In Mitya, the Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906–1975) takes center stage. The performance, created by Emmy Wils and Frank Vercruyssen, premiered in French on April 18, 2023, at Théâtre Garonne in Toulouse. It is now being presented for the first time in Dutch in Antwerp.

The text is based on the first part of The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes and on How Shostakovich Changed My Mind by Stephen Johnson. In addition, Emmy Wils performs several of the 24 Preludes and Fugues (Opus 87) on the piano.

Shostakovich’s life is a complex story in which the composer is tossed between war, acclaim, misfortune, joy, humiliation, and success. His body of work is an extraordinarily compelling musical journey—an intimate, triumphant, ironic, defiant, melancholic, but above all deeply human testimony of a man who, in all his vulnerability, faced the storm of the twentieth century and gave it a voice.

The performance could be a self-inquiry into the right to exist, but also a personal reflection on the relationship between the establishment and the artist, or between the musician and the market—on the fine line between self-preservation and cowardice, between a vibrant repertoire and a worn-out canon.

Mitya is a case study that shows us how quickly and how far derailment can go if we allow it and reminds us of the fact that Russia and its people are far greater than its criminal rulers.

Above all, Mitya is an ode to the sublime music of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich.

Music (For Dmitri Shostakovich)

Something miraculous burns in music;
as you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
when others turn away their eyes.

When fearful friends abandoned me music stayed,
even at my grave,
and sang like earth’s first shower of rain
or flowers suddenly everywhere alive.

Anna Akhmatova, 1957 (vertaling Paul Schmidt)