The Freytag – Music Under Surveillance – The Hidden Layer

Dmitri Shostakovich was born 120 years ago. His work shows how to speak while under surveillance—and the price that entails.

A Man Reads What Others Have Written

In March 1949, a man sits in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York—a man who would rather be anywhere else on earth than right there. Dmitri Shostakovich, 42 years old and his country’s most prominent composer, has arrived as the figurehead of a Soviet delegation to a world peace conference. Stalin himself had called him and ordered him to make the trip. The composer plays the piano, answers questions, and reads aloud two speeches that others had evidently written for him.

Then, an émigré in the audience—the composer Nicolas Nabokov—stands up and asks whether Shostakovich personally shares the Soviet condemnations of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Hindemith. It is a trap: whatever answer he gives will come at a cost. Shostakovich—who had once arranged Stravinsky’s *Symphony of Psalms* for four hands for his composition class—says: Yes.

A single sentence, spoken before an audience by a man who was not free to refuse it. How are we to interpret such a thing? To take him literally is to cast the speaker as a true believer; to dismiss it as a lie is to take the easy way out regarding the truth. This question constitutes the true legacy of the composer, who was born in St. Petersburg 120 years ago today. It concerns not only Moscow, and not only the year 1949. It concerns anyone who knows they are being listened to—and who, for that reason, speaks differently than they think.

A Cult with a Paper Trail

The trap was not new; it was thirteen years old. On January 26, 1936, Stalin attended a performance of *Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District* at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and left early. Two days later, an unsigned editorial appeared in *Pravda* titled "Chaos Instead of Music." The opera—which had been a triumph for two years and performed more than two hundred times in Russia alone—was dismissed in the piece as formalist, crude, and primitive. The text also contained a sentence that required no exegesis in 1936: this game could end very badly.

One must view this alongside Max Weber’s work to grasp what was happening. Every form of rule, he wrote, seeks not merely obedience but to inspire and cultivate a belief in its own legitimacy. This explains why the Soviet state took an interest in music: it did not need silence; it needed consent—audible consent. Weber also left behind an unfinished sociology of music and understood that Western music is a rationalized system of rules. The Composers' Union, established by a Party decree in 1932, turned this system of rules into an administrative matter. Stalin’s rule was a hybrid unknown to Weber’s "ideal types": a combination of charismatic veneration and bureaucratic machinery—a cult with a paper trail. The "iron cage" of modernity had acquired ears in Moscow.

The Art of the Double Bottom

Shostakovich’s reaction was a lesson in how to conduct oneself while under surveillance. He withdrew his Fourth Symphony during rehearsals in the winter of 1936; it did not premiere until 1961. He began the Fifth in the Crimea in the spring of 1937, and Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted the premiere in Leningrad on November 21, 1937. The ovation reportedly lasted more than half an hour. A fitting formula was quickly found—anonymous, like so much else: a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.

But what did the audience hear? The finale rolls in with radiant D major, featuring timpani and brass—a triumph by the book. One can hear it as an apotheosis. One can hear it as the jubilation of someone performing at gunpoint. Those who favor the latter interpretation often cite *Testimony*—the memoirs Solomon Volkov claimed to have compiled from conversations with the composer in 1979—in which the jubilation appears forced. Yet the book’s authenticity remains disputed to this day: Laurel Fay demonstrated that several passages were lifted from previously published texts, and Richard Taruskin warned against interpreting every wink as an act of resistance. To cast Shostakovich as a secret dissident is to take the easy way out regarding his suffering.

The work’s construction is more interesting. A censor can forbid dissonance; irony can only be suspected. Anyone pursuing an interpretation must prove it, whereas anyone offering two interpretations need only acknowledge one. The art of the double bottom rests on this principle, and that is why it is more than a mere ruse: it is an aesthetic that is conscious of its listeners—both the official and the unofficial ones. Its price is self-censorship—the true triumph of power. The censor now sits inside the composer’s head as an imaginary second listener, eavesdropping on every turn. Whoever speaks twice never speaks fully.

Two in One

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Linden near Hanover—barely three weeks after Shostakovich—and died in December 1975, four months after him. They were contemporaries whose work reads like the theory and the score of the same experience: what the one made audible, the other captured in concepts.

Arendt’s analysis of total terror is well known, yet its core is rarely fully grasped. Terror, she writes in *The Origins of Totalitarianism*, reigns unchecked only over people who are isolated from one another. Its ideal is not the convinced adherent, but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, between true and false, no longer exists. In the chapter "Ideology and Terror," she draws a distinction crucial to our inquiry: that between solitude and loneliness. In solitude, I am in the company of myself—"two-in-one": thinking is the silent dialogue I conduct with myself. In loneliness, by contrast, I am merely one, abandoned by all, and the inner dialogue breaks off.

From this perspective, one can hear the ambiguity of Shostakovich’s work anew—as an audible manifestation of this "two-in-one" state. The musical movement speaks to those in power and simultaneously to the self; it is public yet remains within itself. As long as this inner duality persisted, the terror was not total. Arendt was also aware—and acknowledging this is a matter of intellectual honesty—of the flip side. In *Eichmann in Jerusalem*, she describes the perpetrators’ "language rules"—those code words that obscured the reality of their actions and shielded the speakers from equating what they were doing with the age-old understanding of murder and lies. Power, too, speaks with a double meaning. It all depends on which side one chooses to inhabit.

Only the Dead Are Transparent

This headline is the title of a preview piece in which Byung-Chul Han announced—in the newspaper *Die Zeit* in January 2012—the work that would shortly appear as *The Transparency Society*. According to Han, transparency is not a moral ideal but a systemic compulsion: where everything is meant to be visible, everything becomes exploitable, comparable, and accelerable. The Internet, which began as a space of freedom, has become a digital panopticon, and the difference from Bentham’s model is striking: its inmates are not coerced; they voluntarily put themselves on display. Calls for transparency grow loud where trust is waning, yet where everything is fully illuminated, trust becomes superfluous.

Here lies a point regarding Shostakovich that is rarely heard. Stalinism can also be interpreted as a regime of forced transparency. It demanded not merely silence; it demanded the exposure of one’s inner self—through self-criticism, confession, and the public acknowledgment of one’s own errors. When a Party decree once again accused him of formalism in February 1948, he lost his teaching posts at both conservatories that autumn. The powers that be wanted the individual to be transparent because a transparent person is predictable. A hidden layer—an inner self that is not put on display—is precisely what transparency cannot tolerate.

I work professionally with servers, and anyone who does knows the quiet intimacy of a log file. It knows what someone searched for at three in the morning; it does not judge, yet it forgets nothing. Such a gaze no longer requires a censor; it requires only storage space. The difference from Moscow is that, for the most part, we create our own dossiers and seal them with a "thumbs up."

"Panini" and Surveillance Files

How do people speak today when under surveillance? First, in code. On TikTok and other platforms, users write "seggs" instead of "sex" and "Panini" instead of "pandemic" to evade moderation algorithms that detect forbidden words and downgrade posts. Journalist Taylor Lorenz popularized the term "algospeak" in the *Washington Post* in 2022. A British columnist recalled an older name for this: Aesopian language—a term used in Russian literature since the 19th century to describe speaking "between the lines" under censorship.

Yet the resemblance is deceptive, and the difference is instructive. A code is cheap. Anyone writing "seggs" is simply swapping a string of characters, and a filter learns the new one faster than the user can invent the next. Irony, by contrast, is costly; it demands a listener who engages intellectually. Shostakovich’s censors had to interpret meaning, and those who interpret can make mistakes—mistakes that might work to the composer's advantage. A filter that merely matches words does not interpret. What is emerging here is a form of double meaning devoid of depth: plenty of dissimulation, but little mystery.

Then, too, there is caution. In an October 2025 Allensbach poll, 46 percent of respondents stated that one could freely express one’s political opinion in Germany; the rest preferred caution or were unwilling to commit. Pollster Thomas Petersen interprets this finding as a reaction to a climate of social intolerance rather than to a law. It is essential to articulate the distinction before blurring it: in 1936, uttering the wrong phrase could cost you your life; today, at worst, it might cost you a prize, a contract that fails to materialize, a tone that turns hostile, or a screenshot that refuses to disappear. To equate the two is to insult the victims of the Great Terror. To dismiss concerns simply because of this distinction is to overlook the fact that trust between people begins to suffer quietly long before anyone is actually arrested.

And finally, there is the matter of files. Switzerland is all too familiar with this phenomenon. In November 1989, a parliamentary commission of inquiry led by Moritz Leuenberger revealed that the state security services had amassed some 900,000 index cards—the notorious *Fichen*—over the course of decades; more than 700,000 individuals and organizations were affected, amounting to over ten percent of the population at the time. Within three months, 350,000 people inquired whether they, too, had been targeted. The *Fichen* were a scandal precisely because no one knew of their existence. We are permitted to see our own files; indeed, we maintain them ourselves.

One final difference carries even greater weight. Shostakovich knew for whom he was speaking in double meanings. He had a specific face to write against: the man in the box. We, however, often do not know. The reader we seek to please is a composite of friends, prospective employers, strangers, and a hierarchy that remains invisible to all. Censorship without a censor offers no adversary to hate—and, consequently, hardly any community of the initiated capable of hearing the subtext.

Three Days in Gohrisch

In July 1960—the year he yielded to pressure and joined the Communist Party—Shostakovich was staying at a GDR government guesthouse in Gohrisch, in Saxon Switzerland, forty kilometers southeast of Dresden. He was supposed to compose the score for a film about the destruction of Dresden. Instead, between July 12 and 14, he wrote his String Quartet No. 8. The printed dedication reads: "To the memory of the victims of fascism and war."

On July 19, he wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman that the resulting quartet was of no use to anyone and was ideologically objectionable. He had reasoned that, once he died, no one would likely write a work in his memory—so he did it himself. The piece begins with the four notes D–E-flat–C–B (D–Es–C–H in German notation)—the initials D. Sh.—and quotes from his own body of work. The official interpretation honors the victims of Dresden; the private one, the composer himself. Both appear on the same title page. The man who spent his life offering two interpretations—so as never to be pinned down to just one—signs his name here in musical notes.

The "Yes" from New York and the quartet from Gohrisch came from the same man. Those who hear only the former take him for a conformist; those who hear only the latter, for a martyr. Both views are too simplistic. What he leaves us is more unsettling because it defies easy judgment: the realization that there are people who, when under surveillance, neither remain silent nor offer a confession, but instead do a third thing—something only art can achieve—by speaking to the powers that be and to their own conscience in the same breath.

The question he poses to us, therefore, is not whether we are being heard. We are—and more thoroughly with each passing year. The question is whether we still listen to ourselves—in that quiet dialogue Arendt called "thinking," a dialogue no algorithm conducts on our behalf. Anyone who can spare twenty minutes this evening is encouraged to listen to the Eighth Quartet; those who feel like reading afterwards might turn to Arendt’s chapter "Ideology and Terror" and Hans’s slim book—a work that can be read in a single evening yet lingers in the mind long after. The observation stands. The only open question is whether, in the process, we retain an inner self.

Sapere aude!

S.

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