Backward from Decadence

Throughout his remarkably productive career, Dmitry Shostakovich has produced two entirely different kinds of music: "decadent, bourgeois, neurotic'' works that stand in the first rank of contemporary composition, and ideologically pure, "democratic" works that stand almost nowhere at all. Ever since 1948, when he was chastised by the Central Committee of the Communist party for "decadence," Shostakovich's ideology has been improving and his music generally getting worse. Last week, disheveled and stoop-shouldered at 55, he made his way to the stage of the Moscow Conservatory to acknowledge the applause for his Twelfth Symphony, a numerical milestone that few composers, living or dead, have approached.* Unhappily, ideology once again seemed to have triumphed over ideas.

Never a Doubt. Shostakovich composed the Twelfth this past spring and summer in his dacha outside Moscow. He let it be known that the score would deal with the October Revolution and that it was "dedicated to the memory of Lenin." The music is divided into four parts: revolutionary Petrograd, Razliv (the place where Lenin went into hiding to avoid arrest by the provisional government), Aurora (after the cruiser that fired on the Winter Palace), and the finale. Dawn of Mankind. The symphony avoids the dark colors and heavy textures of traditional Russian orchestral music; it recalls far better works in its sharply staccato rhythms and in the superb ingenuity of some of its string sequences. But not even as fine a technician as Shostakovich could conceal the general banality.

Shostakovich was clearly determined to woo a large audience, and there was never much doubt that he would succeed. With his political credentials in apple-pie order, he was rewarded by the usually cautious critics with an instantaneous rave. Said Izuestia: "Just as today we feel an involuntary envy for the contemporaries of Beethoven, Paganini and Tchaikovsky, so will future generations envy us who first heard the Twelfth Symphony of Dmitry Shostakovich, the greatest composer of the 20th century."

Toeing the Mark. Shostakovich gets due reward for toeing the cultural mark. He has won five tax-free Stalin Prizes worth $25,000, one Lenin Prize ($75,000), gets handsome royalties from all his works. (Estimated income: $50,000 a year.) But Shostakovich has walked a tortuous path. He has been a musical celebrity since he was 19, when his First Symphony, a bright, skillful and daring piece, crashed onto the contemporary scene. His style, full of dissonance and wild rhythms, placed him at once high up among the avantgarde. Then came a pair of puerile and hackneyed symphonies, A Dedication to October and A May Day Symphony. All through the '20s and '30s his work continued to be disappointingly uneven as he tried to follow the party line. Rapped in 1935 for his "un-Soviet and eccentric" opera A Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. he meekly subtitled his next work, the Fifth Symphony, "A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism." But for all his wavering, he secured his place among the century's top composers with such consistently popular works as his First Symphony, his meditative, finely etched Sixth Symphony, his consistently powerful Tenth Symphony, his violin and cello concertos, and his vivid Quintet for Piano and Strings with its vibrant, stripped melodic lines. Admirers of those efforts can applaud the stamina that carried him to his Twelfth Symphony--and hope for a return to decadence in the 13th.

*Although Mozart turned out 41 symphonies and Haydn 104. few later composers have ventured beyond the nine Beethoven limited himself to while giving the form larger dimensions and a more complex orchestration. A notable exception: the late Russian Composer Xikolai Miaskovsky, whose 27 made him the most prolific modern symphonist.

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