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  • Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues: Contexts, Style, Performance
  • Sarah Reichardt Ellis
Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues: Contexts, Style, Performance. By Mark Mazullo. pp. xviii+ 286. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2010, £40. ISBN 978-0-300-14932-2.)

The first English-language book devoted solely to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87, Mark Mazullo’s monograph presents a thoroughly engaging discussion of the cycle. Mazullo’s approach to his topic is wide ranging. While the core of the book involves analytical and interpretative readings of individual Preludes and Fugues, the author also aims to situate the work in its social, historical, and artistic context, and offers pedagogical advice. Mazullo presents a reasoned but not dispassionate approach to the issues of interpretation with his primary goal to discuss the cycle as a work of art. Thus, while he values the cultural and political context and how it affects reception and understanding, it is secondary to his discussion of the Preludes and Fugues as an artistic endeavour.

The three chapters in Part I introduce the Preludes and Fugues, address the complexity of interpreting Shostakovich’s music, and set the Preludes and Fugues in context. Here the author does the necessary service of clearing the air with respect to the works’ compositional timeline and political issues, noting that it was well over two years between the 1948 resolution condemning Shostakovich’s music as ‘formalist’ and the beginning of the composition of the cycle. In addition, Mazullo addresses standard issues in Shostakovich studies including those of politics, public vs. private, and dissident vs. communist. He situates the cycle in the Western Art Music canon, discussing the cycle’s (rather superficial) relationship to Bach’s Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues and the work’s place within the Russian composer/performer tradition, and the twentieth-century contrapuntal context.

Part II, which constitutes the greater part of the book, is devoted to discussions of the individual Preludes and Fugues themselves. Mazullo does not tackle the pieces in order, but rather groups them thematically, although he argues the themes filter through the set as a whole. In Part III, consisting of a single chapter, he returns to issues of interpretation, using analyses of various recorded performances of the cycle, including the composer’s own, as a sounding board for his own philosophical stance on interpreting and understanding Shostakovich’s music.

In the preface Mazullo states that ‘it is not a book for musicologists or music theorists’, but rather ‘it is aimed towards those who wish to supplement their effort in performing, teaching or listening to Shostakovich’s music’ (p. xii). Within this broad, perhaps vague, audience, Mazullo intends the monograph for pianists and piano pedagogues, but seemingly also a more generalized audience of ‘listeners’. Yet, he implicitly admits that the book, as a whole, is not for a general audience as he advises those without musical background to skip all of Part II (p. xiii), thus reserving about seventy pages of a 259-page volume for the general audience. In addition, his explicit exclusion of musicologists and theorists is curious. Scholars in those fields will find Mazullo’s work to be worthwhile and a useful reference when undertaking further study of the cycle. The individual essays on the Preludes and Fugues are mostly analytical in nature, with each work receiving a competent analysis of its form and of Shostakovich’s sometimes tricky harmonic and pitch structures. Mazullo keeps his prose from becoming overburdened with technical apparatus that would limit understanding outside musicological or theoretical fields. Likewise, the author’s use of ideas borrowed from literary criticism are not overly technical, but rather defined by short glosses. Nevertheless, a reader would need to be musically educated and armed with a score and a solid knowledge of the work to get the most out of each essay. It may be that musicologists and theorists will be one group of readers that will dig most heartily into the analytical discussions.

The core of the book, Part II, is devoted to twenty-four essays that focus on the individual Preludes and Fugues. Each chapter opens with a short introduction to the theme of the...

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