Dmitry Shostakovich’s suite for two pianos as a musical novel (on the issue of manifestation of epos in the composer’s legacy)

Abstract

In Shostakovich’s creative work, metaphoric completeness becomes the most important constant of any concept, in which the orientation to the depth of the audience’s penetration into the controversial music whole prevails. Naturally, different metaphoric states are enclosed in definite, prevailing metaphoric layers: epos, lyrics, and drama with typical for them various emotional shades and the ways of narrative development. The research object in the article is the suite for two pianos created by the composer in 1922, which reflects the composer’s state of mind after his father’s death. It explains the images and themes in the composition, which  are connected with epos and the epic form of a novel. For the first time, the study of art considers a suite as a musical novel: the author parallels between a novel as a genre of literature and a novel as a possible form of narration and development of a piece of music. It represents the scientific novelty of the article. The author proves that due to its special form of narration, the suite has the features new to the field of piano duet: polysynthetism of the form of the whole, variety of drama “fractures”, diversity of artistic and musical metaphors, and, consequently, the virtuosity of performance. In its turn, it has predetermined the allocation of thematic structures, considerably new for the genre.