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Was Shostakovich a secret dissident?
I have never heard of """Testimony" being mocked and suppressed by Western liberals." I'd qualify as a liberal and I've had a copy since it was first published. And it was "liberals" like Bernstein and Britten that championed his music. As for his music not being known in the West, I remember broadcasts of each of his later symphonies being advertised on Australian public ('liberal') radio a week before they were available. A new Shosh. was a big thing. It was only ever the extreme loony left that tried any minimisation of Soviet excesses. [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 23:03, 18 August 2008 (EDT)
I have never heard of """Testimony" being mocked and suppressed by Western liberals." I'd qualify as a liberal and I've had a copy since it was first published. And it was "liberals" like Bernstein and Britten that championed his music. As for his music not being known in the West, I remember broadcasts of each of his later symphonies being advertised on Australian public ('liberal') radio a week before they were available. A new Shosh. was a big thing. It was only ever the extreme loony left that tried any minimisation of Soviet excesses. [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 23:03, 18 August 2008 (EDT)
==Was Shostakovich a secret dissident?==
When in doubt go to a primary source. In this case, the music. I don't pretend to be an expert at "reading" his music - at understanding his musical language - but I sometimes feel that there is a sense of compassion, especially in his later stuff. There is humanity amongst the rubble. He could not have written the later chamber works and the 13th and 14th Symphonies without feeling despair, not just at the fate of the Jews at Treblinka, say, but at the plight of his own people and the evil surrounding him...and within that despair lay sympathy. I can't articulate it properly, but does anyone know what I mean? I would go so far as to say that by the end he was ''openly'' dissident - for any who wanted to hear. [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 18:26, 27 March 2009 (EDT)