Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets

A new biography of Shostakovich that views him through the intimate music of his string quartets

Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets,...