In more ways than one, the Twelfth Symphony forms an exception in Allan Pettersson’s output. When he agreed tocompose a work for the 500th anniversary of Uppsala University, it was one of the few commissions that he ever accepted.And what’s more, he now – after having written purely orchestral scores for the past 30 years – decided to incorporate achoir and a text. Pablo Neruda had received the Nobel Prize in 1971, and acknowledging the poet’s ‘deeply feltcompassion for the outcasts of society’, Pettersson selected nine poems from the huge collection Canto general for hisnew work. (As Pettersson was composing the symphony, Neruda died during the tumultuous aftermath of the military coupin Chile on 11 September 1973.) The poems deal with an incident in Santiago de Chile in 1946 when six demonstratorswere killed by the police during a workers’ manifestation. Pettersson, who came from a working-class background,commented on the subject matter: ‘My heart was, and is, with the poor of Chile, so like the worker in the ‘third world’ inwhich I grew up.