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Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets. Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets; his 15th expressed powerfully in music the dissidence he was incapable of expressing in his public life.
Since the official battering he had received for his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Shostakovich had been at pains to toe the party line. During the Stalin era this was understandable enough - it was a matter of sheer survival. But after Stalin's death there was, in relative terms, something of a thaw, and dissident voices began to be heard. Shostakovich's was emphatically not one of them - in fact he became more than ever the party loyalist, accepting all sorts of official posts and duties and even adding his name to an open letter attacking the nuclear physicist and civil-rights activist Andrei Sakharov. The only language in which Shostakovich was prepared to express dissidence was the elusive, ambiguous, indefinable language of music. So there grew up in Russia the notion of "the two Shostakoviches" - one daring and progressive, the other, frankly, a coward. Shostakovich subtitled the first movement of his 15th Symphony 'The Toyshop', but it quickly becomes clear that this creepy, eerie toyshop is no place for children. The profoundly melancholy 15th String Quartet - one of the composer's last major works - is a relentless procession of six Adagios, in which Shostakovich completes the journey to the interior he had begun with his 1st String Quartet nearly four decades earlier.