How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

Stephen Johnson

2019 මැයි · New York Review of Books

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A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder.

BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder.

There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.

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Stephen Johnson has taken part in several hundred radio programs and documentaries, including Radio 3’s weekly series Discovering Music. He is also a presenter on the Classic Arts podcast series Archive Classics. He contributed as a commentator and narrator to Tony Palmer’s controversial film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, O Thou Transcendent, and to Palmer’s Holst: In the Bleak Midwinter. He lives in England.