Why do we love Shostakovich?

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25,1906 in St.Petersburg.
The centenary of his birth represents an opportunity to rediscover his complete work, but also an invitation to learn about the extremely difficult conditions under which it has been created. On January 28, 1936, the PRAVDA published a critical comment on the successful composer, then 29 years old, under the title "chaos instead of music". Stalin had decided that Soviet culture had to serve the regime and had to be produced according to the principles of "socialist realism". Thousands of artists where confronted not only with a fundamental critique of their work, but with the concrete risk of physical liquidation. Thousands died in Sibirian labour camps or were executed, on the ground of the suspicion that they were part of a Trotzkyist counterrevolution (e.g. actor/director Vsevolod Meyerhold or film critic Aleksander Arosev, author of "Le Cinéma en URSS" , VOKS 1935)
Foreigners, such as the "brigade May", a group of German and Swiss avantgarde architects that had come to the Soviet Union to help build the "Socialist City", had to leave the country (among them Margarethe Schütte-Lihotsky of Vienna and Hans Schmidt of Basel).
Shostakovich survived by adapting his work to the demands of Stalin, but he had to live, from 1936 on, under the continuous threat to become the target of prosecutionn like so many of his friends.
Now, as the late Swiss composer Jacques Wildberger is cited in an article written by
Marco Frei in todays "Neue Zeitung Zeitung" Nr.221:65 under the title "tragikomische Maskenspiele eines Gottesnarren", Shostakovich changed his composition style into an "absurd too much". Some specialists of Shostakovich describe a hidden (ironizing) message between the lines of Shostakovich compositions befor, during and after World War II.
Paradoxically, it seems that the most appreciated and most frequently interpreted works of Shostakovich to this day are the works created after 1937, according to the
rules imposed by the dictator Stalin.
Why is this so? Are we becoming Stalinists again without knowing it? Are we too naïve to understand the irony in the bombastic sound blasts that end his symphonies?
Or are we sensitive enough to discover the hidden message of a composer whose life was filled with fear...?


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