Dmitri Shostakovich

Through his music, Shostakovich distilled what Dostoevsky termed "life's accursed questions", a process sustained by his desire to "show millions of men and women what goes on in the soul of one individual, and to reveal to each individual what fills the soul of humanity". As the political violence of the twentieth century grew worse, so the composer's inner strength and clarity of vision increased. One sign of this development may be found in his Adagios, all of which are instinct with both inwardness and truth. Here is the music of suffering and the ability to come to terms with that suffering. Shostakovich was thirty-four in 1940 when he wrote his Piano Quintet in G minor op. 57. His rise to fame had begun in 1926, when he was twenty, only to be abruptly interrupted , when in 1936 he felt the whole arbitrary force of the Stalinist regime. By 1940 his zest for life was not wholly exhausted, for all that a pall of darkness hung over the world. But within a year the sense of gloom was complete, war having turned every hope to mere illusion. The acclaimed Russian pianist, Heinrich Neuhaus, wrote of the Quintet that it was impossible "to imagine a more perfect form with such wealth of detail, a form in which, despite episodes of the deepest pain, there is so much wit and deeper meaning, so much music from the street, and in which the inner world is reflected in the outer world on the priciple of, I am the world, and the world is in me". [Below are some clips from an excellent documentary which looks at Shostakovich's music within the context of Soviet Russia: "Shostakovich against Stalin"]