To the memory of myself  

The discussion continues on the question of whether Dmitri Shostakovich was a tool of the communists or not. I know very little about the history of his life, but I'm very fond of a couple of his works, and I've always found it impossible to believe he was some kind of communist propaganda machine. If you get a chance, listen to his second cello concerto, the deeply disturbing sarcasm of the first movement juxtaposed against the overwhelming sorrow of the second. Then there are his preludes and fugues echoing the Well-Tempered Clavier, which I've always read as a kind of escape into pure music, an almost religious statement about musical innocence and constraint.

In any case, despite the apparently overwheling historical evidence of his "moral courage and political disgust", I wonder if it might make even more sense in this case to judge the composer by his work. In a society where political speech is impossible, art carries an additional semantic burden, and music contains explicit messages. Shouldn't we listen to them?