The life and work of Dmitrii Shostakovich (1906–75) are inextricably entwined with the central questions of politics and culture in the 20th century. His music represents a challenge to listeners that is unique in the annals of concert music, in part because of the compelling power of his greatest works and the tremendous divergences in its reception. The qualities of the music and its historical contexts have given rise to highly contested interpretations. More than a quarter-century after his death, however, Shostakovich has emerged as one of the most influential and popular composers of the 20th century.

Born in 1906, Shostakovich experienced World War I and the October Revolution. He participated in the progressive era in the arts of the 1920s. Intensely ambitious and talented as a pianist and composer, he maintained a complex relationship with the Soviet regime from Stalin to Brezhnev. In the post-Stalin era, Shostakovich became celebrated in the West and, in the bilateral world of the Cold War, took on more and more the aspect of an official representative of Soviet music. In the 1950s and 1960s he was championed, partly in the name of peaceful coexistence and partly because his music seemed to convey emotional intensity, along with a connection to tradition seemingly absent from the music of radical modernism and the avant-garde in Western Europe and America. In the final stage of Shostakovich's life, his relationship to the Soviet regime became extremely painful. In ill health, he distanced himself from the ever-growing number of dissidents and continued to sustain his role as the preeminent Soviet composer.

There is little doubt that Shostakovich suffered intensely in the pursuit of his life as a composer within the constraints of Soviet Russia, above and beyond the predictable internal struggle that may be generic to the creative artist. Despite the undeniable fact that in the massive out-put of music he wrote there are masterpieces in practically every genre (including popular song and film music), the controversy over the meaning and significance of Shostakovich's music has not subsided since his death. Not only has there been the predictable rush to interpretive revisionism typical of many posthumous assessments, but debate has continued about Shostakovich's significance and influence, heightened by the collapse of communism and the concomitant decline in the fortunes of musical modernism. He has taken a permanent place as a towering and strangely characteristic seminal figure in 20th-century culture, inclusive of its politics and social history. The reasons for this are as complicated as the matter of understanding the composer himself. Shostakovich's significance as a composer cannot be reduced to some narrative about the triumph of conservatism and the demise of an avant-garde. The symphonies, chamber music, and vocal and operatic music have, from their introduction to both Russian and Western audiences, communicated alienation, affirmation, intimacy, and beauty, as well as the fissures and contradictions of modern life.

The Bard Music Festival will attempt to confront and untangle the strands in the music of Shostakovich, the personality of the composer, the politics of his career, and the posthumous reception of his work. The Princeton University Press volume, edited by Laurel E. Fay, America's leading Shostakovich scholar, and the symposium, panels, and preconcert lectures over the three weekends of orchestral and chamber performances and the additional two weeks of opera performances will provide an overview of his music. The repertoire will include not only those works that have always had a following in the West and appear to be representative, but also lesser-known works. Included will be examples of music that those who wish to portray Shostakovich as a lifelong dissident might wish to forget, works of patriotism and propaganda that suggest little hint of contradiction. As is the custom at the Bard Music Festival, Shostakovich's music will be placed alongside that of his contemporaries in Russia.

Although Shostakovich's career as an opera composer was dramatically changed by Stalin's reaction to Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, written when the composer was still a young man, his music for the stage is still some of his best, and reveals indispensable aspects of his genius. The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, the new home of the Bard Music Festival, will stage The Nose, the opera based on the story by Gogol and first staged in 1930.