Shostakovich

     Recently we heard a concert in which Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony was played, and the program notes related the story of Stalin getting up and leaving before the end of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which plunged Shostakovich into deepest fear, and the Fifth was supposed to be written to show he was reacting to justified criticism.
     This reminded me of two fictional accounts I had read of Shostakovich in terror of the knock on the door.
     First, in Richard Powers' "Orfeo," which has been described as a history of twentieth century music. "Orfeo" also includes an interesting description of the genesis of The Quartet for the End of Time by Messiaen, which was written and first performed in a German prison camp.
     Second in "Europe Central" by William T Vollmann, which won the National Book Award in the US in 20005. Let me cut and paste from somewhere or other (thank Google)to introduce you to this extraordinary book:

''Europe Central'' gives us 37 stories, five of them more than 50 pages long, to represent Central European fanaticism and to recover little-known acts of conscientious resistance to Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. What sets ''Europe Central'' apart from Vollmann's other large-scale historical productions is its strong narrative lines. The pieces are dated and arranged chronologically to give the book a plot that arcs from prewar political machinations to Germany's surge east to Russia's counteroffensive, and that ends with cold war politics in divided Berlin.

Stories about Shostakovich and his intimates or rivals -- his lover Elena Konstantinovskaya; her husband, Roman Karmen; the poet Anna Akhmatova -- recur often enough to make the collection a suspenseful near novel about the composer and his times. Shostakovich is so fascinating -- in his musical ideas, his often failed defenses against Stalinist demands, his nearly suicidal wit and his bumbling speech -- that you may be tempted to skip the intervening stories to see how his treacherous life turns out. Vollmann's pell-mell telling of Shostakovich's last years -- 1943 to 1975 -- in the almost 110-page story called ''Opus 110'' is a tour de force. As the composer jams the horrible sounds of his life into his summary opus, Vollmann compacts the themes and motifs of his book into its emotional climax.

"Europe Central" is an amazing achievement...but over 800 pages....so I cannot just say, get it and read it...