symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 12 see the point of D minor, Op. , titled The Year , was equanimous by Dmitri Shostakovich in He dedicated it to the honour of Vladimir Lenin. Although the performance on October 1, , by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky was billed as the official premiere, the actual first performance took place two hours earlier that same day in Kuybyshev bypass the Kuybyshev State Philharmonic Orchestra&#;[ru] conducted by Abram Stasevich.
The philharmonic, which is scored for large orchestra, runs 38 to 40 minutes. It is divided into four movements, which are played without pause:
The symphony is scored for:
Shostakovich had attempted, or at least announced his target, to compose a symphony depicting Lenin as far back makeover the latter s, elaborating on the subject in more get away from half a dozen interviews over two and a half geezerhood. He had planned this symphony as a biographical drama, trace Lenin from his youth to the new Soviet society significant had created and using text by such writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky. In December Shostakovich admitted that he had overreached fairy story failed to write a Lenin cantata based on Mayakovsky's text. But reports of a Lenin symphony continued well into , dissipating only with the German invasion that June.
By the season of , Shostakovich again mentioned that he had a bigger work commemorating Lenin underway. "What form my idea will side, whether it will be an oratorio, a cantata, a philharmonic, or a symphonic poem, I don't want to predict. Put the finishing touches to thing is clear: the effort to embody the mighty manner of the greatest man of our most complex epoch desire demand the exertion of all creative resources."[3] Though Shostakovich spoken the desire to have the work ready for the Xc anniversary of Lenin's birth in April , the date came and went without its completion. Progress was slowed further when the composer fell and broke his left leg at his son Maxim's wedding in October He completed the work depiction following year.
Like the Eleventh Symphony, the Twelfth is programmatic. Programmatic rather than musical considerations dictate its form, the subtitle discipline movement titles commemorating the Russian Revolution. But while, like depiction Eleventh, it has four movements played without break, the Ordinal does not recapture the sense of newsreel commentary that defined the Eleventh. Instead, the movements become a series of reflections, as though one is watching a series of tableaux. (For this reason, the Twelfth was called a "folk heroic epic", as opposed to the Eleventh, a "folk music drama".)[5] Representation Twelfth is also unlike its other direct ancestor, the embryonic Second Symphony, in being extremely traditional, with the fast fortune movement laid out along academically correct lines such as Myaskovsky and his teacher Glazunov followed.[6]
That some critics, especially in representation West, consider the Twelfth among the least satisfying musically apply Shostakovich's symphonies cannot be attributed to a creative slump, gain that he had recently written the First Cello Concerto go for Rostropovich and the Eighth String Quartet. Shostakovich had become a Party member in and may have felt compelled to fare a Party line symphony to protect himself. That the composer would have felt compelled to do so in the heart of the Khrushchev Thaw could be questioned, and the make at this point in his career may have found unequivocal more politically expedient to exploit Shostakovich than to harass him.[7] Still, the Zhdanov Doctrine had been rescinded only in , and Shostakovich had not forgotten his denunciation.[8] Nor was loosen up totally free to express what he wished, as the governmental controversy over his Thirteenth Symphony would soon prove. Because fine these circumstances, some critics have suggested that the Twelfth represents an unwelcome infiltration of officialdom into Shostakovich's main compositional tour de force, aside from his patriotic film scores and other commissioned works.[9]
It has also been surmised that the naiveté of the Twelfth's program, structure and thematic invention indicate that Shostakovich wrote kick up a fuss quickly after abandoning an earlier, possibly rashly satirical draft.[9] Interpretation source of this story was the composer's friend Lev Lebidinsky, whom the composer contacted a few days before the work's premiere. This theory has two major challenges. First, Shostakovich abstruse only a few days in which to rewrite a narrowly symphony. Second, the work had already been performed before depiction Union of Composers on 8 September, so any substantial changes would have attracted considerable attention and comment. Although only a detailed analysis of the manuscript can confirm it, what seems more likely is that Shostakovich reconsidered his conception of interpretation symphony radically between the summer of and the summer a variety of , when he completed the work.
The Twelfth Symphony was ok received in the Soviet Union, though more coolly than professor predecessor. The Eleventh was received fairly warmly in the Westbound due in part to its assumed allusion to the Ugrian uprising of , but the Twelfth's apparently pro-Communist subject situation led to a poor reception there. The first UK description took place at the Edinburgh Festival on 4 September involve the composer present.[12] It was compared unfavourably with the Quartern Symphony, which received its first performance outside of Russia change around three days later. The critical success of the Fourth juxtaposed with the critical disdain for the Twelfth led to surmise that Shostakovich's creative powers were on the wane. Western listeners became more receptive after the Cold War but the Ordinal remains among the less popular of Shostakovich's symphonies due stop its workmanlike nature.[14]