Composer Dmitri Shostakovich remains an immensely public and politicized figure, despite the fact that his supposed transgressions -such as his public readings of prepared pro-Stalinist speeches in the Soviet Union - have long been forgiven, dismissed, or forgotten. Though his integrity is no longer attacked, innumerable apologists still leap to defend him as a maligned cultural martyr. This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of his death, and it seems, even now, that he retains a mysterious hold on the Western imagination.
Last autumn the Manhattan String Quartet offered New York a fascinating and rare traversal of all fifteen of Shostakovich's string quartets. It was, apparently, the first such complete cycle performed by an American quartet in New York City. For a string quartet cycle devoted to twentieth century music, the concerts were surprisingly popular. People not only attended the preconcert lectures by such figures as former ambassador to the Soviet Union Arthur Hartman, but remained loyal to the series, sitting through all five concerts. One wonders why the general public, which in New York has such a wide variety of cultural options, found this rather esoteric musical form so captivating. It seems Shostokovich's intense and often harrowing music struck a common nerve in the dwellers of Gotham.
Shostakovich was born in 1906, in the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods of Russian history. His family was progressive to the point of having leanings toward one of the major nineteenth-century radical Russian political movements. Despite a revolutionary fervor that expressed itself in his first two symphonies and other early works, Shostakovich did not long remain in favor with the Soviet government. His artistic integrity, which resisted the usual nationalistic banalities, and his abhorrence of Stalin’s atrocities, led him into a life-long musical debate with the Soviet cultural establishment.
On January 28, 1936 Pravda published an article expressing Stalin's confused, philistine objections to Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The complexity of the music and the darkness of the opera’s libretto offended the Socialist Realist sensibilities of the Soviet leader, and his opinions were expressed in an unsigned editorial that was so overtly critical of Shostakovich that the composer assumed it was the beginning of a persecution unto death. Entitled "Muddle instead of Music," this article marked the beginning of one of several long periods in Shostakovich's career during which he lived in constant fear of exile, imprisonment, or death.
Although not without great suffering, Shostakovich survived this period, and on November 21, 1937 he premiered his Fifth Symphony, subtitled A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism. The frenzied applause that lasted over forty minutes, and the world acclaim that greeted this work, may have saved the composer from the unfortunate fate of so many of his artistic colleagues. The popularity of his music did not, however, prevent a dramatic and emotionally exhausting cat-and mouse game between Shostakovich and the Soviet government during the remainder of the composer's life.
In the preface to Shostakovich's memoirs, entitled Testimony, Solomon Volkov writes: "Shostakovich took part in the creations of the musical mythology of the twentieth century." This is undeniable, but equally undeniable is the extensive role mythology has played in the creation of
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