Dmitri Schostakowitsch
Tahiti-Trott (Tea for Two von Vincent Youmans) op. 16
Facsimile of the autograph score
Edited by the Paul Sacher Foundation in honor of Hermann Danuser on his 60th birthday
Hamburg: Musikverlag Hans Sikorski, 2006 (Ed. No. SIK2402)
In German and English, 30.5 × 40 cm, 71 pp. + 6 pp. supplement, clothbound in slipcase
ISMN 9790003035000
ISBN 978-3-935196-78-9
EUR 59
Purchase from Musikverlag Hans Sikorski
Like many other composers, Dmitri Shostakovich had a pronounced weak spot for the popular music of his day. His interest found expression not only in his ballet and film scores but notably in his orchestral arrangement of Tea for Two, the hit theater song by Vincent Youmans that has remained world-famous to the present day. Shostakovich probably encountered the song in a Russian version entitled Tahiti-Trott in 1926, when it was inserted into a stage play at the Meyerhold Theater. He orchestrated it under storied circumstances in 1927 and dedicated the manuscript to the conductor Nikolai Malko, who had proposed the transcription. In 1930, pressured by the proletarian realignment of Soviet cultural policy, Shostakovich was forced to distance himself from his arrangement, which was criticized as an expression of a «decadent westernized mentality».Thereafter it continued to circulate in the Soviet Union in a single set of parts that occasionally reached performance and was also used for two posthumous editions in 1984 and 2006. Yet the original manuscript, which remained among Malko's possessions when he emigrated to the West and entered the holdings of the Paul Sacher Foundation in 1989, has been ignored to the present day. Our volume presents it complete for the first time in print, supplemented by five brief explanatory essays and a reproduction of the 1926 Russian edition of Tahiti-Trott.