Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975)
Soviet composer and pianist.
Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.
People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.
You ask if I would have been different without "Party guidance"? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage.
For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray. And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place.
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.
I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I don't succeed I consider it's my own fault.
I write music, it's performed. It can be heard, and whoever wants to hear it will. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
He did not write about this war and that revolution, but about war and revolution in general, the state of mind and emotion, not facts.
It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.