DMITRI DMITRIEVICH SHOSTAKOVICH lived and died inside a colossal lie. Loved, loathed, purged, rehabilitated, feted, paraded, humiliated, decorated—it was a life where the only truth was his music, and it was a life sustained in a shell by the possibilities of irony, by the uses of cowardice, and by the redundancy of shame. One of the greatest composers of the last century wrote his music under the corrective gaze of Power, and it was the tastemakers of socialist aesthetics who would decide whether his creations were ‘music or muddle’—and whether he should be let to play a ‘game that may end badly.’ He survived—he owned a dacha, a chauffeur-driven car, and he would even get a direct call from Stalin—and, still, the scars of being alive were on his soul,…
