Symphony No. 12 (Shostakovich)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (May 2008) |
Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 12 in D minor, Op. 112, subtitled The Year of 1917, in 1961, dedicating it to the memory of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. The symphony was premiered that October by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky. This was also the last Shostakovich symphony which Mravinsky premiered; his refusal to give the first performance of the Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, caused a permanent rupture in their friendship.
Contents |
[edit] Form
The symphony, scored for a medium-sized orchestra, is approximately 40 minutes long and divided into four movements:
- Revolutionary Petrograd (about 14 minutes)
- The first movement uses quotations from a revolutionary song with the words 'shame on you tyrants' and the Polish song The Warsaw March, both of which appear in the finale of Symphony No. 11.
- Razliv (about 10 minutes)
- The second movement, an expressive adagio, further quotes Symphony No. 11 and the composer's early Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution. The movement depicts Lenin's headquarters at Razliv, in the countryside outside Petrograd.
- Aurora (about 4 minutes)
- The third movement is in scherzo form. Aurora was the battleship that fired at the Winter Palace and began the Russian Revolution.
- The Dawn of Humanity (about 10 minutes)
- The fourth movement, subtitled The Dawn of Humanity, represents Soviet life after the guidance of Lenin. The funeral march quotation is transformed into a jubilant theme in the finale, before a celebratory conclusion.
[edit] Overview
[edit] Composition
Shostakovich had attempted, or at least announced his intent, to compose a symphony depicting Lenin at numerous times in the past. He had planned the Twelfth Symphony as a biographical drama, tracing Lenin from his youth to the new Russian society he had created and using text by such writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky. Instead, he composed a purely orchestral work similar to its predecessor, the Eleventh Symphony (which was subtitled The Year 1905).
The Twelfth Symphony follows the model of the Eleventh in being programmatic in intent. Therefore, programmatic rather than symphonic considerations dictate its musical development, the subtitle for the symphony and movement titles commemorating the Russian Revolution. There is a difference from there as to how the music in both symphonies progresses. While the Twelfth is written like the Eleventh in four movements that play from one to the next without break, the Twelth does not recapture the sense of newsreel commentary that characterized the Eleventh. Instead, the movements of the Twelfth become a series of reflections, as though one is watching a series of tableaux. It is also unlike its other direct ancestor, the experimental Second Symphony, in being extremely traditional, with the fast opening movement laid out along academically correct lines that Myaskovsky or his teacher Glazunov would have followed.[1]
Some have commented negatively that the musical treatment in the symphony resembles an overblown film score, forgetting the work is program music above all. A further hindrance to the organic integration of the symphony is the use of revolutionary songs. While this fulfills the programmatic intent of the work, it is also non-symphonic material that does not allow the music to cohere in a traditional symphonic statement.[2]
[edit] Reception
The Twelfth Symphony was well received in the Soviet Union, though more coolly than its predecessor. While the Eleventh Symphony was received fairly warmly in the West due in part to its assumed allusion to the Hungarian uprising of 1956 (an allusion Shostakovich reportedly confirmed in Testimony, the Twelfth's apparently pro-Communist subject matter led to a poor reception there.[3] Western listeners became more receptive after the Cold War but the Twelfth remains in the lower echelon of Shostakovich's symphonies due to its workmanlike nature. While the work has some fine things in it, such as the opening and the slow movement, and it has the advantage of greater cogency than its predecessor, critics do not feel it lives up to the promises these high points may suggest.[4]
The fact the Twelth is among Shostakovich's musically least satisfying symphonies cannot be atrributed to a creative slump, given that he had recently written the First Cello Concerto and the Eighth String Quartet. Since he had becomee a Party member in 1960, he may have felt compelled to write a Party line symphony, if for no reason other than to protect himself. (The 1948 Zhdanov decree had been rescinded only in 1958, and there were also still memories of his 1936 denunciation). It may be that the idea of a dissident Shostakovich is easier for us to live with than an unresonstructed Lenninist, may be insufficient grounds to read anything more than calculated ambivalence into the music. Whatever the underlying ideology, it may be better to remember that his next symphony was the far weightier, subtler and strongly denuncitory Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar.[5]
[edit] Bibliography
- Fanning, David, Notes for Deutsche Grammophon 431388, Shostakovich: Symphony No. 12, "The Year 1917"; Hamlet (suite); The Age of Gold (suite); Neeme Jarvi conducting the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.
- Layton, Robert, ed. Robert Simpson, The Symphony: Volume 2, Mahler to the Present Day (New York: Drake Publishing Inc., 1972). ISBN 87749-245-X.
- Maes, Francis, tr. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002). ISBN 0-520-21815-9.
- Volkov, Solomon, tr. Antonina W. Bouis, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Harper & Row, 1979.). ISBN 0-06-014476-9.
