He had such absolute mental discipline and an ordered mind, and yet there was a gambler inside him.”ĭmitry Shostakovich’s son, the conductor and musician Maxim Shostakovich, explained the role football played in his father’s life. Polyphony is a very complicated musical technique… and to compose it, it requires an incredible sense of order. He often used polyphony in his music, that is, severeal voices singing different tunes.
“On the one hand," Braginsky said, "he was a gambler and risk-taker, on the other he was an incredibly orderly thinker. I have no money again, and because of this decided to go home,” he wrote to one of his friends. “I have never had such phenomenal bad luck in my whole life. On another occasion in Odessa he lost 1,000 rubles, an astronomical sum at the time. The game went on all day and all night, and Shostakovich was on a losing streak, culminating with losing his bet of his redwood office piano (although it was bought back by a friend). The piano was lost in a game of poker played in the director’s office of the Leningrad Music Hall in 1931. He liked to play cards, poker – there was a famous case in 1930 he even lost his concert piano.” Braginsky says, “He was a gambler at heart. He went to boxing matches, played tennis and billiards, cards, poker, and chess.
How amazing that he could be friends with such a totally different kind of person.”įootball wasn’t Shostakovich’s only sport.
#FANATICAL FOOTBALL LINEUP PROFESSIONAL#
Shostakovich, Braginsky said, “was a philosopher, a deep thinker, who had created such significant, monumental works of music, but it turned out he was good friends with a professional football player. Other sections cover his articles in sports newspapers, his unusual record-keeping for the championship in a leather notebook he called his Großbuch, his time at the games and his friendships with players. Suddenly Shostakovich piped up, 'May I compose the music for Football, if you have nothing against it?’” The boss didn’t, and Shostakovich wrote the piece. In his memoirs, Lyubimov wrote, “Once our boss, a secret police officer, expressed a wish for a dance depicting football. His musical contribution was described by a member of the ensemble, a young graduate of the Vakhtangov Theater Academy named Yuri Lyubimov - who would become one of the country’s most famous, and most non-traditional, theater directors at the Taganka Theater. Later, in 1944, he was recruited to write music for the NKVD (precursor to KGB) musical ensemble, an invitation Shostakovich, who had been accused of composing a “muddle instead of music,” was unable to refuse.
It premiered in 1930 and then was suddenly banned in 1931, only to be revived in very different forms in 19. There are sections on Shostakovich’s football-themed music, the first a football ballet called “The Golden Age” that he wrote at the age of 22 in 1929, after finishing his First Symphony.
It is a compendium of information with more visual material than text: photographs music scores theater announcements letters notes to his family (“Gone to the game… there’s a ticket on the table if you want to come”) telegrams about matches ("Torpedo beat Elektrik three-zero") newspaper clippings and statistical records kept by the composer - many of which are published for the first time.
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In an interview to The Moscow Times, Braginsky said that he had originally conceived the book as something like a series of blog posts that present everything known about Dmitri Shostakovich and football. Inside the page numbers mimic the numbers on scoreboards, and tiny drawings of football players dribble and pass the ball at the bottom of every page. Translated into English by Alison Yermolova, it was designed by Yulia Nogarova, who illustrated the deep red cover with Varvara Stepanova's first sketch of a uniform for Soviet football players. The resulting book came out in Russian in the summer of 2018, and an English version has just been released this summer. After meeting with Shostakovich’s widow, he was able to expand his research to the private family archives. Petersburg Conservatory, gathered material on Shostakovich and football. For 14 years Dmitri Braginsky, a musician, musicologist and professor at the St.
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