2 - Britten and Shostakovich, 1934–63

Summary

Britten's First Musical Engagement with Shostakovich

Although Britten's connections with Shostakovich have become increasingly recognised since both composers’ deaths, Britten did not mention Shostakovich as a favourite composer in 1961, and the BBC fiftieth-birthday tribute to Britten two years later made no reference whatsoever to the composer. Yet from the Second World War onwards it was not uncommon for the two men to be linked, even before their first meeting, which was on 21 September 1960 in the ceremonial box of the Royal Festival Hall during a performance of Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, at which Rostropovich played Shostakovich's newly completed First Cello Concerto (Illus. 3). In 1946 the Press Attache of the British Embassy in Moscow had reported that Grigory Shneerson (1901–82), the Head of the All-Union Society of International Cultural Relations Abroad (VOKS) Music Section from 1942 to 1948, said that ‘he had studied the piano score of Peter Grimes and … thought that Britten had something in common with Shostakovich, especially in his writing for the piano’. In the United States, Virgil Thomson observed that both composers were ‘Very similar in their approach and the nature of their success’, going so far as to describe Britten as ‘a local Shostakovich’, though this was intended as an uncomplimentary reference to cultures that exploit ‘the vein of publicpleasing serious music’. On the other hand, the first symposium on Britten's music in 1952 did not make any reference to Shostakovich, and, while the depth of the personal relationship was certainly recognised among both composers’ close circles by 1968, it was not until after Britten's death that wider aspects of the creative relationship were acknowledged. Key voices in this reassessment, which was made increasingly possible by the publication of a variety of Britten's pre-1942 scores and, in 1991, of the first two volumes of Britten's selected diaries and correspondence, were Donald Mitchell (1984) and Eric Roseberry (1995) and, in Russia over the same period, the work of Liudmila Kovnatskaia.