A dividing voice

Shostakovich attracts adulation and contempt in almost equal measure. Perhaps that's why his birthday is low profile, writes Arminta Wallace

Unless you've been taking part in a reality TV show which has forced you to spend the past eight weeks on another planet, you're probably aware that 2006 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Panels on radio chat shows argue over his personal quirks and musical significance; record shops are full of him; and concert programmes are positively bulging at the seams. You'd be forgiven, under the circumstances, if you hadn't noticed that this year also marks the centenary of the birth of Dmitri Shostakovich.

By comparison with the mania for Mozart, the silence on Shostakovich has been deafening. Why? One reason is that Mozart - or at least, the version of Mozart which has become iconic in popular culture - sells. Another is that the Shostakovich bandwagon won't properly get going until the actual anniversary of the composer's birth on September 25th. But it's also true that where Mozart is concerned, there is a general cultural consensus. Even those who feel somewhat queasy about the current celebratory overkill agree that Mozart is, in himself, A Good Thing. In the case of Shostakovich the jury is still out - and then some.

Was the composer a compliant Stalinist, or a secret dissident? Is his music vulgar nonsense, or the most profound expression of the human condition? Or is it simply, a century after his birth and a mere 30 years after his death, too early to tell?

DMITRI DMITRIYEVICH SHOSTAKOVICH was born in St Petersburg to a family whose modest prosperity was about to be shattered by the Bolshevik revolution. By the time he entered the Petrograd Conservatory as a 13-year-old piano student, his was a world of political turmoil and severe shortages; the head of the music school had to petition for extra rations to keep his young pupil from starving.

Nevertheless, Shostakovich's composing career began well. His First Symphony, written as a graduation piece at 18, was widely acclaimed both inside and outside of Russia, and he scored another hit with his first opera, The Nose, a satirical swipe at bureaucracy based on a Gogol short story.

Shostakovich's second opera, The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, told the story of a desperate housewife who, having murdered her husband and father-in-law in order to marry her lover, killed a rival and finally herself. It was a sensation, packing Moscow opera houses to the rafters for two years - and hailed in Europe and the US as the best thing to come out of Soviet Russia.

And so it was that in December 1935, Josef Stalin dropped in to see the show. He was not amused by the piece's rampant sexuality and vivid portrayal of the Gulag trains. Nor was he impressed by its innovative musical style. As defined by Uncle Joe's cultural apparatchiks, music was to be free of harsh tonalities, have a base in Russian folk-song and - above all - "have a happy ending in which the State is glorified". The following month an unsigned article entitled "Muddle instead of Music" appeared in Pravda. It condemned the opera and noted that if Shostakovich did not change his ways he "could end very badly".

Such bluster from an anonymous newspaper reviewer may seem faintly comic to late-capitalist sensibilities, but in the Soviet Union of the 1930s it sent a clear signal: the hapless composer could expect a loss of prestige and commissions - even, perhaps, a bullet in the back of the head. Shostakovich immediately withdrew his Fourth Symphony, which was in rehearsal at the time.

When his Fifth Symphony was unveiled the following year, it bore the subtitle "A Soviet artist's reply to just criticism" - and was of a distinctly conservative musical flavour. It was a resounding success; Shostakovich appeared to be back in business. In 1948, however, his music was again "denounced". This time most of his works were banned and he was forced to repent publicly. According to one biographer, he used to wait for his arrest at night "out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn't be disturbed". He also wrote some of his most abjectly toadying works, including Song of the Forests, an ode to Stalin's reafforestation programme.

After Stalin's death Shostakovich was officially rehabilitated, but in 1960 - inexplicably, in the view of many people - he joined the Communist Party. From then until his death he collected a clutch of titles and awards, including Honoured Artist of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic Composer's Union, People's Artist of the USSR, the Order of Lenin (three times),

Hero of Socialist Labour, and a whopping 13 Stalin prizes. From a Western perspective, Shostakovich appeared to be the very model of a contented Soviet artist. Depending on one's attitude to Communism, he had either manfully taken his critical medicine and revamped his works in the image of international socialism - or he was a Stalinist hack.

In 1979 the publication of a book called Testimony, by Solomon Volkov, muddied the waters considerably. Claiming to be Shostakovich's secret memoir, it insisted that the composer had been a rebel all along, and that his works contained coded anti-government messages. A new, revised Shostakovich was born - and the fallout has divided commentators ever since.

Ambivalence about how to interpret Shostakovich the man reflects widespread ambivalence about his music. With the exception of his 15 string quartets, which have been universally hailed as among the finest chamber works ever written, Shostakovich's music attracts adulation and contempt in almost equal measure. For every listener who praises its attempts "to encompass something too big to be contained in notes . . . horror beyond the possibility of expression", there is another who declares it to be trashy, strident and vulgar.

Stravinsky detested Lady Macbeth of The Mtsensk District, which he dismissed as "brutally hammering . . . and monotonous" - though anyone who saw Opera Ireland's superb production at the Gaiety Theatre a few seasons ago might beg to differ.

Critical opinion is most divided on the subject of Shostakovich's 15 symphonies which, detractors say, rely on a limited harmonic palette and some oft-repeated tricks, such as unsubtle alternation of static and dynamic elements and a large dollop of the grotesque. But they are also - especially in live performance - thrilling slices of musical drama which use the resources of a large orchestra to undeniably impressive effect.

The Ninth, which the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra will tour to venues around the country this week, has been rightly described as "an engaging and ironic Haydnesque parody". The RTÉ NSO's series of Shostakovich symphonies at the National Concert Hall continues on May 12th with Number 10 - a vast work, yet so tightly composed that it might have been knit with threads of steel. October 6th, meanwhile, is the date set for Number 13, Babi Yar, a stunning setting of the poem of the same name by Yevgeny Yevtushenko which commemorate a massacre of Jews during the second World War.

WHAT, THEN, TO make of Shostakovich? Is his music simplistic and derivative, or full of bleak insights and shifting ambiguities? The truth may well lie somewhere in between. In a recent article in the Guardian, one of the most accomplished Shostakovich scholars, Gerald McBurney, compares the composer to - of all people - Tchaikovsky, citing the fondness of both for kitsch and brazen melodrama.

Tchaikovsky, he adds, is only now beginning to escape from the extraordinary levels of vitriol aimed at him by critics outraged, not by his music per se, but by his homosexuality. It took well over a century for that process of reassessment to begin. It's possible that a century after Shostakovich's death he, like his fellow Russian, will be approached in a less feverish critical atmosphere.

In the meantime, we'll just have to take his music on its own terms. From the comfort of our late-capitalist armchairs we can, it must be admitted, have little real understanding of the cultural atmosphere in which Shostakovich worked.

But his portrayal of the crushing forces of totalitarianism and the struggle of the individual voice to be heard speaks volumes to a society obsessed with forces outside its control: terrorism, climate change, flu pandemics. If we listen carefully, Shostakovich still has a great deal to say to us.