Dmitri Shostakovich and Johann Sebastian Bach

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Dmitri Shostakovich and Johann Sebastian Bach

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was one of the greatest composers of Soviet Russia. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is regarded today as the father of Western music. They came from opposite ends of music history and lived in entirely different environments, but Shostakovich was undoubtedly influenced by Bach’s music, and their respective musical styles came from the same core tradition of Western music. But most importantly, underneath the obvious differences and the subtle similarities, these composers shared the same artistic spirit.

Before looking more closely at the composers’ works, they must be placed in their proper historical contexts. Bach was a great composer of the Enlightenment. All his life he wanted to find a court post, with its increased liberty and financial backing (he had a family of twenty), but he never progressed beyond the Baroque equivalent of a Lutheran minister of music, who was expected to provide new music each week for the Sunday service. By the end of his life, his son C.P.E. Bach was far more famous than Johann ever was.

In comparison, Shostakovich was an adolescent during the Russian Revolution of 1917, and for the rest of his life he lived in an uneasy relationship with the ideologically oppressive authorities. His life was difficult, but from his very first symphony of 1925 he was hailed as one of the greatest composers of his day. He had two public clashes with Stalin’s totalitarian regime, but survived. Today, a fierce argument rages over his actual political leanings: he never publicly showed dissatisfaction with communism, but his supposed memoirs paint a very different picture.

The world of music changed greatly between the eight...

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...stery, which the Enlightenment attempted to quantify. This is where his joy came from. Shostakovich’s horror originated in the oppression of the Communists, and to him, the ultimate meaning was in the essential qualities of humanity, which he saw threatened by Stalin.

Russians are obsessed with issues of death and eternity, the universal quandaries and paradoxes, which they call “the cursed questions.” Bach and Shostakovich were not the only composers who grappled with these issues, but they are unique in that they saw the answering of these questions to be part of their artistic task. They answered them in different ways, but their final answers are not incompatible. They answered them according to their own times and thoughts, and no matter the answer, they pursued it with integrity, honesty, and an artistic passion that few other composers have ever matched.

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