Dmitri Shostakovich: A Man of Many Faces 2015

Overview

In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich's death in 2015, filmmaker Reiner Moritz produced his documentary Dmitri Shostakovich, A Man of Many Faces. With British actor John Hurt as narrator, Moritz examines Shostakovich's life, focusing in on two events in particular: the 1936 banning of his highly successful opera Lady Mabeth of the Mtsensk District, and the composer's labelling as a "formalist and cosmopolitan" in 1948. Despite such setbacks, Shostakovich went on to purs