ABSTRACT
After the sudden outbreak of war, the musical institutions and numerous active musicians of the country’s Western regions, including the recently occupied parts of Poland and Baltic States, passed into the enemy’s hands. The war of 1941–45 affected the country’s spiritual life in a very peculiar way. In the bulk of musical works composed during the war years, the immediate and explicit responses to sotzial’nïy zakaz constitute the overwhelming majority. Chronologically, the earliest response to the war was the song ‘Svyashchennaya voyna’ by Aleksandr Aleksandrov to words by Vasiliy Lebedev-Kumach—a unique specimen of great heroic, martial tune in triple time. Even less acceptable is the description of Shostakovich’s first post-war work, the Ninth Symphony in E flat op. 70, as the most ‘classical’ and ‘Haydnesque’ among his symphonies. From Prokofiev, because of his more cold-blooded temperament, one could hardly expect the same immediate and emotional reaction to war events as from Shostakovich.
