Symphony No. 12 (Shostakovich)

He had planned this symphony as a biographical drama, tracing Lenin from his youth to the new Soviet society he had created and using text by such writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky.

One thing is clear: the effort to embody the mighty image of the greatest man of our most complex epoch will demand the exertion of all creative resources.

)[5] The Twelfth 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 such as Myaskovsky and his teacher Glazunov followed.

[6] That some critics, especially in the West, consider the Twelfth among the least satisfying musically of Shostakovich's symphonies cannot be attributed to a creative slump, given that he had recently written the First Cello Concerto for Rostropovich and the Eighth String Quartet.

That the composer would have felt compelled to do so in the midst of the Khrushchev Thaw could be questioned, and the government at this point in his career may have found it more politically expedient to exploit Shostakovich than to harass him.

Because of these circumstances, some critics have suggested that the Twelfth represents an unwelcome infiltration of officialdom into Shostakovich's main compositional oeuvre, 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 it quickly after abandoning an earlier, possibly rashly satirical draft.

The Eleventh was received fairly warmly in the West due in part to its assumed allusion to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, but the Twelfth's apparently pro-Communist subject matter led to a poor reception there.