Musicology Annotation << Back Exploring Shostakovich’s creative process based on manuscripts of «Twenty-Four Preludes for Piano» Lukyanov Anton V. The article considers the D.D. Shostakovich`s output in terms of Mozartean and Beethovian types of creative process, which have long been distinguished in musicology. The Mozartean type is characterized by composition in mind, minimum number of drafts and corrections, the Beethovian type is characterized by extensive sketchy work with lots of drafts. Shostakovich’s rather numerous self-observations mainly indicate the predominance of Mozartean type over Beethovian one. This point of view is generally confirmed by the exploring of sketches of Shostakovich’s opuses in various genres. "24 Preludes for piano" analysed in this publication are not an exception. Sketches of preludes were explored by the method of comparative analysis, comparing sketches with published versions. Such approach allowed to identify the corrections which had not been fixed in the drafts and were made by the composer a fair copy. Most of corrections concerned the syntactic level of organization of music and first of all its pitch and rhythm. Among the pitch corrections a plenty of semitones displacements were noted, which gave reason to consider such corrections as one of the manifestations of the composer's style. As a result, typical manifestations of Beethovian type of creative process were not found. But the fact of existing drafts corrections allows to suggest a natural combination of Mozartean type and individual Shostakovich`s stylistic features in the "24 Preludes for Piano". Keywords: Shostakovich, creative process, Mozart, Beethoven, drafts, sketches, style, opus 34 “24 preludes for piano“. DOI: 10.25791/musicology.08.2020.1141 Pp. 03-14.