Shostakovich

He spent his whole life inside the Soviet Union and was denounced twice: by Pravda in 1936, in the editorial 'Muddle Instead of Music' aimed at his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and again in the Zhdanov decree of 1948. He is said to have kept a packed suitcase by the door in those years.

His music almost always speaks on two levels — compliant on the surface, sardonic underneath. The finale of the Fifth was read officially as a triumph, but that hammered D major starts to sound like a celebration performed under duress. The fifteen symphonies and fifteen quartets are the two most complete chronicles of the twentieth century; the quartets are the more private of the pair. The Eighth is built throughout on the letters of his own name, D-S-C-H, and he wrote it as his own epitaph.