Was it [the corpus of Shostakovich’s fifteen sym phonies], then, written by the embittered secret dissident introduced to the world in 1979 via Solomon Folkov’ Testimony? It was.

Is the new Shostakovich the real Shosta kovich?

Of course.
—Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich

The lives of few composers in the twentieth century can have contained quite so much of the terror of the times as did the life of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Born in the old Russia of parents belonging to the middle-class intelligentsia, Shostakovich, not yet in his twenties, found himself the shining hope of Bolshevik music; by the beginning of the 1930s, he was well on his way to being the Soviet composer-laureate. In 1936, he was brought to his knees by a vicious official at tack, emanating, it seems, directly from the mighty Stalin himself.

But unlike so many million fellow victims of Stalin’s purges, Shostakovich survived, managing the next year in his Fifth Sym phony to make amends for his previous satiri cal but gloom-laden music by writing a Soviet symphonic classic, noble, uplifting, and ultimately cheerful. In his Seventh Sym phony (1941), Shostakovich celebrated the heroic survival of Leningrad from the Nazi onslaught, and by the end ofWorld War II es tablished himself, like Prokofiev, as the musi cal fulfillment, in war no less than in peace, of the promise of Stalinist culture.

In 1948, the Party axe fell once more on Soviet music, and Shostakovich (along