It has been 100 years since Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich finished writing his first symphony in 1925. When Symphony No. 1 premiered the following year in Leningrad, it was received with thunderous applause and propelled the composer’s career forward so that by the end of his life, Shostakovich became one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Importantly, Shostakovich spent his entire career in the Soviet Union, including through World War II and the entirety of Stalin’s rule.

Attention to Shostakovich’s life and music has persisted for decades, so why bring up his story again? There is much to learn by returning to him, especially when many of us are concerned about the future of arts in the U.S. In Shostakovich I believe we can find a certain solace that, as the present spins out of control, we can rebalance our hope for the arts. I implore you to join me in this reflection of Shostakovich to admire the perseverance of art in the most uncertain times.

First, let’s examine the intertwining of politics and music in Shostakovich’s work. Over the course of his life, he witnessed Stalin’s purges and eventual de-emphasis on the arts, to the point where Shostakovich was labeled an enemy of the Soviet state in the late 1930s. His relationship with the government, though, is one of mixed interpretations.

“Like so many artists, he traveled a zig-zagged, peculiar path through the first decades of the Soviet experiment: from the denunciation of his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as ‘formalist’ in 1936, to his return to favor with the 1937 Symphony No. 5, etc. etc,” Assistant Professor of History and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Nicholas Bujalski wrote in an email to the Review. “There have been ferocious debates regarding how, exactly, we should ‘place’ Shostakovich in relation to the politics, ideas, and values of the Soviet state: to the point where, from the 1980s to the present, people have spoken of ‘The Shostakovich Wars’ in the academy. Here, certain scholars and journalists have heatedly argued that this composer was always a secret anti-communist, encoding ‘anti-totalitarian’ messages into his symphonies, and others have heatedly argued that he possessed a more nuanced, negotiated, socialist-humanist relationship with the political life of his time.”

What we can ascertain from this scholarly conflict is that ambiguity is an inherent strength of his music — music that was mostly requisitioned by a government responsible for the deaths of millions. This is the inevitability of art’s persistence.

“Shostakovich’s use of Jewish themes under antisemitic Soviet rule has always resonated with me,” Graham Lazorchak, OC ’24, wrote in a message to the Review. “Even when it was suspected that Stalin intended to purge the country’s Jewish population, Shostakovich was writing music that said, ‘I hear you, and I am with you.’”

These kinds of interpretations are what keep art alive during even the most grim times. The value of his music goes beyond the bold, neoclassical compositions he is known for and enters a new world of persistent meaning.

The Soviet state controlled its art and therefore its artists. Fellow composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and Mieczysław Weinberg were victims of Soviet authority as well, being denounced or arrested—we still remember and perform their music.

“I think music has hugely potent political meaning,” Assistant Professor of Musicology Lena Leson said. “One of the things that I really admire about Shostakovich as an artist, but even more so as a person, is his resiliency. There are a number of times where he is vigorously denounced, where he might have stopped composing music, but he continues to persevere and he continues to do so with this compositional voice that is unique and remarkably consistent. … Shosty sounds like Shosty, no matter what. Even when maybe it’s dark or when it’s more upbeat, he is himself. Whereas Shostakovich is not a particularly good representation of socialist realism, he’s a good representation of himself.”

The state tried to control its art, but by looking back at Shostakovich, we can see it was unsuccessful. Politics and music have had a complicated relationship for centuries. Now, where we are now concerned for the future of arts directly under executive control, history shows us that the state is incapable of erasing the individual from the music.

“I think that composers in the United States speak from their personal experience and the things that they care about,” Leson said. “And so I imagine that if American composers are asked to do that kind of political work [of composing for an administration], it’s impossible not to represent one’s own experience in your compositional voice. Because music’s meaning is so flexible, I think that engagement is powerful. And engagement doesn’t have to be an obvious protest or obvious acquiescence to a government body, but I think that art is one of the most powerful forms of engagement.”

So, here we are, 100 years after Shostakovich burst into the classical scene and invariably contributed to the way we perceive art in even the most uncertain times. The social context of his music should be equally examined with his musical intentions through the lens of the present U.S., and in that, there is a rare piece of optimism about how we can persist through these current unprecedented times. To conclude, I wish to turn to one of Shostakovich’s most critically acclaimed works, Symphony No. 7. Composed during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 and completed in 1942, he put notes on the page as bombs fell around him. He donned a firefighter’s uniform and combated the flames to save his work. Shostakovich persevered.

“Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony is a work of committed anti-fascist defiance, a militant rejection of capitalist-imperialist dehumanization, a work of suffering humanist solidarity ‘brought down upon the heads of the destroyers,’ as A.N. Tolstoi celebrated it,” Bujalski wrote. “That is: art envisioned not only as ‘the heart of a heartless world,’ but grasped as a weapon in the collective struggle against its descent into barbarism. So — in this sense — perhaps Shostakovich provides us with something, amidst our own besieged and beleaguered world. Perhaps there’s a resonance that we can seize upon here with Walter Benjamin: who once called upon us, in the face of an enemy that masks its saber teeth through the aestheticization of politics, to respond by politicizing art.”