Description

Dmitri Shostakovich is one of the Twentieth Century’s premiere composers of symphonies. Yet even listeners familiar with his work don’t always realize that behind the beautiful and evocative music, there often lies a series of hidden messages. For Shostakovich was harassed, repressed, and often threatened by the regime of Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and so, while creating works that seemed to resound with all the bombast and socialist sincerity that the leader required, the composer was quietly and secretly hiding his true emotions behind a series of coded musical messages. Focusing on the composer’s symphonies, this discussion will look at the dichotomy of Shostakovich: the public face of a loyal servant of the Soviet State and the private one of a deeply sensitive and oppressed creator who discovered an ingenious method of survival and private communication – in the form of deeply personal music that still resonate with listeners today.