At the end of the war, in 1945, came Symphony No. 9. Many people expected a big work, exuding optimism and high purpose; instead the composer gave them something comical, quirky, a parody of Classical style. Dangerous it was not, yet ... in 1948, Shostakovich, along with Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and others, was censured for “decadent formalism” by the authorities. For the next five years, until Stalin’s death, Shostakovich kept his best music to himself. The Violin Concerto No. 1, composed for David Oistrakh, was withheld until 1955, and the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry were likewise locked in the drawer. In the months immediately following the tyrant’s demise, Shostakovich composed his Tenth Symphony, one of the handful of indisputable masterpieces penned in the second half of the 20th century. It offers a glimpse into the darkest and most desolate corners of the composer’s soul. In a gesture reserved for scores of special meaning to him, Shostakovich even signs his name, introducing his motto theme DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B) in the third movement and making it the climactic ingredient of the finale, which ends with the timpani hammering out the initials in gloriously ebullient strokes. The chilling, haunting, desolately severe Symphony No. 11 was written in 1956-57 and subtitled The Year 1905. By 1962, Shostakovich felt safe enough to again be controversial. In his Symphony No. 13, with bass soloist and male chorus, he set five poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, choosing for the very powerful opening movement the poem “Babi Yar,” an attack on anti-Semitism. Symphony No. 14 (1969), with bass and soprano soloists, is a song cycle on death, with texts by Federico Garcia Lorca and Rainer Maria Rilke among others, and the final work in the canon, Symphony No. 15 (1971), is a waking dream, a haunted fantasy: whimsical, strange, touching, with much that is kept secret, like Shostakovich himself.
 

Shostakovich wrote two concertos for piano, but achieved more in his concertos for string instruments, starting with the Violin Concerto No. 1. His first Cello Concerto, written for Rostropovich in 1959, is one of the supreme 20th-century contributions to that instrument’s repertoire; his Cello Concerto No. 2 (1966), also written for Rostropovich, is more introspective and nearly as good. The Violin Concerto No. 2 (1967) was, like the first, composed for Oistrakh.
 

Nine of Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets were composed during the 1960s and 1970s, when he again felt free to write absolute music and take compositional risks. By far the most frequendy performed of the cycle, though hardly typical, is No. 8. Composed in three days during a visit to Dresden in 1960, it is pointedly tragic in tone and contains some of Shostakovich’s most compelling music. The entire collection of 15 has been called biographical, the private as opposed to the public history that can be read in the symphonies. Shostakovich also wrote sonatas for cello, for violin, and for viola (his last work, from 1975); two piano trios, the second of which is a profoundly poignant essay, one of his finest efforts; and several collections of piano pieces, including the 24 Preludes and Fugues, again on the studied and cerebral side but capable of giving great intellectual pleasure.
 

Shostakovich died a shattered man, in terms of his health and nerves, but with his artistry intact. With every year that passes, it appears more likely that he—the heir of Mahler and an artist of mordant, ironic, nervous character who became increasingly dark in later works as he contemplated death—will come to be seen as one of the iconic composers of the 20th century, alongside Stravinsky and Schoenberg. While their works had a much greater influence on the development of style, it was his music, not theirs, which in its darkness and pain, its litany of hope crushed, its sense of the grotesque, the absurd, the paranoid, and the vicious—above all its grasp of suffering and sadness—revealed the essential truth of the time.