'The Choir' on R3

[edashtav]

Rejoice in the Lamb was written in 1943, long before Shostakovich himself started using the DSCH motif. Whilst Britten was an admirer of Shostakovich they didn't actually meet and get to know each other until 1960. I can't see how Britten, or anyone else in the UK, could have been aware of Shostakovich's persecution by the regime, especially as at that time the USSR were our allies, and Shostakovich was best known internationally as the composer of the Leningrad Symphony, then seen as a paean to Soviet defiance and resistance to the Nazis.

After Shostakovich was in trouble with the authorities in 1936, his fellow composer Benjamin Britten, composed a Festival Cantata, Opus 30, Rejoice in the Lamb. This setting of words written in a madhouse by the eighteenth century poet, Christopher Smart. The words which concern us are: 'For the officers of the peace are at variance with me and the watchman strikes me with his staff. For silly fellow, silly fellow is against me.' The Shostakovich motto is featured prominently and the chorus takes up those four notes for the words 'silly fellow'. It is surely more than coincidental that when Shostakovich was in disgrace in Russia with 'officers of the peace', Britten should introduce this secret message of sympathy. Did, then, Benjamin Britten discover and initiate the use of the DSCH motto in 1943? Later, in 1968, he was to dedicate the church parable, The Prodigal Son, Opus 81, to Shostakovich.

(Taken from the DSCH Journal which adapted it from Derek Hulme's text for the first and second editions of his Catalogue)
The same piece mentions that Shostakovich first used the DSCH motif transposed ( disguised?) by a 4th in Lady Macbeth. Does the plot deepen?

[edashtav]

To develop my thoughts from my last post: here’s a footnote from page 232 of the book "Shostakovich Studies" that David Fanning edited :

Derek Hulme suggests that the DSCH motif in Britten’s cantata Rejoice in the Lamb to the words “But silly fellow is against me” may be an actual message of sympathy from Britten to Shostakovich in 1943. This seems far fetched. What is more to the point is that the motif, with its pair of interlocking minor thirds, is not uncharacteristic of Britten’s musical language as a whole. Indeed, it forms the leitmotif of Lucretia where it is used with the same degree of obsessiveness encountered in Shostakovich’s deployment of the motif as a personal motto in the Eighth String Quartet.

Given that Mozart also employed DSCH in one of his string quartets long before the birth of either Britten or Shostakovich, perhaps, the motif DSCH has a peculiar fascination for some composers, in much the same fashion as BACH.