Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, and the master of the double-entendre

‘Shostakovich’s music was never solely about “I”, or even about the great Russian collective “We”. It was for anyone with ears ready to hear.’ Stephen Johnson, author of How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

The 25th of September marks the birthday of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose life and times, according to Stephen Johnson, is ‘one of the most dramatic, stirring, at times even darkly comical in the history of classical music’.

Like most public figures during the Stalinist era, Shostakovich was a man forced to wear many masks. After Stalin attended a performance of his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an unsigned, damning editorial in Pravda quickly put an end to its continuous two-year run. ‘Things could end very badly,’ it threatened.

Just a year later, his Fifth Symphony – which he described as ‘A Soviet Artist’s response to just criticism’ – was received with a half-hour standing ovation and a review that saved Shostakovich’s career, and perhaps his life too. Yet, through a fine balancing act, he also gave voice to personal and collective suffering, engineering a conclusion that was ‘susceptible to other readings’.

In Shostakovich’s music, Johnson identifies the humanity that, despite the horrors, listened and reflected back to those who had ears for it – including himself. In his 2021 Rubery Book Award-winning How Shostakovich Changed My Mind, he examines the Russian composer’s life and work in fascinating detail, as well as what music can mean (and do) to us as humans from a neurological, psychological, philosophical, historical, literary and also a deeply personal perspective.