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→Was Shostakovich a secret dissident?
==Was Shostakovich a secret dissident?==
==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)
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)
:My feelings exactly. Especially when one cross-references his most passionate works -- the First Violin Concerto, Fifth and Tenth Symphonies, Eighth String Quartet, etc. -- with the events simultaneously occurring in his life (friends getting shot, him being bullied into joining the Communist Party, etc.)
:I remember also reading (I think it was even in the Fay biography) that during the first performance of the fifth symphony, in the slow movement, members of the audience were audibly and loudly heard weeping. There's something in his music that connected directly to the suffering of the people who were most affected by the regime's excesses. [[User:JDWpianist|JDWpianist]] 19:25, 27 March 2009 (EDT)