This paper is focused on Dmitri Shostakovich’s swansong, his Sonata for Viola and Piano, op.147. This paper discusses the idea of Spätstil (late style) manifested in various theoretical discourses in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and in the last compositions of Shostakovich. In particular, by documenting the composer’s own testimony and analytical evidences, this essay traces passages of the “death message” in his Viola Sonata