Stephen Harper, as quoted in George Bush’s recent memoir [via the NY Times' Maureen Dowd]:

[Bush] writes of a visit to Russia, when Putin showed him his black Labrador, Koni. “Bigger, stronger, and faster than Barney,” Putin bragged.

Later, when W. recounted this to Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, Harper drolly noted, “You’re lucky he only showed you his dog.”

Michael Ignatieff, as quoted in a recent collection of Bruce Chatwin’s letters [via William Dalrymple in the Sunday Times]:

After visiting Chatwin near the end when his hypomania was at its peak, Ignatieff wrote a loving farewell note about a visit which left him, he said,

“full of dark and strange thoughts. You seemed in a realm of exultation – extreme physical dilapidation seems to have sent you shooting up into the sky with the angels . . . Over it all hung an unmistakable air of Nunc Dimittis . . . It is quite possible that you experience this apparent frenzy from inside some deep calm . . . But those who love you – and see only the outside – see someone haunted and in breathless pursuit. I’m not sure it is among the offices of friendship to convey my sense of foreboding and disquiet at how I saw you. I may just be expressing a friend’s regret at losing you to a great wave of conviction, to some gust of certainty, that leaves me here, rooted to the spot and you carried far away. In which case, I can only wave you onto your journey.”

Fleming manages to write with clarity about Peter Gzowski, a titan of Canadian journalism and radio, and his archival research has been prodigious. He appears to have read every article (no matter how insignificant), watched every TV special (no matter how cringe-inducing), and listened to every radio program (almost all of which were flawless) that Gzowski was ever involved with. And he has unearthed something previously unknown about Gzowski’s personal life: In the 1960s, married with children, Gzowski fathered a child with another woman.

But here is where the problems begin. Rather than integrate the story of Gzowski’s illegitimate son into the general biographical narrative, Fleming sequesters it in a separate, final chapter. In doing so, of course, he created the journalistic splash he was aiming for. But he also manages to draw attention to how devoid of personal insight the rest of his book is.

Consider: In the larger sweep of Gzowski’s life, the story of his secret child has little significance. Gzowski remained friends with the boy’s mother and supported her, yet he rarely saw the child as a boy, and never visited his grandchild later. But in areas that dominated Gzowski’s life, Fleming is virtually silent. Gzowski’s first wife, Jennie Lissaman, is little more than a shadow in Fleming’s book, her presence reduced to the woman who bore Gzowski’s children and cooked his meals. There is little description of what Peter might have found attractive about her, what they might have found in common, how tensions arose in their relationship, why they divorced when they did. While Gzowski’s illegitimate child gets an entire chapter, his five children from Jennie are barely mentioned. Some get no more mention than a listing of their names and the year they were born.

The reasons for this perverse approach to Gzowski’s personal life are obvious: Fleming was unable to gain the confidence of the Gzowski family, who refused to cooperate with his project. I think this was a mistake on the family’s part, though understandable. Their misgivings about Fleming’s professionalism have been amply borne out.

Even worse is the material that Fleming has stuffed into the gaping hole left by Gzowski’s absent family. Instead of narrative, we get entire chapters filled with laundry lists of articles he wrote or edited for various publications. Gzowski might have been the terrific print journalist Fleming claims he is, but you’d never know from this book. Each and every piece of published writing Gzowski came into contact with – no matter how trivial or dated – is given the “Fleming treatment”: a one or two-sentence summary that makes little effort to sift, evaluate or contextualize.

What little analysis exists suffers from a common editor’s complaint: telling rather than showing. According to Fleming, Gzowski was a great editor who pushed his writers in unexpected directions and improved their skills. Is this true? Well, Fleming has managed to string together a series of quotations from friends and colleagues who repeat this point, sometimes almost verbatim. But not one of them offers a concrete example or anecdote to actually illustrate it.

When anecdotes do appear in the book, they are almost invariably tedious or irrelevant. One of the longest involves a game of golf, where Gzowski was apparently competitive and prone to stretching the rules in his favour. In my experience, that description covers almost every male golfer I’ve come into contact with. Fleming apparently believes it reveals something of the “dark” side to Gzowski, an allegedly surly character and serial exaggerator. (On this last point, which is a recurrent theme in Fleming’s book, the author dwells at greatest length on the various permutations and implausibilities of Gzowski’s childhood memories. Aren’t childhood memories – by their very nature – unreliable? Is this really news?)

And yet despite the book’s many flaws, something of Gzowski’s magical, melancholy character comes through, just as it did for years over the airwaves. It’s a shame that a man who meant so much to millions of Canadians was cursed with such a pedestrian biographer.

Here’s a sample of his promo spots for upcoming programs: One performer’s “fresh style is always original.” Another performer’s “signature vulnerable performances are punctuated by driving rhythms.” But an absolute gem was dispensed just a couple days ago in a promo spot for a concert by Marie-Jo Thériault. It’s a beaut, complete with redundancies, plenty of meaningless descriptive phrases, and even a problem with verb conjugation at the end. Take 20 seconds out of your day and have a listen:

Download audio file (promoboy_2008_04_01.mp3)

Her passion moves an audience with genuine emotion. Her musical vision is swift, deep, and transports the listener. And, her Acadian roots not only define her music, but defines her as an artist. She’s Marie-Jo Thériault, on the next Canada Live.

Klein opted for something more “homeopathic” to clear up her condition. Despite her endorsement, unfortunately, Klein insists that she has “no real sense that [the product] works. I think of it like a kind of talisman. I like the old-fashioned country-doctor packaging.”

He is sanctimonious and self-aggrandizing, but what politician isn't?

But beginning with his ill-advised decision to join the Liberal Party — after criticizing other MPs for switching party allegiance — Turner has gradually shed his reputation as an honorable and principled political actor. The last straw, for me, was this report from a couple days ago, on his current trip out west.

In Edmonton there was a top-of-the-lung rant by a pesky senior, decrying all things Conservative; a dire prediction I ‘ll be tossed out of the Liberal party by Stephane Dion within 30 months for my unique pain-in-the-ass qualities; an anti-immigrant tirade that almost caused a dustup in the audience; several pleas that oil come second to the environment; and the intervention by a pack of young Liberals who showed up to argue Nine Eleven was an inside job, and Canada is morally bankrupt to be fighting George Bush’s illegal war in Afghanistan.

Actually, that last group was persuasive. Not that I buy the conspiracy theory – not yet, anyway. But I was struck by their fervour and commitment. They loaded me up with literature and CDs, and made me promise I would blog about this. And I did.

There are two things that struck me about this passage. First of all, 9-11 conspiracy theories are apparently considered unremarkable in the Liberal Party. It's one thing for individual Liberals to quietly grumble such nonsense among friends; it's quite another for a "pack" of them to feel comfortable in publicly haranguing an MP on the subject. This should be national news, IMHO.

Second, and most depressing, is Turner's cowardice. He's not quite ready to don the tin-foil hat ("not yet, anyway"), but gosh those boys were "persuasive."

What an ass.

Graffiti is ubiquitous; it's everywhere.

And one paragraph later, in case you didn't get it:

It's all over the place. . . . 

Kinsella is always tiresome. Tedious too.

The journalist does a good job of drawing the controversy over the books to battles over phonics and "whole language." And her summary of Junie B. Jones' voice is almost perfect:

And though she is the narrator of the stories, she struggles with grammar. Her adverbs lack the suffix “ly”; subject and object pronouns give her problems, as do possessives; she usually isn’t able to conjugate irregular past tense verbs; and words like funnest and beautifuller are the mainstays of her vocabulary.

I say "almost perfect" because the problem with the books isn't that Junie "struggles with grammar." It's that she doesn't struggle with grammar. Her grammar is, in fact, as strict and rule-bound as a mathematical equation. Unlike most children, in fact, Junie doesn't slip up with irregular verbs — she conjugates them uniformly incorrectly. Junie's solecisms don't bother me most — it's her lack of imagination and literal adherence to a small set of rules. She doesn't sound like a child to me — she sounds like a robot.

What makes this particularly problematic is that the books are written in the first person. The only voice the reader ever gets is Junie B. Jones's voice. There is no contrasting 3rd-person narrator (as in Winnie the Pooh, for instance) who might alert children to the fact that Junie isn't speaking correctly.

The author's comparison of her book with Huckleberry Finn might be legitimate, except for one thing. Huck Finn isn't pitched at the level of novice readers who are still struggling with the elements of proper grammar.

Liberals are calling for an apology from Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, for allegedly referring to Belinda Stronach, the Aurora MP and his former girlfriend, as a dog.

As a historical service, I thought I'd offer a brief — and far from exhaustive — sampling of canine-themed insults from recent days in the House of Commons.

Mr. Michel Guimond (Beauport—Montmorency—Orléans, BQ):

Mr. Speaker, just before beginning, could you ask the chihuahua for Bourassa to do his barking outside the House? I am utterly fed up. ….

I did not call the hon. member for Bourassa a dog, I called him a chihuahua. There is a difference.

Some hon. members: Ha, ha.

Mr. Michel Guimond: A chihuahua is a small dog that yaps a lot but does not bite.

Some hon. members: Ha, ha.

Source: Hansard, December 5, 1997 

Mr. Lynn Myers (Waterloo—Wellington, Lib.): I was very pleased to be called “a young pup” by [Scott Brison]; far better a young pup than an old dog. The Conservatives are nothing under Joe Clark than an old dog with no teeth.

Source: Hansard, March 30, 2000

    Mr. Monte Solberg (Medicine Hat, CPC): Mr. Speaker, the NDP tail is wagging the Liberal dog.

    How incredible that Liberal cabinet ministers are now lobbying NDP members to get things included in the new budget. I guess that Liberal dog must be a lapdog.

    The finance minister may be getting really good at retrieving the NDP leader's slippers, but he is irrelevant as a minister. When will he resign?

    Some hon. members: Hear, hear!

Source: Hansard, May 4, 2005

And finally, Peter MacKay again, this time directing his canine contempt at a man, Ralph Goodale, Liberal Minister of Finance:

Mr. Peter MacKay: Ralph [Goodale, Liberal Minister of Finance] the wonder invisible dog swallowed himself whole and committed to letting the NDP set the stage for the budget ….

Hansard, Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Strangely, not one of these exchanges provoked a front page story in the Star.

So it was with some surprise that I saw this morning's Op-Ed, a rousing paean to the creative work and moral message of Dr. Seuss, composed by none other than Jonathan Kay himself.

[Dr. Seuss's] best works provide … a sense of true drama (think of Horton the Elephant's efforts to save his flea-sized colony) — and even a valuable moral. The life lessons I learned from Dr. Seuss stuck with me because they always came embedded in an unforgettable graphic panel …

Now I'm as big a fan of Dr. Seuss's work as anyone, and I largely agree with Kay's assessment. But I find it passing strange that Kay avoided addressing the philosophical heart of Seuss's works: moral equivalence. There are countless examples of this. Star-bellied Sneetches are equivalent to those who have "none upon thars." The north-going Zaks and south-going Zaks mindlessly cleave to their petty differences. And finally, in the Butter Battle Book (1984), which Seuss himself reportedly considered his finest, Yooks and Zooks end up in a pitched arms race threatening the very extinction of their species, over the most laughable difference:

"It's high time that you knew," the old Yook grandfather tells his grandson, "of the terribly horrible things that Zooks do."

"In every Zook house and in every Zook town
every Zook eats his bread
with the butter side down!

"But we Yooks, as you know,
when we breakfast or sup,
spread our bread," Grandpa said,
"with the butter side up.
That's the right, honest way!"

The parallels with the Cold War — or at least how Ted Geisel viewed the Cold War — are transparent.

One thing is certain: Dr Seuss would never have been published on the Post's opinion pages.

Pity the ghost of Dmitri Shostakovich. Thirty years after his death, it seems his soul will never be allowed to rest in peace. Hounded by Stalinist commissars during his lifetime, ridiculed by Western modernists to this day, Shostakovich remains one of the twentieth century's most embattled cultural figures.

Mercifully, things look rather different on today's stages. Had he lived to his 100^th birthday this year, Shostakovich might have allowed himself one of his characteristic wincing smiles. For his musical opponents have been all but vanquished in the concert hall. Shostakovich reigns supreme.

Not everyone is pleased with this turn of events. Back in 2000, Pierre Boulez, the high priest of modern music, expressed his growing irritation with the Russian composer's eminence. "Shostakovich plays with clichés most of the time," Boulez told the London Times. "It's like olive oil, you have a second and even third pressing, and I think of Shostakovich as the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler. I think, with Shostakovich, people are influenced by the autobiographical dimension of his music." Strip away the contempt and something rather surprising emerges: Boulez is largely right.

One of the bittersweet ironies of Shostakovich's posthumous triumph is that his enemies often understand him better than his friends. You would have to be deaf not to hear the Mahlerian voice in Shostakovich's music, particularly in the monumental symphonies. Shostakovich's Fourth, for instance, sounds at times like a bitter rejoinder to Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. And the Russian composer did play with clichés — deliberately and expressively. Sometimes the clichés are overt, as in the bombastic "Invasion" theme of the Leningrad Symphony. Sometimes the clichés might not even be audible to modern listeners, as in Shostakovich's repeated references in the Eighth String Quartet and the Eleventh Symphony to hoary Russian revolutionary songs.

Of course, this expressive use of musical clichés is not really what Boulez is objecting to. Substitute "established musical conventions" for "clichés," and you get a pretty good idea of why Shostakovich's music is detested by the mandarins of high modernism. Shostakovich's music establishes clear links to the traditions of the past, while at the same time expanding and reinvigorating them. His music makes sense, even to the casual listener.

Undoubtedly a huge reason for the popularity of Shostakovich's music has been its ability to convince listeners that it is, well, something more than music. Internet enthusiasts and music popularizers have created something of a cottage industry exploring the "autobiographical dimension" of Shostakovich's music. Many believe they hear the voice of political protest and personal defiance. In part, this view can be traced back to Shostakovich's own lifetime. Speak with any music-loving Russian émigré who lived through the Soviet nightmare, and you will inevitably hear something like this: Shostakovich's music was the "secret diary of a nation," describing the hidden world of fear, suspicion, and desperate hope that millions experienced under the Soviet dictatorship. Margarita Mazo, who taught at the Leningrad Conservatory before coming to the US, once described Shostakovich's music to me as a "sacred experience." In his music she and her compatriots heard what they believed to be the composer's suffering, the incredible moral complexities of living under Communist rule: "When we listened to his music it spoke to us at a certain level," she says. "Whether it was true or not doesn't matter."

Shostakovich's official biography, of course, offers rather meager resources to these listeners. To all appearances, he presented himself as a sturdy pillar of the Soviet regime, complete with thick glasses and ill-fitting suits — who also happened to compose music. After being elected to the Leningrad city council in 1934 (he was then only twenty-eight), he continued a long, illustrious, and uninterrupted career as a Soviet public servant until the end of his life. He was elected repeatedly to the Supreme Soviets of the Russian Republic and of the USSR, and joined the Communist Party in 1960. It is fitting that the most famous image of Shostakovich ever circulated in America was his face on the cover of Time magazine in 1942. One might expect a photo of Shostakovich waving a baton, scribbling on manuscript paper, or playing a piano. But instead he wears a fireman's hat, the better to perform his loyal citizen's duty to protect the motherland from outside invaders.

Even as a musician, Shostakovich proved a model Soviet citizen. A significant portion of his creative energy was spent composing paeans to a regime that imprisoned and killed millions of his countrymen. Two of his earliest symphonies were ecstatic hymns to communism. Several of his late works appear to be nostalgic evocations of this youthful idealism. Sandwiched in between are regular tributes to Soviet power. One of the final state honors bestowed on Shostakovich before his death was a Glinka Prize for a choral work entitled, rather appropriately, Loyalty. Based upon words by the poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, the choral ballads, according to his biographer Laurel Fay, "elevate Lenin above God, Confucius, Buddha, and Allah." (Shostakovich's lifelong admiration of Lenin seems to have been genuine, according to recent accounts of friends and family.) Shostakovich told Soviet television that "it will not be my last work about Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin]. In the future I will most certainly strive to embody the image of this great man."

In other words, in any conceivable understanding of his public life, Shostakovich was, in the words of his official obituary, a "faithful son of the Communist Party." But if such a statement seems incontrovertible, it is also a gross distortion of the lives of Shostakovich and his contemporaries. In the most obvious sense, Shostakovich's outward "faithfulness" did not insulate him from official persecution. Thousands of Party members discovered this too late in the 1930s, their loyalty rewarded with a bullet to the back of the head. Shostakovich never met such a fate — indeed he prospered throughout his life — but he did endure the ups and downs characteristic of any Soviet official who lived during those times. The composer's music was famously singled out for attack in 1936 and 1948, and there is at least one unconfirmed story that the secret police summoned Shostakovich for questioning.

More importantly, and this fact cannot be stressed enough, the public behavior of a Soviet citizen was often strikingly at odds with his private views. As the music historian Levon Hakobian points out, it is "possible to loathe and despise a totalitarian regime at the same time as one faithfully and truthfully serves it." And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Shostakovich hated Stalin, detested the criminal Soviet society he spawned, and above all, despised himself for failing to publicly oppose it — even long after the dictator's death.

If this seems a rather bleak and unforgiving portrait of a man, especially on the occasion of his hundredth birthday, then it should be remembered that Shostakovich himself largely endorsed it. In private conversations late in life, he would either reproach himself for weakness and indecision, or encourage others to adopt a similar stance. He had little time or respect for the growing ranks of Russian dissidents. "Don't waste your efforts," he told the great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. "You're living here, in this country, and you must see everything as it really is. Don't create illusions. There's no other life. There can't be any." After joining the Communist Party, he responded to friends who were aghast at his decision by quoting the final line of Pushkin's long poem, The Gypsies: "Against fate there is no defense."

But such an image of a man resigned to his fate has been difficult for some to accept. They prefer a hero wear a white hat — preferably with a large "H" emblazoned on it. Shostakovich's biography has been scoured for evidence of bitterness (of which there was plenty) and resistance (of which there was none).

His music has come under the same critical scrutiny — and has suffered for it. Under the influence of Solomon Volkov's Testimony, a book purporting to be the composer's memoirs, many of Shostakovich's best-known works have come to be interpreted as coded works of anti-Soviet propaganda. In Testimony, Volkov's Shostakovich explicitly states that "all" his symphonies after the Fourth were about Stalin's criminality in the 1930s, and that particular works were even musical portraits of Stalin.

Aaron Copland had a fine response to this kind of musical understanding in his classic What to Listen for in Music:

‘Is there a meaning to music?' My answer to that would be, ‘Yes.' And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, ‘No.' ….

Simple-minded souls will never be satisfied with the answer to the second of these questions. They always want music to have a meaning, and the more concrete it is the better they like it.

Shostakovich himself detested such simple-minded literalness. Asked to summarize his music, he invariably responded with silence or impatience. He complained in 1933 that when Soviet music critics wrote that "in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section, you want to scream!"  Even in works that seemed to invite such a reaction, such as his Seventh Symphony, Shostakovich chafed at his listeners' overindulgence in literalist fantasies. Once, after playing the Seventh Symphony on the piano before a small group of musically knowledgeable friends, Shostakovich grew irritated that all of them seemed to hear nothing in it but direct references to the Nazi invasion of Russia. "Of course — Fascism," Shostakovich confided to a friend. "But music, real music, can never be literally tied to a theme." Shostakovich was to discover on many occasions that his greatest admirers were often not his best listeners.

What is particularly unfortunate about this vision of Shostakovich-as-dissident is how much its misses — not just of the man himself, but of the music he created. Consider Shostakovich's early interest in jazz, and his attempts to incorporate the style into his music. Jazz seems a peculiar choice for a composer often associated with expressions of persecution and bitter recrimination, but it fit naturally with a composer blessed — or cursed — in his youth with cocky self-confidence and a wicked wit.

Shostakovich's love for jazz reached its fullest expression during what has come to be known as the Soviet Union's "Red Jazz Age," from 1932 to 1936. In the early 1930s, Soviet composers had come under increasing pressure from an influential group of ideological hard-liners known as the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM). These activists championed the creation of a distinctive "proletarian musical culture" consisting entirely of marches and mass songs. Most classical music was considered too abstract and self-indulgent for the masses, while the popular "light genre" works then beginning to seep into Russian music halls was contemptuously dismissed as "musical pornography."

But in April 1932, the Communist Party passed a resolution effectively disbanding RAPM and related artistic organizations. The results were predictable. "Jazz music is staging a remarkable comeback in Soviet Russia," reported the New York Times in May 1933.

Each of the big hotels in Moscow has its own jazz band and dancing floor…. The orchestra of one Moscow hotel has an American Negro who nightly brings down the house with dances which the Russians have never seen before. There are frequent debates these days in workers' clubs on the question, ‘Is Jazz Compatible With Communism?' At one such debate a jazz orchestra played selections for an hour so the club members could form a judgment on good evidence. The result was an overwhelming vote of ‘Yes.'"

The jazz craze swept all before it, especially the working class. Some factories even organized weekly fox-trot classes for their workers.

Shostakovich, as usual, cannily sensed the change of tide. Much of his music in the early 1930s was infected with jazz rhythms and instrumentation, including the First Jazz Suite and First Piano Concerto. In incidental music for a 1932 production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Shostakovich had Ophelia sing a popular music-hall tune backed up by a jazz orchestra. His musical style was influenced by vaudeville and circus entertainment; he collaborated in staged works that included acrobats, clowns, and performing horses. He became a friend and admirer of Leonid Utesov, the famous Soviet jazz band leader. Above all, he came to value jazz's ability to speak to a broader audience than those who traditionally attended concerts of "classical" music. In January 1930, he appeared before an audience of Leningrad workers in a performance of scenes from his opera The Nose. Who was his intended audience? he was asked. "I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator," Shostakovich responded. "If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported."

At the same time, Shostakovich repeatedly expressed concerns about gaudy displays of musical tastelessness at many jazz performances. "I am not against jazz as such," he wrote in 1934. "But I am against those ugly forms in which the universal, almost mindless enthusiasm for the genre has manifested itself." Shostakovich hoped to redeem this aspect of popular music, and strove to create a genuinely popular, genuinely serious music.

It was a delicate balancing act that probably no one could have pulled off successfully. So when the Red Jazz Age finally ran its course — a victim of its own commercial success — Shostakovich came under immediate suspicion. His 1932 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which had proved initially to be a popular and critical success, came under a famous blistering attack in the pages of Pravda in January 1936. Shostakovich was accused of "borrowing from jazz bands their nervous, convulsive, epileptic music in order to impart ‘passion' to his heroine." While the opera succeeded in "tickling the perverted taste of the bourgeoisie with its fidgety, neurotic music," Shostakovich was darkly warned that such musical shenanigans "could end very badly."

The episode illuminates much about Shostakovich's career and character. In the most obvious sense, it shows that even the most careful attention to and respect for official musical policy could not insulate a composer from attack. But more importantly, it highlighted the musical philosophy and startling artistic self-confidence that Shostakovich retained throughout his life.

Shostakovich survived the 1936 attack and its aftermath, and adjusted his style accordingly. Somehow, the more his musical options were restricted, the more expansive and confident became his musical voice. The crippling doubts and compromises in his personal life never infected his musical output — indeed, it seemed to spur him on to greater and greater artistic expressiveness. Faced with a direct threat to his life, the most obvious response would have been artistic paralysis. For Shostakovich, it was his Fifth Symphony, one of the great symphonic works of the century. His prickly humor turned bitter and corrosive, his earlier enthusiasm for opera entirely evaporated, and was replaced with a passion for the private utterances of the string quartet. (His very first string quartet was written shortly after completing the Fifth Symphony.) He retained an unnerving confidence in his ability to transcend his material circumstances, to navigate the twists and turns of the ever-shifting official line, to spin the straw of official Soviet doctrine into gold. "Even if they cut off both my hands," he told his friend Isaak Glikman in the spring of 1936, "I will compose music anyway, holding the pen between my teeth."

Shostakovich, in other words, was the living embodiment of a Soviet survivor, one who understood and navigated the system probably better than anyone. He knew when to offer a suitably strong opinion, when to nod obsequiously, and when to remain studiously silent.

But he managed to retain, under a mask of compliance, a core confidence in his ability as a composer. Speaking to the Time magazine reporter in 1942, Shostakovich described his Seventh Symphony in revealing terms. One might have expected a humble tribute to the courage and suffering of the Soviet people under Nazi attack. But Shostakovich says something rather surprising — he defiantly expresses his artistic credo. His symphony, he told the reporter, was a "polemic against the statement that ‘when the cannons roar the muse is silent.' Here the muses speak together with the guns."

Throughout his life, Shostakovich's muse spoke together with the guns. It is this fierce, seemingly invincible, pride in his musical craft that is the key to Shostakovich's enduring popularity, and the greatness of his art. This is the "autobiographical dimension" of Shostakovich's music that dominates his works. Shostakovich's music whispers and shrieks, thunders with patriotic passion and cackles cynically. No twentieth-century composer ever expressed so confidently the dominant emotions of a century disfigured by war and crimes against humanity. That the composer managed to create such music under such unimaginable conditions was his lasting achievement. It speaks to a hope, shared by many of his listeners, that art can redeem us, that music allows us to remain human in the face of inhumanity.

When one listens to the music this way, it is clear why it was such a "sacred experience" for Soviet listeners, and why it remains so for many today. The pathos of so much of Shostakovich's music comes from the incongruousness of its goals. What can a symphony do for the starving citizens of besieged Leningrad? What can a string quartet do for the victims of fascism? Shostakovich clung to a hope that writing great music was enough. His listeners, deprived of any hope for social or political change, embraced his example as their own. One needn't agree with Shostakovich, or excuse his behavior, to appreciate that the result was a body of musical work unique in the twentieth century for its emotional force.

It's probably a good thing that Shostakovich wasn't the man of the myth, the fierce dissident hurling direct attacks on Stalin throughout his life. His music almost certainly wouldn't have been as good. Shostakovich asks a lot from us; above all he asks us to listen for complexity. Too often his listeners — even those sympathetic to him — have not been up to the task. On his hundredth birthday, perhaps it's time that we give Shostakovich the greatest birthday tribute he could have imagined: simply listen.