Violist Mahoko Eguchi

continued

perforce professed to believe ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and that was that. And unlike other atheists, a Russian atheist couldn't even count on being remembered by the living. At its whim, the Communist Party might decide to erase you from records, airbrush you from photographs, and banish all memory of you to the dustbin of history.

Imagine, then, how Dmitry Shostakovich felt, in the summer of 1975, when he knew he was facing death. His right arm was crippled by polio. Both his legs were crippled after a car crash. His lung cancer had recurred. His heart was weak. His eyesight was failing. Despite it all and the impending end of it all, he kept on writing, using his left hand, because, after all, what else could he do but write, write against the dying of the light. He knew that there was no Resurrection and that the Party might decide to make him a nonperson, a nonmemory. So he had to write as if there were no tomorrow.

The last thing Shostakovich wrote the summer before he died was the Viola Sonata, the central work of Mahoko Eguchi's recital at Pease Auditorium on the EMU campus on Sunday, January 25. Eguchi should be up to it. Anyone who heard the Arianna String Quartet at Pease while it was the EMU quartet-in-residence remembers Eguchi's strong, soulful performances as the group's violist. She's now a member of the National Symphony in Washington, but she still comes back to Pease to perform the occasional recital, and on this occasion Eguchi will perform the memento mori by the greatest atheist composer who ever lived and died.