In the Red House at Aldeburgh hangs a portrait of Anton Del'vig, the poet to whom are addressed the lines by the Decembrist, Wilhelm Küchelbecker – lines set by Shostakovich in his Fourteenth Symphony, the work he dedicated to Benjamin Britten in 1969. A gift from Shostakovich to Britten, the portrait would seem to lend confirmation to what is surely implicit in the ninth movement of the symphony: that those lines of Küchelbecker served Shostakovich as a mouthpiece for a fraternal greeting to his English friend and colleague. In the desolate context of the symphony this setting stands apart on account of its emotional warmth and tonal stability; indeed, its calm, hymnal gesture of four luminous triads that dispel the angry twelve-note ‘cluster’ of the previous movement could almost be taken as a friendly salutation à la manière de Britten. and the key – Db major – is the key of ‘the world of high ideals’ in Shostakovich's Twelfth String Quartet:

The high seriousness and cyclic sense of completion that Shostakovich brought to his work in the final years of his life coincide with an on-going, passionate admiration for Britten and his music, whose own accomplishments during the same period (the composers died within a year of each other) correspondingly proclaim a late, valedictory style.