Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva

Marina Tsvetayeva (R)

1 My poems
2 Whence comes such tenderness?
3 Hamlet’s dialogue with his conscience
4 The poet and the tsar
5 No, sounded the drum
6 To Anna Akhmatova


One of the most powerful and challenging of Shostakovich’s last compositions, this song cycle takes six carefully chosen poems by one of Russia’s greatest 20th century writers, who committed suicide in 1941.


Shostakovich orders the poems to make a blazingly intense if small-scale drama in which the artist meditates on the purpose of her art and its destiny in the face of tyranny and indifference. In the first song, Tsvetayeva speaks of her early poems and wonders at the talent and innocence of as-yet-unpersecuted youth; this was a poem with special significance for Shostakovich who had himself had such a spectacular international success as a very young man in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Then comes an exceedingly love-poem, in which the emotion of desire is connected to the act of artistic creation. ‘Hamlet’s dialogue with his conscience’ raises questions of moral compromise and their effect on artistic integrity; this too was a theme of strong personal interest to Shostakovich with his long history of being a political pawn in the hands of tyrants and politicians. ‘The poet and the tsar’ is a verse of bitter accusation, in which Tsvetayeva angrily meditates on the difference between the fates of Tsar Nicholas 1st and his victim, Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet; the parallels between this early 19th century situation and the condition of the modern poet are made clear. After an alarming vision of Death’s challenge to the artist, the cycle ends with a poem addressed by Tsvetayeva to her great contemporary, the poet Anna Akhmatova, in which she states her passionate belief in the power of art to bring hope and defy persecution.


Shostakovich himself made an orchestration of this song-cycle for small orchestral forces, as op.143a.


Note by Gerard McBurney