Shostakovich, a Life Remembered

Each time I read another book on Shostakovich it seems like the best yet. It's such a compelling story that one might think it can hardly fail but I reckon it could. Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich, a Life Remembered, though, brings together first-hand reports from those who were there, the likes of friends such as Rostropvich, and so it gains greater immediacy.

The most crucial moment comes in 1937 when Shostakovich is summoned to answer for himself and suspects his time has come only to be sent away because his inquisitor has just become one of the disappeared ahead of him. That seems like a miraculous reprieve and perhaps it was although the way the Soviet government worked the situation is beset by riddles.

Otherwise in this vast book, a monument of editorial achievement and collation, Shostakovich is nervous, devoted to his work, sceptical, principled, generous, funny and, as everybody apparently needs to be, a football supporter, of Zenit Leningrad. 

What would he have achieved without the terrible pressures he worked under. Brilliant, no doubt, but surely very different and, one suspects, nowhere near as interesting although 'interesting' is hardly the word.