Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich is presented as both a composer whose symphonies acquire shifting political meanings and a memoirist who judges the artistic stance of his rival Sergei Prokofiev. The book places his judgment within a broader argument about how music can be enlisted by official ideology, reinterpreted against it, and still carry tensions that neither reading exhausts.

Identity and Critical Judgment

In his memoirs, Shostakovich dismisses Prokofiev as someone who refuses to take historical horrors seriously and is always playing the “wise guy.” The remark identifies a sharp critical opposition: Shostakovich treats Prokofiev’s irony as evasive in the face of history. Yet the book does not let that verdict stand as the final account of Prokofiev’s music. It turns instead to the first violin sonata, Opus 80, as a work whose internal struggle complicates the charge of mere cleverness.

The Changing Meaning of Shostakovich’s Symphonies

The book uses Shostakovich’s Fifth or Seventh Symphony to show how radically a work’s public interpretation can change. At its first performance, the symphony was celebrated as an exemplary instance of Stalinist Socialist Realism; it is now also interpreted as carrying a concealed dissident message that mocks and subverts Communist ideology. In the Seventh, the first movement’s gradually advancing mechanical march, in a pattern compared to Bolero, was commonly understood as the cold advance of the German Army into Russia. A later reading hears in the same inexorable rhythm the mechanically cruel advance of Communism. The musical passage remains, but its political referent reverses.

Art, History, and Interpretive Conflict

This reversal places Shostakovich’s music within the book’s distinction between official meaning and the unstable meanings a work can sustain. The discussion compares the changing readings of his symphony to Budapest’s liberation monument on Gellért Hill: made in 1943 on Admiral Horthy’s orders to honor his son, who had died fighting the Red Army, the statue was adopted after the city’s liberation in 1945 as a monument to that liberation. The comparison makes political interpretation look less like a fixed message embedded in an artwork than a claim that can be reassigned as historical circumstances change.

The book’s argument does not reduce Shostakovich’s symphony to either its original official celebration or its later dissident interpretation. Rather, the two readings expose the work’s capacity to bear opposed historical meanings. Shostakovich’s presence in the discussion is therefore double: he is the critic who accuses Prokofiev of treating horror lightly, and a composer whose own music becomes an example of how art’s relation to history cannot be settled by a single public reading.