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My paper centers on the compositional manuscripts of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), the Soviet Union’s leading composer of art music. Opening a window onto the composer’s creativity, fragmentary passages, rejected movements, revised manuscripts, jumbled drafts, aborted works, meticulous piano score drafts, and extracts from final scores offer a glimpse into one of the most extraordinary compositional minds of the twentieth century. These documents are extremely diverse but little known. My paper presents selections from sketch materials for Shostakovich’s symphonies and, in doing so, seeks to probe both the compositional endeavor and aesthetic framework that shaped the composer’s thought. Shostakovich’s sketch materials have only recently come to light after decades in which their very existence was denied. Until now, therefore, Shostakovich has been excluded from the ranks of major composers whose sketches have been regarded as essential to understanding the creative process. Such omission has produced an image of the composer-creator who conceived his pieces in every detail, then wrote them out in finished form. Shostakovich’s own statements about his working methods confirmed this impression. When asked about his compositional process at the outset and the end of his creative life, he claimed that he conceived his pieces completely before writing them and emphasized the totality, sophistication, and permanence of his compositional decisions. Contemporaries who were in a position to know mostly affirmed this claim, suggesting or allowing the implication that Shostakovich put his music to paper whole and complete. Such remarks encouraged an image of Mozartian mastery. There was nothing else to report—because Shostakovich never sketched.

In 2002, however, Manashir Iakubov, the late curator of the Dmitri Shostakovich Archive in Moscow, made a startling assertion: hundreds of sketches survive from Shostakovich’s creative process. These manuscripts, Iakubov claimed, include all the usual documents that provide insights into a composer’s creativity. Limiting our inquiry to Shostakovich’s symphonies, we know, so far, of piano score sketches for eleven (of the fifteen) completed works. The New Collected Works edition of Shostakovich’s music includes facsimiles of manuscripts for Symphonies Nos. 1–5 and 9. Manuscripts for Symphonies Nos. 8 and 10 are in Shostakovich’s fondï, or archival collections, in Moscow and are currently being published. There are also indications in the Russian-language literature and in files of unidentified manuscripts in Shostakovich’s fondï that materials relating to Symphonies Nos. 6, 7, and 12, not to mention many other non-symphonic works, also exist. Based on Shostakovich’s sketch materials for his symphonies alone, it is possible to reconstruct key moments in his creative process and show what compositional issues his manuscripts raise.

Shostakovich’s sketch materials for different symphonies illustrate a spectrum of his process, but no sketches for a particular symphony trace that process completely. Rather than early, middle, and late sketches, his symphonic manuscripts typically comprise one stage of his thinking per work. Manuscripts for some symphonies are coherent and detailed; others are partial, and some, extremely fragmentary. Some documents are written in piano score, others in orchestral score. Some show almost all the notational details of the final autograph, though rarely particulars of dynamics, articulation, tempi, or scoring. Others merely outline ideas, break off abruptly, and appear to lack continuity. Some sketch materials contain large, unbroken sections of music; others, just two or three bars. Some compositional manuscripts (if the term may still be used) even postdate autograph scores.

These manuscripts, however, are extremely difficult to access. Shostakovich’s fondï in Moscow are large, growing, and not yet fully organized. They are also closed and documents can only be seen if the composer’s widow gives written permission. Given concerns for the rights of immediate family, scholarly interests in Russia, and possibly even the composer’s own sense of privacy, Shostakovich’s unpublished manuscripts are subject to vigilant protection. Moreover, many of his sketch materials are also filed under generic, even puzzling, labels—from “sketches,” “excerpts,” and “drafts” to “assorted compositions” and “documents for lengthy safe-keeping”—and contents are occasionally mixed up. A folder of “sketches” may actually contain fragments of autograph scores. “Assorted compositions” might be unidentified manuscripts, and “documents for lengthy safe-keeping” can contain entire drafts of previously unknown works. Resources are plentiful, but finding and interpreting them are difficult. These challenges have left a gap in scholarship that sketch study is poised to fill.

Sketch study on Shostakovich’s music is in its infancy. My paper elaborates the current scholarly situation and offers a framework for examining Shostakovich’s manuscripts for his symphonies. All documents discussed are in three archives in Moscow: the Dmitri Shostakovich Archive, the Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts (RGALI) and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture. Shostakovich’s manuscripts permit expositional and interpretive questions, including what kinds of materials are available, what information they contain, and how they illuminate the composer’s creativity. To some extent, they corroborate Shostakovich’s own description of his creative process, in which thorough mental preparation preceded writing. But they also suggest that the act of writing was a particular cognitive and compositional process for Shostakovich; it led to changes, new ideas, occasional anomalies, and sometimes the abandonment or complete alteration of large-scale works. Though extremely disparate, Shostakovich’s manuscripts show that he sketched his way to final versions and that his method of sketching varied for different works. In elaborating this process in relation to his symphonies, my paper will demonstrate how Shostakovich composed and how his sketches provide insight into his creative thinking.