Music: Shostakovich Reads the Papers

Dmitri Shostakovich, cramped in his doghouse, heard good news last week. Perhaps his Soviet masters were ready to let him out.

Six hundred thousand moviegoers packed into 20 Moscow theaters in four days to see the new film success, Young Guard, with music by Shostakovich. Seventeen theaters in Leningrad were also jammed with fans, anxious to see the dramatization of Alexander Fadeev’s best selling novel about Russian partisan heroes. Though the music wasn’t what drew most of the crowds, Shostakovich could read his press notices and see, with a practiced eye, just where he stood.

Izvestia had very kind words for him, the first in more than five years. And Pravda sang the praises of his “clear, realistic and emotionally powerful music. The composer felt fully the pathos of the heroic lives of the young Komsomols; he also understood the producer.”