Symphony No. 14

Shostakovich composed his Symphony No.14 for soprano, bass, string orchestra and percussion during a hospital stay in the spring of 1969. Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had already orchestrated a few years earlier, can clearly be recognised as a source of inspiration. This penultimate symphony is structured as a cycle of eleven settings of texts by different poets (Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke), all of which deal with death. In a speech at the launch of his new symphony, Shostakovich said: “Death awaits each and every one of us. I can see nothing good in our lives ending like this, and that is what I want to convey in this work”. In the score, the texts are underlaid in Russian, German and in the respective original languages.

This volume is part of the revised and corrected new edition of all 15 symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich published by Boosey & Hawkes and Sikorski as large format study scores for optimal legibility. All scores and the related orchestral parts have been newly computer typeset, and the orchestral parts are also compatible for performance use with scores in ‘The New Collected Works of Dmitri Shostakovich’.