It took some gumption to write music for a production of King Lear in Stalin's Russia in 1941. Dmitri Shostakovich, already having been denounced in Pravda during the Great Terror, composed a score of incidental music to accompany Shakespeare's tale of a ruler gone mad, betrayed by flatterers and angry at those who spoke truth to him.
Anyone for allegory?
In 1971, long after Stalin's death, he did it once again for a motion picture soundtrack.
We'll hear some 20th-century representations of English Renaissance pageantry this week, and we'll flesh out the evening with plenty of genuine-article music from Shakespeare's time.
