Welcome back to Origin Story. This bonus episode is something a bit different: a story about the power of music and the music of power. 

Tortured genius? Stalinist stooge? Undercover dissident? Perhaps no musician better represents the competing demands of art and politics than Dmitri Shostakovich, who died 50 years ago this week. He has been called the most brilliant symphonist of his age and the most controversial composer since Wagner.

Shostakovich’s career began with Lenin and ended with Brezhnev but his great antagonist was Stalin, a self-styled music buff and maestro in the art of fear. From symphony to symphony, Shostakovich danced on the edge of a knife. Sometimes he was the Soviet Union’s favourite composer, bathing in privilege and acclaim. At other times he was an “enemy of the people”, bullied into silence and terrified for his life.

Nobody knew what Shostakovich’s music was really saying until the posthumous publication of his memoir Testimony made an extraordinary claim that turned all assumptions on their head. But was this just a dying man’s attempt to save his reputation and was Testimony even his words or a brilliant forgery? His admirers and detractors have been fighting the

“Shostakovich wars” ever since.

How did Shostakovich and contemporaries like Prokofiev manage to produce great art in a dictatorship, and what did it cost them? Why did his Leningrad Symphony transfix the world? How did he inspire the most consequential review in the history of music criticism? And can we ever truly know what his music meant or is it all in the ear of the beholder? Listen closely.

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, Pravda (28 January 1936)

• Anonymous, ‘Shostakovich and the Guns’, Time (20 July 1942)

• Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (2016)

• James Devlin, Shostakovich (1983)

• Jeremy Eichler, ‘The Composer and the Dictator’, New York Times (2004)

• Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (2000)

• Michel Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin (2025)

• Dorian Lynskey, ‘Settling a Soviet Score’, Jewish Renaissance (Spring 2025)

• Brian Morton, Shostakovich: His Life and Music (2006)

• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

• Nikil Saval, ‘Julian Barnes and the Shostakovich Wars’, The New Yorker (2016)

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (1979)

• Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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