Olga Digonskaya (The Glinka Museum of Music Culture and the Shostakovich Archive)
On a “Marginal” Work by Shostakovich: Re-dating and a Change of Context

The main topic of this paper is the Solemn Campaign March by Shostakovich, published in the New Collected Edition and dated 1941.

Extant materials, including the sketch for the March, newly found and attributed by me, requires us change the date to 1939. This would prompt us to place the March into the “Finnish context”, which would mean that the Suite on Finnish Folk Songs was not the only piece commissioned from Shostakovich in anticipation of the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940.