At his death in 1975, Dmitri Shostakovich was regarded by many Western critics as the quintessential Communist Party musical apparatchik. The thin- lipped, bespectacled composer presented a bland face to the world, periodically bowing his head to the artistic dictates of Soviet authority and writing propagandistic tub thumpers to cloak his occasional forays into modernism. Or so it seemed.
With the 1979 publication of Testimony, the composer's memoirs secretly narrated to his friend, editor Solomon Volkov, a different picture emerged. This Shostakovich was a pragmatist, who learned to keep his head down after he was denounced in Pravda and saw his...
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