By his death in 1975, Dmitri Shostakovich was recognized internationally as the most important composer the Soviet Union had produced.
Important composers tend to write masterpieces.
In the last 20 years there has arisen an intellectual game. The object is to prove that even Shostakovich's most banal music conceals pointed criticism of a society that demanded banality. It sounds a lot like spinning Beatles albums backward in search of hidden messages. But whether or not Shostakovich's bad music is really good music, the situation illustrates the tensions that stifled the careers of many other composers in the Soviet Union. Those concepts, two conflicting critical theories, fell into the hands of bonehead Communist Party functionaries who understood little about the theories they wielded as weapons over artists' heads.