The Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin (Russian: Четыре стихотворения капитана Лебядкина, romanized: Chetyre stikhotvoreniya kapitana Lebyadkina) by Dmitri Shostakovich is a song cycle composed in 1974.
Despite having a lifelong appreciation for the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich did not embark on a large-scale musical setting of them until the penultimate year of his life, when he became fascinated by Captain Ignat Lebyadkin, a character who affected to be a learned poet in Demons.
Krzysztof Meyer called the work "truly astonishing", while Bernd Feuchtner [de], president of the German Shostakovich Society, described it as a "dark counterpart" to the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti.
A cue from his 1928 film score to The New Babylon representing the Franco-Prussian War, which juxtaposed "La Marseillaise" with the can-can from Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, may have been inspired by a reference to a fictitious piano piece with similar characteristics in Dostoyevsky's Demons.
[1] In 1974, while convalescing in Barvikha, Shostakovich read Demons; he became interested in Captain Ignat Lebyadkin, a character whose verses were described by Sofia Khentova, the composer's official biographer, as a "parody of poetry, the philosophy of a crook".
[5] Glikman recalled that Shostakovich had been profoundly upset over having "not a single musical thought in his head" during the period immediately preceding his work on these compositions.
He refers to virtuous young women from the upper classes as "governesses", who despite their surface affectation of chastity conceal the capacity to become a "little George Sand".
[17] "A Pure Soul" is a strophic song that utilizes an anonymous text referred to in Demons,[10] which satirizes the revolutionary-themed poetry of Nikolay Ogarev.
[18] The only song in the cycle with a key signature, B major, it retells the life of a man, "not a gentleman by birth", compelled to leave Russia in order to escape Tsarist persecution and declare "fraternity, equality, and liberty".
[17] According to Dorothea Redepenning, the work's form suggests that of a "four-movement symphony, but [with] a total renunciation of motivic interrelationship".
[21] The American premiere took place on October 30, 1983, at Boston University Concert Hall; the performers were bass Robert Osborne and pianist Howard Lubin.
[24] Alfred Schnittke had a different perception of the same occasion: I will never forget being at the last concert that [Shostakovich] attended—in the spring of 1975, the premiere of the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin.
[9] Musicologist Levon Akopyan [ru] ranked it with Shostakovich's Satires, noting that its style of subversive humor, which had made a great impression on the public in the 1960s, had become stale by the 1970s.
[27] Meyer defended the work in his overview of Shostakovich's life and music: [He] used only a very few strokes to convey the cartoonish image of the madman that was Captain Lebyadkin.
[9]Malcolm MacDonald said that Lebyadkin was in the lineage of the Fool from King Lear and suggested that Shostakovich may have felt a greater degree of affinity for the character than may be immediately apparent.
Bernd Feuchtner [de], president of the German Shostakovich Society, called the work a "dark counterpart" to the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti.