Word: twelfths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Other UMass runners in scoring positions were Ted Wrynn, Ron Bloonstrom, and John O'Brien, in seventh, eighth, and twelfth places respectively...
Drawing on the experience of both plays, Shakespeare was then able to fashion a masterpiece, Twelfth Night, whose characters surpassed those in the two earlier works. Beatrice and the self-disguising Rosalind yielded the similarly self-disguising Viola; Dogberry and Co. led to Sir Toby and Co.; Jaques grew into Malvolio, and Touchstone (plus Amiens) into Feste...
...Like It is really a flawed and uneven exercise for Twelfth Night, it still has its own individual merits. Clearly, Shakespeare was little interested in the early court scenes; and just as clearly, the sudden and unmotivated ending, with its quadruple marriage and reported reform of the villain, comes simply because it's time for the audience to go home...