ABSTRACT
In August 1953, the Soviet folklorist Lev Kulakovsky took to the press to express his admiration for the heroic spirit of the Greeks. He took to the Soviet musicological journal Sovetskaya Muzyka to describe in fiery words, and with the help of musical examples, the courage Greek fighters had demonstrated all the way from the Greek Revolution of 1821, which won independence from the Ottoman Empire, to their recent resistance against Nazi occupation and the civil war that followed. Fragmentary evidence and the broader historical circumstance suggest that Kulakovsky was the force behind Dmitri Shostakovich’s little-known Greek Songs, a set of four songs transcribed by Shostakovich between 1953 and 1954, first published as a set in 1982, and recorded as recently as 2001. It is in the setting of coercion and submission that Shostakovich’s need for rehabilitation and redemption, expressed partly through a promise to compose folklore-infused melodies, met with Kulakovsky’s aforementioned ‘anti-formalist’ musicology and work on folklore.
