Dmitri shostakovich festive overture

We have an interesting picture of Dmitri Shostakovich from Sergei Prokofiev’s son Oleg. Oleg recounts a time that he went to visit Shostakovich in the early 1950s:

“He never seemed to stop moving. He would continually change his position on the chair, as if he never felt comfortable, crossing one leg over the other, then swapping legs; then a slipper would fall off, and he would try and pick it up from the floor and put it back on; then he would drop it again.

Occasionally he would try to light a cigarette, but matches kept breaking, and the cigarette would refuse to light…”

Shostakovich had very good reason for being a nervous man. During the reign of Stalin, Shostakovich spent much of his time playing cat-and-mouse games with the culture police; always trying to push his artistic boundaries outwards without offending Stalin by seeming too formalist.

Shostakovich the composer has taken a lot of flack from Western musicologists for seeming to capitulate to the whims of Stalin and