[elgar's ghost]

Shostakovich may have held back certain compositions until it was more conducive for them to see the light of day but even when Stalin was alive and the cultural commissars were on his back the composer was still clever enough to mask his true thoughts behind song texts and musical ciphers. At least it proved that in this regard he was way ahead of the arbiters of taste who were responsible for picking ideological holes in his work. Even if Robert Craft was right Shostakovich should still be given special credit for having the kind of streetwise smarts that were beyond the arguably more gifted Prokofiev.

 

[elgar's ghost]

Just another low-class musician opening his big mouth and dumping on a fellow musician. It strikes me that professional athletes exhibit much more respect for one another than musicians.

Apart from most boxers...

 

[elgar's ghost]

Yes!! "The Nose"!! :devil::lol: really wild!! Very satirical, and bound to run into trouble....after its introduction in 1930, it did not surface again in Russia until 1974.

At least The Nose wasn't banned at the time. There was still artistic freedom for composers in the Soviet Union during 1929-30, it's just that The Nose was simply a box office bomb and was then forgotten. Needless to say, had the work premiered later in the 1930s the Culture Commissars would have had Shostakovich's balls on a fork...