Dmitri Shostakovich

Symphony No. 13 (Shostakovich)

The Symphony No. 13 in B minor, Op. 113 for bass soloist, bass chorus, and large orchestra was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1962. It consists of five movements, each a setting of a Yevgeny

Movements#

The symphony consists of five movements.

I. Babi Yar#

In this movement, Shostakovich and Yevtushenko transform the 1941 massacre by Nazis of Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev, into a denunciation of anti-Semitism in all its forms. (Although a monument was not erected at Babi Yar by the Soviet government, it still became a place of pilgrimage for Soviet Jews.) This movement touches on the subject of suppression in the Soviet Union and is the most elaborate musically of the symphony’s five movements, using a variety of musical ideas to stress its message, from an angry march to alternating soft and violent episodes.

II. Humour#

Shostakovich quotes from the third of his Six Romances on Verses by British Poets, Op. 62 (Robert Burns’ “Macpherson Before His Execution”) to colour Yevtushenko’s imagery of the spirit of mockery, endlessly murdered and endlessly resurrected, denouncing the vain attempts of tyrants to shackle wit.

III. In the Store#

This movement is about the hardship of Soviet women queueing in a shop. This arouses Shostakovich’s compassion no less than racial prejudice and gratuitous violence. Written in the form of a lament, the chorus departs from its unison line in the music’s two concluding harmonized chords for the only time in the entire symphony, ending on a plagal cadence functioning much the same as a liturgical amen.

IV. Fears#

This movement touches on the subject of suppression in the Soviet Union and is the most elaborate musically of the symphony’s five movements, using a variety of musical ideas to stress its message, from an angry march to alternating soft and violent episodes. Harmonic ambiguity instills a deep sense of unease as the chorus intones the first lines of the poem: “Fears are dying out in Russia” (""). Shostakovich breaks this mood only in response to Yevtushenko’s agitprop lines, “We weren’t afraid / of construction work in blizzards / or of going into battle under shell-fire” (""), parodying the Soviet marching song "" (“Bravely, comrades, march to step”).

V. Career#

While this movement opens with a pastoral duet by flutes over a B pedal bass, giving the musical effect of sunshine after a storm, it is an ironic attack on bureaucrats, touching on cynical self-interest and robotic unanimity — and is also a tribute to genuine creativity. The soloist comes onto equal terms with the chorus, with sarcastic commentary provided by the bassoon and other wind instruments, as well as rude squeaking from the trumpets. It also relies more than the other movements on purely orchestral passages as links between vocal statements.

Instrumentation#

The symphony calls for a bass soloist, bass chorus and an orchestra with the following instrumentation. Woodwinds : : : : Brass : 4 horns : 3 trumpets : 3 trombones : 1 tuba Percussion : timpani : triangle : castanets : whip : woodblocks : tambourine : snare drum : bass drum : cymbals : bells : tam-tam : glockenspiel : xylophone Keyboards : celesta : piano Strings : 2-4 harps : 1st violins : 2nd violins : violas : cellos : double basses

Background#

Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” was published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta in September 1961 and, along with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir, appeared during a surge of anti-Stalinist literature during the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev. Publishers began receiving more anti-Stalinist novels, short stories and memoirs. This fad soon faded. According to Edison Denisov, Shostakovich had always loathed anti-Semitism.

Composition#

The symphony was originally intended as a single-movement “vocal-symphonic poem”. By the end of May, Shostakovich had found three additional poems by Yevtushenko, which caused him to expand the work into a multi-movement choral symphony Yevtushenko remembered, on hearing the composer play and sing the complete symphony for him, Yevtushenko added, about the composer’s setting of Babi Yar that “if I were able to write music I would have written it exactly the way Shostakovich did…. His music made the poem greater, more meaningful and powerful. In a word, it became a much better poem.”

Growing controversy#

By the time Shostakovich had completed the first movement on March 27, 1962, Yevtushenko was already being subjected to a campaign of criticism, Shostakovich defended the poet in a letter dated October 26, 1965, to his pupil Boris Tishchenko: For the Party, performing critical texts at a public concert with symphonic backing had a potentially much greater impact than simply reading the same texts at home privately. It should be no surprise, then, that Khrushchev criticized the symphony before the premiere, and threatened to stop its performance, By mid-August 1962, Gmyrya had withdrawn from the premiere under pressure from the local Party Committee; writing the composer, he claimed that, in view of the dubious text, he declined to perform the work. He was then pressured to drop the first movement.

Premiere#

Official interference continued throughout the day of the concert. Cameras originally slated to televise the piece were noisily dismantled. The entire choir threatened to walk out; a desperate speech by Yevtushenko was all that kept them from doing so. The premiere finally went ahead on December 18, 1962, with the government box empty but the theatre otherwise packed. The symphony played to a tremendous ovation. Kondrashin remembered, “At the end of the first movement the audience started to applaud and shout hysterically. The atmosphere was tense enough as it was, and I waved at them to calm down. We started playing the second movement at once, so as not to put Shostakovich into an awkward position.” Sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who was present, said, “It was major! There was a sense of something incredible happening. The interesting part was that when the symphony ended, there was no applause at first, just an unusually long pause—so long that I even thought that it might be some sort of conspiracy. But then the audience burst into wild applause with shouts of ‘Bravo!’”

Changed lines#

Kondrashin gave two performances of the Thirteenth Symphony; a third was scheduled for January 15, 1963. However, at the beginning of 1963 Yevtushenko reportedly published a second, now politically correct version of Babi Yar twice the length of the original. The length of the new version can be explained not only by changes in content but also by a noticeable difference in writing style. It might be possible that Yevtushenko intentionally changed his style of narrative to make it clear that the modified version of the text is not something he initially intended. While Shostakovich biographer Laurel Fay maintains that such a volume has yet to surface, the fact remains that Yevtushenko wrote new lines for the eight most offensive ones questioned by the authorities. The rest of the poem is as strongly aimed at the Soviet political authorities as those lines that were changed so the reasons for these changes were more precise. Not wanting to set the new version to music, yet knowing the original version faced little chance of performance, the composer agreed to the performance of the new version yet did not add those lines to the manuscript of the symphony. :Original Version :Мне кажется сейчас – я иудей. :Вот я бреду по древнему Египту. :А вот я, на кресте распятый, гибну, :и до сих пор на мне – следы гвоздей. :… :И сам я, как сплошной беззвучный крик, :над тысячами тысяч погребённых. :Я – каждый здесь расстрелянный старик. :Я – каждый здесь расстрелянный ребёнок. :Censored Version :Я тут стою, как будто у криницы, :дающей веру в наше братство мне. :Здесь русские лежат и украинцы, :с евреями лежат в одной земле.. :… :Я думаю о подвиге России, :фашизму преградившей путь собой, :до самой наикрохотной росинки :мне близкой всею сутью и судьбой. :Original Version :I feel myself a Jew. :Here I tread across old Egypt. :Here I die, nailed to the cross. :And even now I bear the scars of it. :… :I become a gigantic, soundless scream :Above the thousands buried here. :I am every old man shot dead here. :I am every child shot dead here. :Censored Version :Here I stand at the fountainhead :That gives me faith in brotherhood. :Here Russians lie, and Ukrainians :Together with Jews in the same ground. :… :I think of Russia’s heroic dead :In blocking the way to Fascism. :To the smallest dew-drop, she is close to me :In her being and her fate. Even with these changed lines, the symphony enjoyed relatively few performances — two with the revised text in Moscow in February 1963 and one in Minsk (with the original text, conducted by Vitaly Katayev) shortly afterward, as well as performances in Gorky, Leningrad and Novosibirsk. After these performances, the work was effectively banned in the Soviet bloc, the work’s premiere in East Berlin occurring only because the local censor had forgotten to clear the performance with Moscow beforehand. Meanwhile, a copy of the score with the original text was smuggled to the West by Mstislav Rostropovich, and it was premiered and recorded in January 1970 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. Second to the “Babi Yar” movement, the bureaucrats most viciously attacked the “Fears” movement. To keep the symphony in performance, seven lines of the poem were altered, replacing references to imprisonment without trial, to neglect of the poor and to the fear experienced by artists.

Influence of Mussorgsky#

Shostakovich’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina and Songs and Dances of Death had an important bearing on the Thirteenth Symphony, as well as on Shostakovich’s late work. Shostakovich wrote the greater part of his vocal music after his immersion in Mussorgsky’s work,

Notes#

:1.This nickname neither appears on the title page of the symphony’s manuscript score nor originates from the composer.

Sources#

Blokker, Roy, with Robert Dearling, The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich: The Symphonies (London: The Tantivy Press, 1979). .
Fay, Laurel, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: 2000). .
Figes, Orlando, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Picador, 2002). .
Layton, Robert, ed. Robert Simpson, The Symphony: Volume 2, Mahler to the Present Day (New York: Drake Publishing Inc., 1972). .
MacDonald, Ian, The New Shostakovich (Boston: 1990). (reprinted & updated in 2006).
Maes, Francis, tr. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002). .
Schwarz, Boris, ed. Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), 20 vols. .
ed. Volkov, Solomon, trans. Antonina W. Bouis, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). .
Volkov, Solomon, tr. Antonina W. Bouis, Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). .
Wilson, Elizabeth, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Second Edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994, 2006). .