Writing an article about a great beloved masterwork of the Western musical tradition is one thing. Writing about a piece that practically nobody knows is another. Writing about a piece that has been run over and left for dead is something else entirely.
Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony has yet to overcome its initial unfavorable reception amongst Western listeners, even if it was a hit in the Soviet Union—or at least amongst the party pols. To this day it emits a faint whiff of noxious political toadying, as propaganda more than music.
So as I set about the task of writing an article on the Twelfth, I’m fascinated by the challenge of dealing with a piece that 1) not all that many people know but 2) a lot of people seem to think is a stinker. Consider Andrew Porter’s assessment of the first Western performance at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963:
The Twelfth has fallen prey to a Catch-22 situation: people are told that it isn’t worth bothering with, so they don’t bother with it. Because they don’t bother with it, the symphony doesn’t get a chance to be heard on its own merits—i.e., as descriptive program music that has a story to tell.
In the interest of bringing myself closer to this most maligned of the Shostakovich symphonies I’ve been acquainting myself with a sampling of Shostakovich’s public works, pieces written to acccessorize various Soviet functions, in accordance with party dictates. Like most folks, I hadn’t bothered giving them the time of day, but all the same I have been curious: are they really that banal? That they give evidence of support, however begrudging, for a reprehensible, evil regime makes them all the more difficult to approach. Besides, public-function music is not usually all that interesting, no matter where, when, or for whom it is written. Khrennikov- and Zhdanov-approved Soviet music is likely to be even more watered down than the movies coming out of Hollywood during the ascendency of the Hayes Office, when Rhett Butler came within a hair’s breadth from being forbidden to tell Scarlett that he didn’t give a damn because it was, after all, a dirty word.
So I decided to plunge right into the fire, as it were, and started familiarizing myself with Song of the Forests, Shostakovich’s 1949 cantata celebrating Stalin’s program to reforest Russia after the terrible depredations of the War. Shostakovich wrote it immediately in the wake of the 1948 denunciation, if anything even more catastrophic for him than the infamous "Muddle Instead of Music" attack from the 1930s. So it’s the work of a composer who knew he had better toe the line or else. Now, there’s nothing particularly offensive about writing a cantata in support of a public project. American composers wrote music for all manner of WPA and wartime films that aimed at keeping people’s spirits up in difficult times, after all. Providing music for public functions is an integral part of the job description for just about any composer, and has been for centuries. It is a role that was almost forgotten by Western composers when they retreated into the monastic seclusion of academia following WWII, but Soviet composers remained fully engaged.
Song of the Forests was written in the later years of Stalin’s dictatorship, and the original libretto was stuffed with fawning praise of the Noble Leader. Once Stalin had dropped dead (funny how even the most exalted of Great Heroic Leaders do that just like everybody else) the libretto was revisited and the toadying removed. (Now, would somebody please do that for Beethoven’s cantata "The Glorious Moment"?) Fortunately, the libretto is in Russian, a language I don’t know, so instead I can listen to Song of the Forests with just a general sense of the text, courtesy of the liner notes.
And what do I find? A most attractive piece of music, that’s what. It isn’t modernistic at all and in fact sounds like Borodin. From time to time it even sounds a little bit like Shostakovich. But that’s true of a lot of Shostakovich’s later music, including stuff like the Thirteenth Symphony that nobody disses. Song of the Forests, as a specimen of monumental public music, is quite head and shoulders above the norm, not necessarily just in the Soviet Union, but anywhere. Shostakovich himself hated it, though.
Getting to know stuff like Song of the Forests and The Sun Shines on our Motherland is helping me with the Twelfth Symphony, a work which is nowhere near so blatantly public but steers clear nonetheless of the bitter self-flagellation of the Eighth Quartet, written right around the same time, or the marvelously barbed First Cello Concerto of 1959. The Twelfth is something of a midway work, not altogether rah-rah propagandistic but yet far from the inner world of the string quartets. I’m not sure how much I buy into Ian MacDonald’s take on the Twelfth as being a nonstop series of coded anti-Communist messages to cued-in listeners. There’s a whole cottage industry out there finding anti-Soviet references to just about everything Shostakovich wrote from the Fifth Symphony onwards, but just because people cook up such references doesn’t mean that they’re actually there. That’s a far cry, however, from insisting that the Twelfth is "pure music" without any message or plot, because that’s utter nonsense. It’s definitely program music that speaks of events and people and places.
The one thing I’m sure about is that I’m not going to write the article until I’ve had more time to let the subject percolate through my head and heart. I’m nowhere near ready to begin yet. Shostakovich is never straightforward, and unless you are the slickest diplomatic weasel in the business, people are going to take objection to something or another you say. Shostakovich presents a writer with an infinite regress of Ukrainian dolls inside dolls. It will be a good long time before we ever figure him out, if indeed we ever do. But I’m not going to try to figure out Dmitri Shostakovich; fortunately my task is easier. I need to give folks a running head start on hearing a symphony that they might have been told wasn’t worth their time. But it most definitely is worth hearing, and not just once either. There’s a lot of good music in there, well-structured and brilliantly orchestrated. That’s what I’ll need to get across, and let the rest of the chips fall where they may.