Poem of the Motherland

Radin, Parjenov, Kornilov, Lebediev-Kumatsch (R)

Shostakovich wrote this patriotic cantata at great speed in 1937 for the forthcoming celebrations of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the October Revolution. It did not find official favour as it consisted very largely of beefy arrangements of already existing music including well-known revolutionary songs like ‘Bravely, my comrades!’ (which the composer used again in the Eleventh Symphony op.103), popular songs by contemporary light-music composers like Isaak Dunayevsky and Vano Muradeli, and his own famously catchy ‘Song of the Counterplan’ from op.33. The composer was deemed to have taken the easy option when he should have composed something more substantial and dignified.


The piece was therefore not performed at the time and only months later it was sharply criticised during the grim proceedings that led up to the Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers at which Shostakovich was publicly condemned for being a ‘formalist’, an individualist and a lackey of the West, and required to recant his errors in one of the most shameful and humiliating moment of his careers. Curiously after all that, ‘The Poem of the Motherland’ was performed once or twice in the 1950s and even recorded, though it has hardly been heard since. A real rarity.


Note by Gerard McBurney