Shostakovich's Ballets and the Search for Soviet Dance [Hardcover]

Author Laura E. Kennedy examines the three ballets composed by Dmitri Shostakovich during the early Stalinist period, showing how he aimed to create Soviet ballet until his third ballet was condemned in 1936, when he subsequently abandoned the genre. Throughout the book, she draws on extensive archival materials from St. Petersburg and Moscow--many not previously published--and argues that the three ballets illuminate his interest in the genre, the creative resources available to him, and the artistic and political pressures under which he worked.The late 1920s and early 1930s were a pivotal moment in Russian cultural development: a time of uncertainty but also of openness and experimentation in the arts and especially in dance. During this period in Leningrad, Dmitri Shostakovich composed three ballets--The Golden Age,The Bolt, andThe Limpid Stream--at a time when he was consolidating his position as Soviet Russia's preeminent young composer. His three ballets aimed at creating Soviet ballet, or works that commanded the technical legacy of the genre but that promoted contemporary topics and Soviet cultural policies.The Limpid Streamproved hugely successful and was even staged as part of the 1935 celebrations for Stalin's birthday at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Six weeks later, however, the ballet was condemned, just a week after Shostakovich's operaLady Macbethsuffered a similar fate. Shostakovich never wrote another ballet.Shostakovich's ballets of the early 1930s occupied a unique moment in Soviet cultural history and in the development of early Soviet dance. As author Laura E. Kennedy demonstrates, cultural policy shifted frequently and rapidly in these years, summoning all areas of Soviet life to new orthodoxies. Like other arts, ballet emerged as a testing ground for the marriage of artistic innovation to Soviet ideology. Kennedy argues that Shostakovich's three ballets shaped the search for a Soviet approach to l'