Shostakovich's musical genius was protean, but it was with opera above all that he wanted to consolidate the dazzling international reputation he established when Bruno Walter conducted his First Symphony in Berlin in February 1928. He was thus following in the footsteps of his nineteenth-century forebears Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, whose gravitation towards opera was a reflection of its central importance within Russian musical and cultural life. Somewhat surprisingly, opera continued to be a high-profile musical genre after the Revolution, despite its bourgeois associations, and new Soviet operas were actively sought for the main stages of Moscow and Leningrad, earmarked to become traditional symbols of national prestige as before. Shostakovich therefore had every reason to feel confident and optimistic when beginning his first opera in 1927.

After completing The Nose before he even turned twenty-two, Shostakovich embarked on what he planned to be a tetralogy of operas about women – a kind of self-styled Soviet Ring of the Nibelung. His Rheingold equivalent, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, was a huge success when it was first performed in 1934. Two years later, however, Shostakovich was stopped in his tracks by a savage denunciation of his new work in the Soviet Union's premier newspaper Pravda, following an infamous performance attended by Stalin. Quite apart from the fact that Lady Macbeth did not exemplify the principles of Socialist Realism, which had been launched in 1932 as the monolithic and conservative new style for Soviet artists to follow, this was the period marking the start of the ‘Great Terror’ – a time of mass arrests and summary executions.

Judging by the excitable nature of the letter that Shostakovich wrote to his mother from Berlin on 8 February 1927, the young composer's eagerness to expend precious financial resources on a week-long trip to the German capital was merely an act of impulse born out of frustration at his lack of success at the Warsaw Chopin Piano Competition. On further reflection, however, there seems to have been a much greater degree of calculation in his behaviour. No doubt, like many other young Soviet composers, Shostakovich was fascinated by the increasing amount of new German music that was being performed in his native country in the mid-1920s. For this reason he would have seized any opportunity to experience at first hand the cultural environment from which such compositions emanated. Perhaps his desire to visit Berlin was also stimulated in the previous month by the invitation to play through his First Symphony to the conductor Bruno Walter, who was giving concerts in Leningrad at the time.

Shostakovich's encounter with Walter proved particularly decisive. Although an arch conservative when it came to the promotion of contemporary music, Walter was evidently so impressed by the qualities of the symphony that he agreed at once to programme the work in his next season of concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The auspicious German premiere took place on 6 February 1928, its overwhelming success serving to launch Shostakovich's name in the West as a composer of extraordinary promise.

Since composers in the Soviet Union were routinely urged to devote themselves to increasing the production levels for the officially sanctioned mass genres of patriotic cantata, opera and programmatic symphony, Shostakovich had little professional incentive to compose chamber and solo works. But as all artistic celebrities come to realize, inattention can spell relief and freedom for creativity and the artist's conscience. While it would be simplistic to claim that Shostakovich's smaller-scale compositions are more personal, more revelatory, let alone superior to his symphonies, it is nevertheless certain that most were written with a different kind of performance and performer in mind. Following a notable Russian precedent, Shostakovich routinely released new works of this sort that were not dedicated to the ‘tsars, kings, and emperors’ of the world, nor to his inescapable employer and patron – the Soviet State – but to individual musicians, living or dead, who had attained a level of artistry commensurate with the music's demands.

Leonid Nikolayev: pianist, composer, pedagogue

Shostakovich dedicated his Second Piano Sonata to a Conservatoire mentor whom he revered throughout his career: Leonid Vladimirovich Nikolayev (1878–1942). Begun in early 1943, just four months after Nikolayev's death in Tashkent, this sonata stands apart from later works dedicated to Rostropovich, Oistrakh and the Beethoven Quartet when they were quite active as performers. In style as well as the circumstance of its composition, the Second Sonata encourages a retrospective glance back to the 1920s, when Nikolayev was the renowned head of the Leningrad Conservatoire's piano faculty, Shostakovich was a precocious multi-talented student, and all of the musicians of post-revolutionary Russia were struggling to establish an identity for themselves and a relationship to the past, present and future.

Although reception history has given pride of place to Shostakovich's impressive double set of fifteen symphonies and string quartets, he was anything but a genre specialist. On the contrary, he adhered more strictly than any of his contemporaries to the traditional role of the composer as competent and active in all genres and modes of expression. Song writing was an area for which he showed special affinity. With twenty opus numbers devoted to solo vocal pieces (including the Fourteenth Symphony, which is a song cycle in all but name), a handful of unnumbered songs, and a significant element of vocal writing in his theatre and film scores, his place in the history of twentieth-century song can hardly be questioned.

Shostakovich wrote songs throughout his career, with a particularly high concentration in his later years. It has rightly been observed that ‘from 1960 until his death the relationship between vocal and instrumental music is virtually in balance’, and in this latest phase of his development he turned the genre of the song cycle – without ever using that specific term – into a flexible and multi-layered means of expression for his autobiographical and philosophical musings. But it should come as no surprise that the earliest work to show signs of his distinctive musical voice is also a set of songs: Two Fables of Krïlov, op. 4. Composed during his student years, these were a logical outcome of his conservatoire training, in which exercises in word-setting on the basis of the Russian literary classics were normal practice.

In the first twenty years of his career, Shostakovich wrote a dozen incidental scores for the theatre. In length and variety they represent a substantial part of his output, yet they are surprisingly little known. There are practical and historical explanations for their neglect, but also good reasons why they are worth looking at. In the first place, Shostakovich's early theatrical experience was in so many ways the key to his rapidly evolving artistic character and technique. By contrast with his music of later years, his output through to the first half of the 1930s was overwhelmingly dominated by drama of different kinds, including two full-length operas, a third uncompleted opera, three full-length ballets, a score for the live accompaniment of a silent movie, three or four of his finest sound-movie scores, an unfinished musical comedy, a full-length show for the music hall and his first six sets of incidental music. As the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky has observed, for Shostakovich at this time the theatre was a ‘laboratory’ in which he could experiment and develop his skills in an abundance of ways. If these incidental scores do not have the mastery and finish of the operas or the brilliance and span of the ballets, they still reveal much about what went on in that laboratory. Writing at speed and usually under harsh conditions, he was forced to invent weird vocal and instrumental combinations, to set sometimes preposterously improbable texts and, more generally, to hone his quickfire ability to solve dramatic and creative problems thrown in his way not by the demands of his own imagination, but by the day-to-day requirements of those in charge of the productions he was working on.

'The prophets don't live for ever!' warned Matthew Mead in his funeral sermon for the Puritan minister Timothy Cruso in November 1697. The old guard was passing. Already that winter the City of London had lost six Dissenting ministers. A distinct clerical generation was bowing out. Of seventy-eight Dissenting ministers pursuing their ministry in the capital in 1695, forty-three were 'Bartolomeans', Puritan ministers ejected from their parishes by the Act of Uniformity on St Bartholomew's Day 1662, and twenty-six of these ejected ministers would die before the century's end. The very last of the Bartolomeans, Nathan Denton, struggled on in Yorkshire, preaching where he could, and never repenting of his nonconformity until overtaken by death in 1720: to the end he was, in Edmund Calamy's words, 'the picture of an old Puritan'. In 1720 the Puritans were apparently a thing of the past. Even in 1680 Bunyan had felt the need to explain the label: 'the man was a godly old Puritan, for so the godly were called in times past'. In the later seventeenth century the term was acquiring an air of rather generalised piety. In 1688 Roger Morrice noted that the Princess of Orange had recommended the 'holy heavenly mortified life' practised by some 'very godly' Dutch Protestants, 'like the old Puritans in England . . . These keep communion in all public acts of worship . . . but go on Wednesdays to conventicles, private meetings for humiliation and fasting etc., where they rehearse the last sermon, confer upon some practical questions, or upon the catechism, pray and hear a sermon.' As an adjective, 'Puritan' was applicable to the 'more strict and sober' Muslims or Papists.

In 1564, or thereabouts, the English discovered a new term of abuse - 'Puritan'. Initially, it was an insult launched at nonconformist clergy within the newly reformed Elizabethan church, zealous Protestants who refused to wear prescribed liturgical vestments, particularly the white surplice, and who gained a reputation as 'opposers of the hierarchy and church-service'. But soon the nickname was taken up by 'profane mouths', who deployed it rather indiscriminately 'to abuse pious people'. 'Puritan' became a handy smear word for bishops angered by clerical nonconformity, metropolitan playwrights provoked by censorious moralism, and villagers driven to distraction by assaults on traditional festive culture. By the early seventeenth century, Patrick Collinson explains, 'Puritanism' had become 'the brand name for a certain kind of Protestant religiosity, social conduct and politics'. The polemical origins of the term have troubled historians, and led some to call for the abolition of Puritanism as a historical category. Yet for most scholars of early modern England and New England, the concept has proved indispensable. As the American historian Michael Winship explains, Puritanism is 'an extremely convenient shorthand term', but one that 'is unavoidably a contextual, imprecise term, not an objective one, a term to use carefully but not take too seriously in itself'. Defining Puritanism has become a favourite parlour game for early modern historians. Some readers will be familiar with the discussion, but others may appreciate some basic orientation. The chapters in this collection offer different perspectives and approaches to the problem of definition, and together they build up a multifaceted picture of our subject. But we can begin by locating Puritans on the map of sixteenth and seventeenth-century European Christianity.

Puritanism was an intrinsically bookish movement. Just as the spread of Protestantism through Europe in the early sixteenth century was greatly facilitated by, if not dependent upon, the resources of the printing press, so the penetration by Puritanism of the nation's religious, political and cultural life was achieved primarily through the printed word. Religious works comprised at least half the 100,000 or so titles that represent the total output of the press from the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 to the end of the seventeenth century. Of these, a very significant proportion - and during periods in the seventeenth century a majority - were Puritan. They included the century's bestsellers which sold in unprecedented numbers: Arthur Dent's fictionalised dialogue The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (1601) went through over thirty editions by 1682; John Ball's Short Catechisme (1615?) nearly sixty editions by 1689; Richard Baxter's 600-page treatise on preparing for The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650) reached its fourteenth edition by 1688 and his evangelistic A Call to the Unconverted (1658) its twenty-eighth edition by 1696; the first part of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) reached its twenty-second edition by the end of the century. Contemporaries recognised the extraordinary asset that had been, as they firmly believed, providentially placed in their hands. 'Printing', wrote Richard Baxter, 'hath been a blessed means of increasing knowledge and religion' for 'the Press hath a louder voice' than that of any single person: 'the Writings of Divines are nothing else but a preaching the Gospel to the eye, as the voice preacheth it to the ear'.

Between 1530 and 1660, Ireland and Wales were sites of hope and anxiety for a series of English establishments. While they represented unparalleled opportunities for shining light in 'dark corners', the linguistic, cultural and religious differences of these parts of the Celtic periphery were often perceived to be threats to the metropolitan centre and its various reforming projects. This sense of threat was often felt and sometimes created by Puritans. Puritan movements developed in Ireland and Wales in complex dialogue with their host and sponsoring cultures, sometimes sharing and sometimes opposing prominent themes in English (and, in Ulster, Scottish) Protestantism, and sometimes developing indigenous preferences in piety and theology. In both countries, Puritans faced the challenge of religious apathy and, in the aftermath of the Civil Wars, an enduring royalism. Puritans subjected both countries to a determined push for reformation throughout the 1650s. Nevertheless, while Puritans in Ireland failed to capture the national imagination, their Welsh counterparts succeeded in laying the foundations for later Dissent. This chapter will make a number of general comparisons while looking in detail at the development of Puritan movements in Ireland and Wales, concentrating on the 1640s and 1650s,when Puritan movements became most obvious and when their boundaries became most difficult to sustain.

In the last week of March 1585, nine clothiers from the small market town of Dedham in Essex resolved some sober business. The local vicar, Richard Parker, who commented afterwards upon the business, described what took place as a 'protestacion' and noted, significantly, that 'it was offered them the 20 of march 1585'. Yet the surviving text calls itself a 'profession freely made and approved by the voyces and handes of us whose names are underwritten' and the terms are revealing, for this was no simple set of orders akin to those found in other larger boroughs concerned primarily with the pressing issues of unemployment, poverty, unlicensed alehouses and the social order. Although the word covenant is nowhere used, the text makes clear that what was agreed in March was a covenant, perhaps the earliest recorded example of such in the Elizabethan church. In a series of solemn oaths or promises, the Dedham clothiers expressed their determination to be the sharp edge of reformation in their community, so many godly exemplars for their poorer, illiterate neighbours. Eleven times, promises were made 'reverently' or 'willingly' to encourage participation in Dedham's monthly communions and weekly lectures, to extend hospitality on Sundays to 'the poorer and weaker sort', to use all means to correct and reform those who misbehaved in church or who profaned the Sabbath day and to uphold the credit of the godly preachers. The Dedham covenant predates the more famous covenant agreed in 1588 between Richard Rogers and twenty of his Wethersfield (Essex) parishioners who were said to 'exceed the common sort of them that professe the Gospel'.

To review the historiography of Puritanism is to review the history of early modern England. The history of Puritanism started almost at the same moment as the emergence of Puritanism as a movement and a sensibility. The first history of the Elizabethan Puritan movement was published by Richard Bancroft in 1593. Thereafter histories of Puritanism came thick and fast as both the enemies of the godly and the godly themselves strove to produce accounts of a 'Puritan' or 'sectarian' threat against which they could define their own position as the personification of the Protestant tradition or national church. During and after the English Civil War such efforts intensified. Peter Heylin wrote a history, if not of Puritanism, then of presbyterianism, and both his and John Hacket's biographies of Laud and Williams respectively were organised in part at least around different versions of the Puritan threat and how best to deal with it. Samuel Clarke's famous collections of Puritan lives - the first version of which was published in the early 1650s, to be reissued at the Restoration and again and again thereafter - can be read as replies to these and other attempts to cast 'Puritanism' as a threat to order. From the outset, then, histories of Puritanism were heavily ideological interventions in debates about the nature of the English church, Protestant orthodoxy and ecclesiastical, political and social order. The historiography of Puritanism from Bancroft or Hacket to Collinson, from Edwardes to Hill or Hughes, from Heylin to Tyacke is, therefore, the story of how various versions of the Church of England and its others have been used to define the discourse (and indeed to shape the practice and patronage networks) of the national church over the five hundred years since the Reformation.

Puritanism has been credited (and blamed) for bequeathing a puzzling set of legacies, including the spirit of capitalism, scientific enterprise, Anglo-Saxon sexual repression, companionate marriage, liberal democracy, American exceptionalism and religious bigotry. Puritans have been hailed as midwives of modernity, and censured as reactionary foes of enlightened values. In the first half of this chapter, I want to introduce some of the grand theories about Puritanism and modernity, explaining how they have generated vigorous but inconclusive debate. In the second half, I will point to an alternative way of exploring the Puritan legacy, one that studies the reception and uses of Puritan religious texts from the eighteenth century onwards, and asks how later generations remembered and represented seventeenth-century Puritanism. / Puritanism and modernity / It is now more than a century since Max Weber published his seminal essay, 'Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus' (1904-5), translated into English by Talcott Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Weber's general claim was that cultural factors play a significant role in economic development; his specific claim was that the predestinarian doctrines of the English Puritans fostered a 'Protestant ethic' that produced 'the spirit of capitalism' and contributed to the economic dynamism of England and the United States.