How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

‘How Shostakovich Changed My Mind is one of the most powerful, honest, and profound revelations that exists on what it is that music means and does: it’s just an essential document.’

”… an intensely readable, highly personal analysis of the major works of a composer, who, Mr. Johnson decides, has recorded a collective experience for an all-inclusive listenership….All great music teeters the edge of madness. This troubled writer makes a convincing case that the music of Dmitri Shostakovich helped to save his mind. In life’s crises, he suggests, each of us comes up against an internal siege of Leningrad, and music comes to your relief.”

“For Radio 3 presenter and journalist, Stephen Johnson, Shostakovich’s music is nothing less than a matter of life and death. Johnson, a tireless and passionate advocate of the man and his works, explores how the fraught music of Shostakovich shepherded the Soviet Union through the dark times of Stalin and the Great Patriotic War - and also helped to pull Johnson, suffering from clinical depression, out of the suicidal depths of despair.”

‘Stephen Johnson is one of our most sensitive and thoughtful music critics, and this book, written from the heart about a composer whom he loves and admires, will prove be a landmark.’

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.