Shostakovich has come to represent the tragedy and terror of the 20th century, but this overlooks his impudent humour

Music adores its martyrs, two of whom have anniversaries this year: Mozart, born in 1756, and Dmitry Shostakovich, born in 1906. Melody supposedly sublimates pain, which is why we hear so often about Mozart's premature, impoverished death and the paranoid misery of Shostakovich, harried by cultural bureaucrats. Their stories also testify to art's abject dependence on social power. A scornful official booted Mozart out of the archbishop's palace in Salzburg; Shostakovich, having been accused of cacophonous anarchism by Stalin, spent the rest of his life awaiting arrest, and always kept fresh underwear and a toothbrush in his briefcase in preparation for prison.

His colleague Sofia Gubaidulina saw Shostakovich as "pain personified, the epitome of the tragedy and terror of our times". But to think of him as a victim is to overlook his impudence, his aggression and his savage, lethal laughter. Igor Stravinsky was dismayed by the "doom and gloom" of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It was a half-deaf response, ignoring the comic effrontery in the music - the breathless, scrambled orchestral accompaniment to a bout of adultery, with a horn that lewdly brays and bellows before slithering into detumescence, or the mockery of law when the police, as incompetent as the Keystone Kops, jabber and chatter while investigating a murder.

Shostakovich did confront the Soviet regime that assailed him, though he used sly, subtle, indirect weapons. He began as a jeering farceur, and ended as a more duplicitous ironist, professing respect but intimating contempt. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing during the first years of the revolution, noted: "All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of the laughing people." In the composer's first opera, The Nose - included in the Mariinsky Theatre's season "Shostakovich on Stage" at the London Coliseum - this raillery is a contagious uproar, a carnival of noisy derision that ridicules the official who forfeits his rank when his proboscis drops off. Later, after Stalin called his music vomitous and Nikita Khrushchev said it caused bellyache, Shostakovich relied on wordless signals. In his Eighth Symphony, as he told the conductor Kurt Sanderling, a pompous bassoon represents a gallivanting Communist apparatchik on a mission abroad.

In his cheery operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki - a sort of Soviet Brookside about intrigues between neighbours on a custom-built housing estate - politics literally stops the music. A bossy administrator, annoyed by the noise, orders the conductor to put down his baton. But music prevails: the residents collectively dream up a magic garden in which a babbling fountain drowns political harangues. As the water mellifluously splashes, the Communist officials open mouths from which no words emerge.

Occasionally his satire was less hygienic. His secret skit Rayok, in which four officious basses drone through extracts from actual speeches about the responsibilities of the Soviet composer, has a note attached to it explaining the besmirched state of the manuscript: it was recovered from a cesspit into which the minister for ideological purity unfortunately tumbled. Waste-disposal engineers were summoned to retrieve his body, Shostakovich solemnly recalls, but the venerated comrade had dissolved into shit and slime.

Over the decades, of course, his music changed. In 1932, composing interludes for a production of Hamlet in Moscow, he treated the tragedy as an absurdist comedy, with rowdy vaudeville routines for the prince and an interpolated cancan at Claudius's banquet. By 1963, when he scored Grigory Kozintsev's film of the play, he had learned to sympathise with its account of the individual's fatal entrapment by society: the soundtrack starts with a thudding volley from the percussion - a reminiscence of the knout with which the tsar's gaolers tenderised dissidents, or, perhaps, an anticipation of the KGB's battering knock on the door before dawn.

Once at least, Shostakovich recanted: he withdrew Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936 when Stalin defamed it. In the early 1960s, it sneaked back into circulation under a new title, Katerina Izmaylova. The composer penitently shortened the orchestral orgasm, eliminated the scene ridiculing the police, softened the score's abrasive harmonies and lowered the heroine's shrill vocal line. But when the opera was filmed by Mikhail Shapiro in 1966, he allowed Galina Vishnev skaya to restore some of the keening, lacerating high notes with which Katerina harangues her dreary oppressors. In 1974 Vishnevskaya and her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, were expelled from the Soviet Union as a punishment for sheltering Alexander Solzhenitsyn; bidding them farewell, Shostakovich begged them to record the unexpurgated original in the west, which they faithfully did. Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky troupe offer a choice of versions: at the Coliseum they will stage Katerina Izmaylova, though they return to the Proms next month to perform Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Shostakovich was partial to the murderous shrew because - as she mutters her contempt for her relatives and doles out rat poison - she enacts revenge on his behalf. His second wife, a Komsomol hackette, once nagged him about the children she had inherited from his first marriage. He suggested killing them, which is exactly how Katerina deals with her domestic vexations: his sense of irony allowed him to contemplate infanticide smilingly. Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth suffers no insomniac remorse. She dies in an icy Siberian river, grappling with a rival; Nikolai Leskov, in the story that Shostakovich adapted, describes her lunging at the other woman "like a muscular pike" before the current swills both of them away. The other convicts trudge on, immediately forgetting them. Satire has no patience with the mournful rites of tragedy.

The abrupt, dismissive ending of the opera shows the delight Shostakovich took in scenarios of violence. A new disc of his Songs and Waltzes includes his setting of a letter sent to a newspaper by a doughty pensioner in 1965. The old man took offence when a bus skipped a stop; he decked the driver with a single blow, adding in a boastful postscript that he wasn't drunk and hadn't even had breakfast. The baritone Sergei Leiferkus, his voice blackly malevolent, gives this trivial anecdote the ferocity of a popular uprising. He goes on to stammer his way through Shostakovich's Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works, and a Brief Reflection Apropos this Preface, reciting the empty honours loaded on the composer as People's Artist of the USSR. A male chorus interrupts to chant the composer's name: he is, as he dolefully acknowledges, a public possession and a hostage to the regime. Whenever Shostakovich had to make such doctrinaire statements, he spoke in an embarrassed patter and missed out punctuation, sabotaging the text he was obliged to deliver. Leiferkus exactly catches his bad faith and the devious irony that underlay it.

Soviet aesthetics prohibited the western vice of subjectivity, but Shostakovich's initials - transcribed in German musical notation as D-E flat-C-B - recur throughout his Tenth Symphony and his Eighth String Quartet, loudly announcing his survival and predicting his eventual triumph. In 1975 he composed a set of songs based on poems by Michelangelo. The sculptor's hammer, crashing down to split stone, reminds him that violence can be creative; the cycle ends with a chirpy dance for flutes and woodwind instruments, in which Michelangelo boasts that his works will confer immortality on him. A few months later, Shos takovich died, sure of the same vindication. The ironist, expiring, enjoyed the last laugh.

"Shostakovich on Stage" is at the Coliseum, London WC2, until 29 July (0870 145 0200). "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" is at the BBC Proms on 20 August. "Songs and Waltzes" is on Deutsche Grammophon CD 00289 477 6111

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