first posted 20040929
latest minor change 20040929

Shostakovich, Dmitri Dmitrievich (1906-1975) --
Pianist, composer.
His career spanned much of Soviet history. He was publicly loyal to Stalin and his successors, despite occasional condemnations of his work by the Soviet press, most fearsomely on 28 Jan 1936 at the beginning of the Great Purge.
After Shostakovich's death, musicologist Solomon Volkov published Shostakovich's supposed memoirs Testimony (1979) in the West, revealing him to be a secret dissident. Shostakovich's third wife Irina has denounced Testimony as a forgery, but his son Maxim has embraced it.

For more on Shostakovich, check out:
Speaking of Shostakovich...
An archive of media clippings
http://www.geocities.com/kuala_bear/ds.html

Some Soviet reviews from 1936 -- What music should sound like

"Muddle Instead of Music"
Pravda, 28 January 1936.
Condemns Shostakovich's opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District as cacaphonous modernism. The fact that some bourgeous Western audiences seem to like it is hardly a point in its favor.
Opera adapted from famous story of same name (1865) by Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (1831-1895)
In English:
http://www.geocities.com/kuala_bear/articles/muddle.html
Original text in Russian:
sumbur-r.html

"Ballet Off-Key"
Pravda, 6 February 1936, Thursday
Condemns ballet "Svetlyj Ruchej" ("The Bright Stream") for presenting kolkhoz as saccharine-sweet generic European pastoral, rather than adapting indigenous folkdance and modern Soviet folk-ways.
Shostakovich composed the music.
Original text in Russian:
baletnaya-falsh-r.html

A minor curiosity

The young Dmitri Shostakovich

Was he modeled by JK Rowling for her "Harry Potter" books?

Photo appeared in
Shostakovich(?) and Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1979
and may be copyrighted.