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JANDL100 wrote:

I hadn't realised it was a contentious issue.

O, yes. There are lot controversies about Shostakovich and the infamies “Testimony” – did not help as lot but rather spill oil into the fire. I do not tend to accuse Solomon Volkov in direct falsification but he Volkov does have very strong tendencies for massaging facts in order to make the point more polarized and more salable. I real all his books and there are many very “slippery” places in many of them.

JANDL100 wrote:

I certainly agree that there is no need to mix musical issues with political/historical ones.

Shostakovich in many instanced was the horn and the voice of Communism, he made very many actions, writings, speeches and articles where he was absolutely voluntary behaving as a representative of extremely pro- Communistic way of thinking. He became a member of Communist party in adult and mature age, without any pressure and perfectly according with his will. Shostakovich in many instances behaved protecting the Communist nomenclature and he was fully supported and benefited by that Communist machinery. Shostakovich got over a dozen of Party’s prizes and grants and he was the most officially celebrated Soviet composer. Still, in the western propaganda twist it all as some kind of devilish ploy, portraying Shostakovich living in a hell and is fighting each second of his life for… fighting the ideals of … the Washington Post’s values. Do not forget that the very same propaganda that invented Shostakovich as an “ultimate sufferer” invented and brought to the world the Cold War… whatever it worth. The portraying Shostakovich as a Russian Jesus Christ was very nicely fitting into the ploy of general demonization of socialists in western propaganda since the second part of the century. It might or not might be a correct of view the politics but it is absolutely mistaken and jaded wai to look at Shostakovich.

Shostakovich wrote a lot of wonderful and sometime ingenious music but at the same time he wrote a lot of incredible crapy music in many instances extremely vulgar and distasteful music. I take the things as they are.

Shostakovich, as any other composers has own voice in sound and own stylistic. I do not like many things he did BUT I would not associate it with his political/historical/social scene. Shostakovich good or his bad moments were portraits of who Shostakovich was. In many instances he wrote music in the way how he was thinking – nervosa-loaded, jumpy, inappropriately-sarcastic thinking with no point of references to relevance and with setting the boundaries of own sarcasm. Sarcasm is phenomenal expression form but only if the supper-intends are very well defined. In case of Shostakovich the self-devastating sarcasm became a part of nature, the nature that lacks of any non-sarcastic supper-intends.  I might understand why it happened as according to Dostoyevsky a sarcasm  is a last refuge of people whose soul’s privacy are invaded. Still, we do not blame shark are eat meat and we do not blame elephants that they are vegetarian. They are who they are and let them to be their ways…

The sarcasm-sunk and sarcasm-diluted Shostakovich is who he is. His sarcasm have become his own voice, converting his own voice into the disgusting permanent stylistics of the “Clockwork Orange”

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