Two Fables by Ivan Krylov

Dedication: "To M. V. Kvadri"

Duration: 7’

Two Fables by Ivan Krylov

for Mezzo-soprano, Female Chorus, and Orchestra

1. “The Dragonfly and the Ant” for mezzo-soprano and orchestra.
2. “The Ass and the Nightingale” for a solo group of Altos (mezzo-soprano) with an orchestra.

This is the earliest of young Shostakovich's few chamber vocal works that have survived.

In the list of compositions compiled in 1932, the composer dated this work to 1920-1921.

In the preface “From the Editors” in Volume 31 of Collected Works, Two Fables by Ivan Krylov is dated 1922 without any specification or explanation.

There is no reliable information about the lifetime concert performances of Two Fables by Ivan Krylov either in the piano, or in the orchestral version. The composer himself marked this composition in various lists of his works as unperformed.

The composition was dedicated to Mikhail Kvadri, with whom Shostakovich was friendly in the 1920s.

The piano score of Two Fables by Ivan Krylov was published for the first time by Lev Danilevich in a collection entitled Muzykalnoe nasledstvo (Music Heritage).

The score was printed for the first time in Volume 31 of Dmitri Shostakovich's Collected Works (Muzyka Publishers, Moscow, 1982).

The author's manuscript of the score is kept in Dmitri Shostakovich's personal depository in the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RSALA).

Two Fables by Ivan Krylov, Op. 4, was performed for the first time on 2 February 1977 in Tallinn, in the Estonia Concert Hall by a symphony orchestra and female chorus of students from the Moscow Conservatory under the direction of Gennadi Rozhdestvensky.