As a young man of 27, Dmitry Shostakovich treated the Soviet Union to a feast of sex, murder and dissonance in his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (revised in 1962 and retitled Katerina Ismailovd). At its first performance in 1934, Joseph Stalin loathed every note of it. He and the Communist Party denounced Shostakovich for his bourgeois musical tastes and, ever since, the composer has been sliding in and out of party favor. Too talented and far too famous to be squelched, he produced symphonies, ballets, choruses, chamber music. He alternately...
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