La question du sens dans les passacailles de Chostakovitch: vers une interprétation sociopolitique.

More than perhaps any other composer, the story of Dimitri Shostakovich's life invites socio-political readings of his works. His preference for the passacaglia is well known and during a period of forty-two years, from 1930 to 1971, Shostakovich chose this musical form on eleven different occasions. It was the particular features of the passacaglia, its slow tempo and repetitive structure, minor keys and often sorrowful chromaticism, that seemed to fly in the face of the aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. Recent Anglophone studies that have gone beyond purely formalistic perspectives to consider Shostakovich's work in its historical context, legitimise a socio-political reading of his abundant use of the passacaglia. Situated between academicism and deviance, allegories of determined perseverance and morbid expressionism, Shostakovich's ambiguous writing style inculcates his passacaglias with a deep and subversive semantic duality. Using both analysis and reception theory, the multi-layered meanings of these works-and their different rhetorical expressions-are investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]