The Mysterious Case of Shostakovich’s Quite Possibly Fictional “Real” Twelfth Symphony

When Nate & I were in New York together in March we watched a short documentary movie about Shostakovich that was playing at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater. It wasn’t a very good film – the only real pleasure in it was the clips of Shostakovich himself talking or performing, which were frustratingly few and far between – but it inspired me to borrow Nate’s copy of Elizabeth Wilson’s excellent book Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, which I’ve been reading during the last week.

Wilson relates a story by Shostakovich’s friend Lev Lebedinsky concerning the Twelfth Symphony of 1961, a work which is widely regarded as a sop to the Soviet powers that be, as well as musically subpar. (I’ve never actually listened to it, mostly because I’ve only read that it’s awful. Nate also says it’s awful, and if Nate says he doesn’t like a Shostakovich piece, it means it’s pretty bad.) Wilson seems fairly skeptical about this story, and it sure looks like there are some reasons to doubt it, but it’s too juicy to pass by without notice:

In 1961 Shostakovich made another attempt to express his true attitude to what was going on in his country. He decided that his Twelfth Symphony was to be a satire of Lenin. When he told me this I tried to talk him out of it. . . One evening he rang me up in a panic. “Lev Nikolayevich, tomorrow my symphony will be played for the first time. Can you come up to Leningrad?” . . .

I arrived early in the morning. He was waiting for me at his hotel. He was pale as death. He looked awful. In the lobby he said to me, “I’ve written a terrible symphony. It’s a failure. But I managed to change it.”

“Change what?”

“The whole symphony. But we can’t talk any more. My room is full of journalists and all sorts of strange people.” . . .

Shostakovich [later] explained: “I wrote my symphony, and then I realized that you had been right. They’d crucify me for it because my conception was an obvious caricature of Lenin. Therefore I sat down and wrote another one in three or four days. And it’s terrible!” With his insane technique he could do anything. . . .

I believe that part of the original manuscript was destroyed, while Shostakovich kept the rest, intending to re-use the material in the future. His widow, Irina Antonovna, must have what remains of the original score.

Now, the same passage by Lebedinsky also notes that other people close to Shostakovich (“close” is somewhat relative, since the composer was famously indirect and inscrutable) have accused Lebedinsky himself of forcing the Twelfth’s party-line theme on Shostakovich, not to mention pressuring Shostakovich into communist party membership around the same time. That defensive tone, combined with the singular central position Lebedinsky occupies in the story itself, represents a very big grain of salt. I’m curious whether there’s been any specific reaction/refutation of this since Wilson’s book came out (in 1994).

Regardless of factual merit, the idea of a double-secret “real” Shostakovich Twelfth Symphony that satirizes Lenin is pretty spellbinding. I await the day when some delicate manuscript appears, offering up a chunk of politically impossible masterpiece from Shostakovich’s prime.

Of course, “regardless of factual merit,” any number of intriguing possibilities are worth salivating over. And even if this thing existed, any valuable music in it must have ended up recycled in the Second Cello Concerto or one of the quartets anyway.