Shostakovich composed his Symphony No.14 for soprano, bass, string orchestra and percussion during a hospital stay in the spring of 1969. Modest Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had already orchestrated a few years earlier, can clearly be recognised as a source of inspiration. This penultimate symphony is structured as a cycle of eleven settings of texts by different poets (Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke), all of which deal with death. In a speech at the launch of his new symphony, Shostakovich said: “Death awaits each and every one of us. I can see nothing good in our lives ending like this, and that is what I want to convey in this work”. In the score, the texts are underlaid in Russian, German and in the respective original languages.