The texts for the symphony are drawn from poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Kückelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke, with foreign poems sung in Russian translation.
Composition History
The Fourteenth Symphony is dedicated to Benjamin Britten, and is conceived as a polemical response to Britten's War Requiem.
Compositional Technique
The Fourteenth Symphony is a vocal cycle for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, consisting of eleven movements.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Shostakovich considered his Fourteenth Symphony a landmark composition, believing everything he had written for many years was preparation for this work.
Composer Biography
By the late 1960s, Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer, was at the peak of his fame, receiving numerous awards and critical acclaim both in the Soviet Union and abroad.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Eight of the eleven movements in the symphony focus on the theme of death, which is consistently portrayed as tragic, premature, violent, and unjust.
Composition History
Despite his public success, Shostakovich expressed deep dissatisfaction with his life and work in letters to his close friend Isaak Glikman, stating he would not wish to relive his 62 years.
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