Shostakovich composed his _Symphony No.14_ for soprano, bass, string orchestra and percussion during a hospital stay in the spring of 1969. Modest Mussorgsky’s _Songs and Dances of Death_, which Shostakovich had already orchestrated a few years earlier, can clearly be recognised as a source of inspiration. This penultimate symphony is structured as a cycle of eleven settings of texts by different poets (Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke), all of which deal with death. In a speech at the...