ABSTRACT
Dmitri Shostakovitch has reached the age of thirty-six, and, from the middle of the road, can now look back on a career full of dramatic episodes. Not since the time of Berlioz has a symphonic composer created such a stir. In far-away America, great conductors vie with each other for the jus primae noctis of his music. The score of his Seventh Symphony, the symphony of struggle and victory, has been reduced to a roll of microfilm and flown half-way across the world, from Russia to Persia, from Persia to Egypt, from Egypt to Brazil, and from Brazil to New York, to speed the day of the American première. How the old romantics would have loved to be the center of such a fantastic adventure! But Shostakovitch is a product of another age, realistic and collectivist, rather than romantic and egocentric, an age that takes airplanes and microfilms for granted. He is proud of his status as a Soviet composer, and he understands the responsibility that all artistic expression entails in collectivist society.
