Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) became the icon of Russian poets of the ”silver age”. It was her musical education (her mother was a pianist) that might have been the source of the musicality of her poetry, which grew into an expression of revolt against traditional form, into deliberate provocation. Joseph Brodsky once said that Tsvetaeva kept the rhythm of her poems like the metronome that measured out the course of her childhood. Caught in a web ideological traps, “the eternal rebel”, as she was often called by her monographers, finally committed suicide.
Shostakovich put to music six poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, first in a 1973 suite for alto and piano op. 143, and produced another version, with chamber orchestra, the following year. He wrote the songs for Irina Bogachova, a young singer endowed with a beautiful alto voice, who premiered the cycle on 27 December 1973. In the words of Krzysztof Meyer, “this is exceptional music, at once intellectual and ascetic, like Violin Sonata; the emotion is concealed in the background and the musical means are limited and of utter simplicity.”
Six poems by Marina Tsvetaeva remain in the sphere of confessional and reflexive lyricism: Moi stikhi (“My poems”) and Otkuda takaya nezhnost? (“Why so gentle?”), Dialog Gamleta s sovestyu (“Hamlet’s dialogue with his conscience”) Poet i tsar (“The poet and the tsar”), Net, bil baraban... (“No, the drum rolled”), and the invocative Anne Akhmatovey (“To Anna Akhmatova). The music is derived from the melodious poetic phrase itself; its function is to convey the message in a beautiful example of the union of word and tone.
Opus 143 is part of the composer’s final phase; it represents Shostakovich’s so-called late style, characteristic in its escape into the sphere of metaphysics and symbols, in a simplified language and its focus on ultimate values. The songs – and his entire chamber music – became, for the composer, the enclave of personal and moving statement, free of the Stakhanovite mask. In a lyrical situation, the “genius enslaved” – in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn – could express himself as an artist deeply affected and experienced by the evil of the world he had to live and write in. The song survived...

Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz