The Song of the Forests

Yevgeni Dolmatovsky (R)

At the 1948 Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers, Shostakovich was publicly condemned – along with Prokofiev and four other composers – for the anti-Soviet nature of his music. Determined to make an example of him, Soviet officials led by Stalin’s cultural henchman Andrey Zhdanov accused the composer of manifold errors and wrong turnings, and they forced him to make a public recantation, apologising for his music and promising to do better in the future.


One of the first results of this promise was this large-scale patriotic oratorio, to a text by the official poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky and composed in a lugubrious a poster-paint style, half Musorgsky-and-water, half film-music, which tells of the wonders of Stalin’s Russian and Siberian reforestation programme in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is the musical equivalent of those monstrous official sculptures of Lenin and Stalin that once used to decorate the main squares of every town and city in USSR.


As an act of contrition, it earned Shostakovich much forgiveness including a Stalin Prize First Class in 1950. From an artistic point of view it bought Shostakovich some safety and time, in the course of which he composed his Fourth String Quartet op.83 and other works. As a piece it entered the official repertory of Soviet power and propaganda and for a number of years was made required performance in the countries of the Communist Eastern Bloc, as a musical means whereby they could show their subordination to the Soviet Union.


All of this said, ‘The Song of the Forests’, however awful the circumstances of its composition (and however much the composer himself disliked it), is still a work by a great musician and in a sympathetic performance, while hardly one of his major achievements, has moments that are not without curiosity interest.


By Gerard McBurney