Dmitri Shostakovich quotes

Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward. (Dmitri Shostakovich)
I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I don't succeed I consider it's my own fault. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
I don't think that either self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement is among the defining qualities of an artist... Beethoven could have been forgiven if his symphonies had gone to his head. Gretchaninoff could also be forgiven if his Dobrinya Nikititch went to his head. But neither one could be forgiven for writing a piece that was amoral, servile, the work of a flunky. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing," and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing." View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. (Dmitri Shostakovich)
What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in "serious" music. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes – tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
A creative artist works on his next composition because he is not satisfied with his previous one. When he loses a critical attitude toward his own work, he ceases to be an artist. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray. And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place. (Dmitri Shostakovich)
Football is the ballet of the masses. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
What do you think of Puccini? [ Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful." ] No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
The withering away of illusions is a long and dreary process, like a toothache. But you can pull out a tooth. Illusions, dead, continue to rot within us. And stink. And you can't escape them. I carry all of mine around with me. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich