Brothers in musical arms: the wartime correspondence of Dmitrii Shostakovich and Henry Wood

ABSTRACT

Wartime correspondence between the conductor Sir Henry Wood and the composer Dmitrii Shostakovich marks the earliest point of Anglo-Soviet musical exchange at the highest artistic levels. Though short-lived due to Wood’s death in 1944, the correspondence shows how genuine warmth and mutual regard could coexist with a relationship that was brokered by government officials. Other archive sources around them reveal the varying shades of cynicism and sincerity that underpinned the whole project of wartime cultural exchange between Britain and the USSR. Though this rendered Anglo-Soviet connections inescapably underpinned by political motivations, it could not prevent genuine artistic and personal relationships from forming, albeit on a limited basis. The result, in this case, was a brief correspondence that acted as a crucial element of goodwill in Anglo-Soviet diplomacy during the war.

KEYWORDS:

• Shostakovich
• Henry Wood
• Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul'turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei (VOKS)
• wartime
• Soviet

View correction statement:

Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

Shostakovich letters reproduced by kind permission of Irina Shostakovich. They will be published in Russian as follows: ‘“Verniy i stoykiy drug”: Shostakovich i Genri Vud: perepiska voennikh let’ (‘“My true and loyal friend”: Shostakovich and Henry Wood: letters of the war years’) in Lidia Ader, ed., Dmitrii Shostakovich: Issledovania i materiali (Research and materials), Vol. 5, Moscow: DSCH Publishing, forthcoming.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Pauline Fairclough is Reader in Music at the University of Bristol and a specialist in Soviet musical culture. Her last book, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin, was published by Yale in 2016 and she is now working on music relations between the Soviet Union and Britain during the Stalin era.

Notes

1. Much of the correspondence may be found in GARF, f. 5283 (files on English and American artists).

2. VOKS = Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul’turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries).

3. See the covering letter written by the VOKS music representative Lidia Kislova, GARF f. 5283, d. 134, l. 33, letter dated 6.5.43.

4. For a good account of the SCR and its foundation, see Lygo (2013)..

5. GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 53, ll. 8–10. Letter from Soviet composers to British composers.

6. GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 53, ll. 8–10.

7. See letter from the Soviet Embassy official in London, Mr Zonov, to Kislova, 29 October 1943, where he explains that John Barbirolli was ‘the foremost conductor in England after Henry Wood’ (GARF, f. 5243, op. 15, d. 118, l. 17.

8. GARF f. 5283, op. 15, d. 134, l. 30.

9. Preserved in GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 134, l. 22 and in the British Library, Add. MS 56426 vol. VIII, p. 31.

10. Preserved in GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 134, l. 20. Original letter in the British Library, Add. MS 56426 vol. VIII, p. 45.

11. Preserved in GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 134, l. 28 and in the British Library, Add. MS 56426 vol. VIII, p. 40.

12. Preserved in GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 134, l. 17 and in the British Library, Add. MS 56426 vol. VIII, p. 47.

13. Preserved in GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 134, l. 25 and in the British Library, Add. MS 56426 vol. VIII, p. 44.

14. Preserved only in GARF f. 5283 op. 15 d. 134 l. 24.

15. Preserved only in the British Library, Add. MS 56426 vol. VIII, p. 67.

16. This would have been Rosa Newmarch’s biography Henry J. Wood, London and New York: 1904).

17. GARF f. 5283 op. 15, d. 53, l. 15.

18. Lozovskii’s dismissal of Handel is especially odd, since he, along with J. S. Bach, had been ostentatiously celebrated in Leningrad and Moscow in 1935 on the 250th anniversary of their birth. See Fairclough: 2016, pp. 119–127.

19. National Archives, Kew, FO924/478. n.p.