The Shostakovich Symphonies, Part 4

Enthusiasm, hopefully not quite bordering on obsession, can take one a long way into filling the days with some purpose. The Shostakovich project has gone as far as buying a couple more books, first up of which is Ian MacDonald's The New Shostakovich. First published in the 1990's and extensively updated since, it's not as 'new' now as it was then and although it seems some areas of Shostakovich Studies might never be fully resolved, I think it's much clearer now, with the help of this book, than it had been.

The integrity of Solomon Volkov's Testimony, the memoirs as told to him, has been upheld by some authorities who ought to know and few would now believe Shostakovich to have been a Soviet puppet in the light of the encoded meanings in so much of the work, not least the symphonies. There are passages we might never interpret satisfactorily but it's clear that in many works he was a dissident hiding in plain sight, sometimes providing 'socialist realist' work that was approved of, producing film music and being used as a Soviet figurehead but subversively hiding deeper meanings in his art. Quite how he survived the mass purges of intellectuals, writers and others suspected of being 'enemies of the people' is some kind of miracle and he didn't expect to.

Possibly even more than Solzhenitsyn's first hand reportage, Ian MacDonald gives a compelling account of Stalin's rule, not that he has any right to in which nobody was able to feel safe. He also does a fine job of analysis on the symphonies and other significant pieces which will be useful in further listening to them, if one can bear it.