Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Some composers can be relied on for a pithy quote. Ask Pierre Boulez his thoughts about the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and something memorable would shoot back: “Shostakovich plays with clichés most of the time, I find. It’s like olive oil, when you have a second and even third pressing, and I think of Shostakovich as the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler.”Such were the antipathies between composers in the 20th century. (Shostakovich, incidentally, is not known to have retaliated publicly with anything as barbed.) Devastated by two world wars, uprooted by the Holocaust, crushed by totalitarian regimes, composers spent the middle decades of the century struggling to keep composing. After the second world war the younger generation wanted to forge a new path for music going forwards.Shostakovich and Boulez were in the thick of it. No two composers of the 20th century stand at such diametrically opposing positions and it is a wry coincidence that both should have anniversaries this year — Shostakovich (1906-75) the 50th anniversary of his death, Boulez (1925-2016) the centenary of his birth.This year a spotlight will be shone on their music, although Shostakovich hardly needs it. His symphonies fill concert halls on a weekly basis and have arguably been overexposed for a generation. The exhaustive, two-week Shostakovich festival in Leipzig in May, leading with a complete cycle of the symphonies and much of the chamber music, is only the biggest tribute in what promises to be serious Shostakovich overkill throughout 2025.The legacy of Boulez is in a different place. Since his death in 2016, Boulez’s music has largely disappeared from countries such as the UK, where it was never a box-office draw, so the anniversary is a timely opportunity to reset public recognition of his achievements. Two organisations are pushing the boat out — the Barbican in London and the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin — though the concerts they have planned suggest a degree of caution. Few risk an all-Boulez programme. Nobody wants to frighten the audience away.Rejecting a past that had led to the horrors of the war, Boulez and many of his generation sought to break with the musical traditions of oldHow did these two composers’ fortunes come to differ so wildly? Growing up in different generations, and against very different political backgrounds, they represent two extremes of the 20th-century musical experience.Born in St Petersburg, Shostakovich cut his teeth improvising piano accompaniments for silent films and won recognition with some blazing early masterpieces such as the 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and his Symphony No 4. He might have seemed set fair on his path, but Stalin’s rise to power in the Soviet Union changed everything. Composers were subjected to state-sponsored criticism and Shostakovich, most prominent of the younger generation, found himself publicly denounced in devastating terms. Instructed to follow socialist principles and write music that could be understood by the masses, he toed the line. As Stalin’s Great Terror intensified in the 1930s, there were no other options.How far Shostakovich’s music contains coded political messages has been the subject of endless debate. What hits the ordinary listener is the illustrative power of its message — the pounding, mechanistic rhythms and the crushing weight of its orchestral climaxes, out of which a lone voice will emerge, singing a poignant lament. Here is the soundtrack of the communist era.A generation younger, Boulez completed his education in France just as the second world war was ending. Stepping out into the brave new world of the 1950s, he forged connections with groundbreaking composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, started a cutting-edge concert series in Paris and wrote Le Marteau sans maître (1955), hailed as a masterpiece, though even one expert described it as “difficult to take in”.Rejecting a past that had led to the horrors of the war, Boulez and many of his generation in Europe sought to break with the musical traditions of old. Interviewed in 1972 about his new position as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Boulez brooked no opposition: “[I] urge the public to grow up and . . . cut the umbilical cord attaching it to the past,” he declared. New music was to be encouraged, “by exciting the curiosity of the snobs . . . I did it in Paris and it worked very well.”Far from alienating the powers that be, Boulez was feted by the establishment. In 1970, President Pompidou invited him to set up Ircam, a research institute dedicated to avant-garde and electro-acoustical music, and funding from the French state never seemed to be a problem.It is an irony that Boulez, who enjoyed political backing and funding from public taxes, should have composed music that speaks primarily to the intelligentsia. He was confident that this hardline, often 12-tone music — hugely complex, impeccably crafted, exquisitely imagined — was the right and only way forwards.Shostakovich, hounded for most of his musical life by one of the most pernicious totalitarian regimes of the century, responded by composing for a wide public and that popularity has persisted since his death.For his generation, which came of age during the nightmare of the 1930s, political engagement meant they had to write accessible music if they were to put their messages across. Kurt Weill wrote popular theatre shows that challenged Berlin audiences with their leftwing ideology. Benjamin Britten believed in music for public good and focused on the human cost of war and pacifism. Americans such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein sought to bridge the gap between popular and classical. Boulez excoriated them all, but it is their music that is making a stronger claim to survival.Why did Boulez and many of his generation turn away from courting popular appeal? Was it simply the rejection of the culture that led to the second world war? Was it the overwhelming, postwar rise of popular music for the masses that caused a gulf to open up? Or did the ready provision of state support for high culture in that period take away the need to please paymasters and audiences?Most likely, it was all those. It seems the kind of repression that Shostakovich suffered at the hands of the totalitarian state will always be with us, but the combination of circumstances that led some postwar composers to venture into the highest realms of intellectual complexity looks unique. As governments across Europe start cutting back funding for the arts, it may be gone for good.
