#I mean I got all this from a ten minute scroll through Shostakovich's Wikipedia entry

[the-wine-dark-sea]

So, why Shostakovich?

That's what I wondered, watching Aziraphale in Maggie's record shop.

Shostakovich is a rather recent composer for Aziraphale to listen to - I mean, he regards Glenn Miller as modern. I would have expected him to get something that's a more obvious choice - maybe one of the composers Crowley mentions early in S1? That would have been a nice nod to that scene. Why Shostakovich? So I read up on the man, and then I understood.

Because Shostakovich was a Soviet-era composer, and came into conflict with the regime more than once.

In 1936, his career took a massive hit after a campaign against one of his works, because the music was viewed as "deliberately dissonant" - it didn't conform to some people's idea of of what Soviet music should be like. He did not strictly adher to their narrow ideals and felt the consequences. (And he was lucky. He had friends and family who were killed during the Great Terror, which started around that time.)

This forced him to try and adept and eventually his career recovered.

He was denounced again 12 years later, during a wider campaign against Western influences on Russian music. He had to apologize, many of his works were banned and he and his family lost privileges.

In 1960, Shostakovich made a controversial decision: He joined the Communist Party. It is unclear why he did this, whether it was fear, political pressure or indeed his own free choice - though reportedly he was in tears afterwards and told his wife about having been blackmailed.

So we have a composer whose work was repeatedly marked as non-conforming to the regime he lived under, not living up to some arbitrary, propagandistic standard, even after he tried to adapt his style. And we have an angel who never quite fit in with Heaven, whose approach to the world and his work were seen as silly at best, who was admonished for the way he used miracles and eventually declared a traitor.

We have a composer who, for one reason or another, ended up joining the party that had punished and humiliated him in the past. And we have an angel who ends up going back to Heaven.

I get why Shostakovich was an obvious choice, after all. What I can't get over is the implication that WE WERE TOLD AS EARLY AS EP 1 THAT AZIRAPHALE WOULD REJOIN HEAVEN!?? EVEN THOUGH IT WOULD MAKE HIM SUFFER AND MIGHT NOT BE AN ENTIRELY VOLUNTARY DECISION EITHER?? The audacity (I love it) to put that out there right from the start, for everyone to see who only cared to look, when none of us would be paying too much attention to it on the first watch.