Terrible Genius of Dmitri Shostakovich (Shostakovich: A Life Remembered; Pis'ma K Drugu: Dmitri Shostakovich)‪.‬

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH has always confounded the West. One of the most renowned composers of this century, he occupies an ambiguous, even troubling, position in Western music. Unlike his equally celebrated contemporaries Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Shostakovich, openly and enthusiastically used music to express "extramusical," frequently political, ideas. Indeed, he burdened his best-known works, the fifteen symphonies, with an often painfully literal commentary on contemporary politics, dedicating works to "October," "May Day," "1995," and "Leningrad." Unlike earlier examples of program music or "tone painting," Shostakovich's works can seem to suggest less a portrait than a proposition, less an image than an argument. Perhaps this is why discussion of his music has often veered away from questions of melody and rhythm to assessments of morality and of character. For no composer - not even Wagner - has come under more sustained moral scrutiny than Shostakovich. Why should an artist's character matter? Why are we, along with Pushkin's Mozart, so willing to equate artistic genius with moral virtue? Part of the reason, one might guess, is that Russians and Westerners alike have tended to assume that artists - at least those under a politically repressive regime - play a secondary, perhaps even primary, role as social critics. They must be a "bracing wind of truth" dispelling the fog of distortions spread by the official regime. They must, in fact, be a beacon of resistance if they are to be considered worthy of critical esteem. What young student of Russian history has remained unmoved by Belinsky's ringing denunciation of Gogol? Why do writers such as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Solzhenitsyn loom over lesser figures who received the imprimatur of the Soviet censor? Shostakovich, at first glance, presents quite a different image: composer-laureate of the Soviet Union, Soviet delegate to international congresses, signatory of denunciations of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, Communist Party member. In short, we might argue, Soviet Russia's most faithful musical subject.