Nobody knows when the satirical opera Antiformalist Rayok was composed. The composer's widow claims it was written in 1948; the composer's friend Mstislav Rostropovich claims it was written ten years later; the scholar Laurel Fay claims that portions of it were composed in the late 1960s. The internal evidence of the music seems to indicate that it may have been composed in 1948 but that Shostakovich kept adding to and subtracting from the score over the next two decades. The only thing that is certain as far as the dating of the score goes is that it was a closely held secret of the Shostakovich family until 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That is because no one in his or her right mind would have allowed Antiformalist Rayok to be performed publicly: the work was a virulently satirical portrait of the Composers' Union Congress of 1948 that condemned Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian as "formalists," a offense that was nearly a capital crime in those Stalinist days. Complete with speeches from the Congress turned into arias for blockheads and parodies of Stalin's favorite song turned into excrement, a performance of Antiformalist Rayok during Shostakovich's lifetime would have pulled the trigger on the gun the Party kept to his temple.

Although musically Antiformalist Rayok is little more than a pastiche of various popular song styles and hardly worthy of the composer of the Fourteenth Symphony, the work's merciless excoriation of those who tortured Shostakovich makes it a central document in the composer's psychological dossier.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide