Scott Horton’s brief on the Harper’s blog about Isaiah Berlin’s rec­ol­lec­tions of Dmitri Shostakovich offers rich sym­bol­ogy of an hon­orary degree and evening fete at Oxford for the great Russ­ian com­poser. Shostakovich’s clash with Stalin over decades has become pop­u­lar knowl­edge of the composer’s biography:

Shostakovich had of course danced a dif­fi­cult waltz with Joseph Stalin, a man whom he detested and feared. The most dra­matic encounter came on a Jan­u­ary evening in 1936, the best account of which has sur­vived in hand­writ­ten notes by Mikhail Bul­gakov. Stalin and his entourage went to the opera to hear Shostakovich’s Lady Mac­beth of Mtensk. Unfor­tu­nately, the Man of Steel had been seated too close to the brass sec­tion, a fact which seems to have soured him on the work. Or per­haps it was the plot itself, which could hardly have flat­tered one of the great mass mur­der­ers of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Shostakovich was denounced in an unsigned edi­to­r­ial in Pravda and spent the bal­ance of the winter fear­ing for his life. He could easily have been exiled, sent to a camp to near cer­tain death. But as it hap­pened, he suf­fered mere dis­fa­vor for a few years and a second denun­ci­a­tion in 1948, only to reemerge tri­umphantly with Stalin’s demise.

It wasn’t just hon­orary degrees at Oxford that came run­ning after Stalin’s death. Shostakovich was like­wise awarded the Royal Phil­har­monic Soci­ety in the U.K. in 1966, the Grand Dec­o­ra­tion of Honour in Silver for Ser­vices to the Repub­lic of Aus­tria in 1967, and the Son­ning Award from Den­mark in 1973.  Nat­u­rally, these inter­na­tional awards were the cul­mi­na­tion of not only Shostakovich’s prodi­gious talent as one of the twen­ti­eth century’s great­est sym­phonic com­posers, but also the inter­na­tional community’s post-​mortem nose-​thumbing of Stalin and his ilk. Taste in high cul­ture has always played proxy for larger cul­tural stand­offs–and the Scan­di­na­vians (Den­mark in this case, Sweden in many others) have rel­ished the role of high-​cultural bully in a world where they have no mil­i­tary muscle to flex.

But I would be remiss not to note the Amer­i­can con­tri­bu­tion to this late-​career recov­ery of Shostakovich on the inter­na­tional scene, made as only Amer­i­cans could. In 1961, as part of one of the more fas­ci­nat­ing line­ups in its his­tory of its musi­cal nom­i­na­tions (Shostakovich, Dmitri Tiomkin, Duke Ellingon, Miklos Rosza scor­ing “El Cid”!), the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences nom­i­nated a Shostakovich score for an Oscar in the cat­e­gory of “Music (Scor­ing of a Musi­cal Picture).” While Shostakovich even­tu­ally lost out to the crew who penned West Side Story, the mes­sage was clear: we Amer­i­cans love an anti-​Stalinist.

The Shostakovich score was recorded for a film adap­ta­tion of an unfin­ished opera by Modest Mus­sorgsky, a Russ­ian epic titled Хованщина (”The Kho­van­sky Affair”). The opera nar­rates the Moscow Upris­ing of 1682, a strug­gle for power that resulted in the major czarist reforms of the sev­en­theenth cen­tury. Shostakovich was assert­ing his status as a pre­em­i­nent national com­poser by taking his hand to com­plet­ing a ver­sion of it; Rimsky-​Korsakov had done a prior ver­sion that debuted in 1911. But that this film made com­pany with West Side Story, Flower Drum Song and Babes in Toy­land speaks to more than just the gen­eral craze in pop­u­lar musi­cal film–we’re talk­ing about a film ver­sion of opera, in Russ­ian no less!

Thus, a nation­al­ist glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the Russ­ian state, a score that embod­ied Shostakovich’s alle­giance to a pop­u­lar his­tory of his native land uncor­rupted by Stalin, became the recip­i­ent of one of the strangest (and most intel­li­gent) Acad­emy Award nom­i­na­tions in his­tory.