PRAVDA HAILS ‘MORALLY REBORN’ SHOSTAKOVICH

The late composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music once was officially labeled crude, primitive and vulgar, was praised in the Soviet Communist newspaper Pravda on Thursday, his 80th birthday.

Without mentioning his vilification during the rule of Josef Stalin, Pravda hailed Shostakovich as a glory of Russian music and said he had emerged “spiritually purified and morally reborn from the tests of fate and history.”

Shostakovich was denounced by Soviet authorities for about 20 years.

But he began receiving acclaim in the Soviet Union in 1954, a year after Stalin died, and he was awarded top Soviet state honors before his death in 1975.

During a tumultuous life he often suffered at the hands of the authorities, beginning in 1936 when his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was denounced by Pravda as “a deliberately dissonant, crude flow of sounds.”

Shostakovich waited two years before his next work, his Fifth Symphony, restored his official reputation.

But in 1948 a party decree on formalism in music assailed Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and other leading Soviet composers, saying, “Your atonal, cacophonous music is organically alien to the people.”

Shostakovich was forced to leave the Leningrad and Moscow conservatories, where he had taught classes in composition, and nearly all his works were banned for years. The state stopped buying his new compositions, consigning him to poverty.

But after Stalin died, Shostakovich became music consultant at the Bolshoi Theater, and he gradually began receiving acclaim at home. His music had drawn praise abroad for years.

A Communist Party member, Shostakovich frequently made speeches praising the Soviet system, although a book published in the West as his memoirs in 1981 presented him as deeply cynical about his homeland. Moscow said the book was a fraud.

Pravda described Shostakovich as a great composer, communist, public figure and artist of world authority who was deeply loved.

Similar pieces were published Thursday in all the major Soviet newspapers, including the army daily Krasnaya Zvezda and the labor daily Trud.

None of the newspapers referred to the composer’s son, Maxim Shostakovich, a conductor who defected to the West in 1981.