Symphony No. 12 in D minor, Op. 112 (‘The Year 1917’)

Program notes

About the Work

Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony is the one that his admirers have found hardest to defend. Written in 1961, subtitled “The Year 1917” and dedicated to the memory of Lenin, it tells the story of the October Revolution in four movements played without a break. Like the Eleventh Symphony before it, it is programme music, with a title for each part.

The titles set out the plot. Revolutionary Petrograd is the city in ferment. Razliv is named after Lenin’s retreat in the countryside outside Petrograd. Aurora is the cruiser that fired towards the Winter Palace, and The Dawn of Humanity celebrates the Bolsheviks’ victory. The writer Gerard McBurney has described the four movements as depicting these events in “graphic movietone imagery”, and the comparison with film is apt for a composer who wrote a great deal of music for the cinema.

The first performance was given by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky on 1 October 1961. The circumstances have coloured the symphony’s reputation ever since. In 1960 Shostakovich had joined the Communist Party, a step that dismayed many of his friends, and a symphony about Lenin the following year looked to many like the price of membership. In the Soviet Union the piece was received respectfully, if with less warmth than the Eleventh. In the West it was received badly. When it reached Britain, at the Edinburgh Festival in September 1962, it was compared unfavourably with the Fourth Symphony, which had its first performance outside Russia a few days later.

The usual charges are that the music is crudely pictorial and that its triumph is hollow. McBurney, who lists them, also argues the other side: heard in a great performance, the Twelfth shows that even when Shostakovich appeared to compromise he remained capable of “tremendous feats of orchestral mastery and symphonic narrative”, and he suggests that when the politics of the period have receded the music may be heard differently. The Berliner Philharmoniker’s own description of the work speaks of heroic gestures, dramatic force and timpani that suggest cannon fire.

It is a compact piece by Shostakovich’s standards, about forty minutes long, and unusually single-minded. Themes recur from movement to movement and are transformed at the end, so that the four parts can be heard as one large span.

What to Listen For

Revolutionary Petrograd. The longest movement, about a third of the whole. A moderately paced introduction leads to a fast main section laid out on traditional symphonic lines and driven hard.

Razliv. The slow movement, an Adagio, and the most reflective part of the symphony. It follows the first movement without a pause.

Aurora. The shortest movement, only a few minutes long, which takes the place of a scherzo. This is where the percussion comes into its own: the timpani strokes stand for the ship’s guns.

The Dawn of Humanity. Music heard earlier as a funeral march comes back transformed into a jubilant theme, and the symphony ends in a long celebration for the full orchestra. Whether it sounds triumphant or merely loud is the question each performance has to answer.