Symphony No. 13 (Shostakovich)

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The Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor (Op. 113, subtitled Babi Yar) by Dmitri Shostakovich was first performed in Moscow on December 18, 1962 by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and the basses of the Republican State and Gnessin Institute Choirs, under Kirill Kondrashin (after Yevgeny Mravinsky refused to conduct the work). The soloist was Vitali Gromadsky.

1 Structure
2 Overview
- 2.1 Composition
- 2.2 Premiere
3 Bibliography
4 Refernces
5 External links

[edit] Structure

This work has been variously called a song cycle and a choral symphony since ite composer sets poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that concerned the World War II Babi Yar massacre and other topics. The work has five movements:

Adagio (Babi Yar)

A criticism of Soviet anti-Semitism and official indifference to the Holocaust.
Allegretto (Humour)

Humour is personified as a mischievous rascal who constantly eludes official attempts at censorship and silencing.
Adagio (In The Store)

An ode to the hard-working women of the Soviet Union, always tired from standing in long lines at the store, often in bitter cold.
Largo (Fears)

This movement recalls the pervasive atmosphere of dread during the Stalin era.
Allegretto (A Career)

A celebration of Galileo's refusal to recant his discoveries about the nature of the heavens, even in the face of censorship and threats from the authorities.

The "Lenin" theme from Second and Twelth Symphonies reappears, and the work ends with a bell tolling the death knell of Lenin's revolution under the Stalinist bureaucracy.

[edit] Overview

[edit] Composition

The symphony was completed during a thaw in Soviet censorship, and Shostakovich takes his critique of the Soviet regime in this work to the furthest that he would publically in his lifetime. Even so he does not engage in outright dissent; he broaches subjects open to discussion more or less freely, provided the basis of the Soviet regime was not questioned. The criticism in which Shostakovich engages here was actually the bounds tolerated at the end of Nikita Khrushchev's regime.^[1]

Even so, Yevtushenko was considered a political liability. Babi Yar engendered a campaign to discredit him, accusing the poet of placing the suffering of the Jewish people above that of the Russians. The intelligentsia called him a "boudoir poet" — in other words, a moralist.^[2] Shostakovich defended the poet in a letter dated 26 October 1965, to his pupil Boris Tishchenko:

As for what "moralising" poetry is, I didn't understand. Why, as you maintain, it isn't "among the best." Morality is the twin sister of conscience. And because Yevtoshenko writes about conscience, God grant him all the very best. Every morning, instead of morning prayers, I reread - well, recite from memory - two poems from Yevtushenko, "Boots" and "A Career." "Boots" is conscience. "A Career" is morality. One should not be deprived of conscience. To lose conscience is to lose everything.^[3]

Shostakovich originally intended the first movement to stand by itself, but he found three additional poems by Yevtushenko, which caused him to change his plans and to expand the work into a multi-movement choral symphony^[4] with "A Career" as the closing movement. Shostakovich did so by complememting Babi Yar's theme of Jewish suffering with Yevtushenko's verses about other Soviet abuses. "At the Store" is a tribute to the women who have to stand in line for hours to buy the most basic foods. "Fears" invokes the terror under Stalin. "A Career" is an attack on bureaucrats and a tribute to genuine creativity.^[5] Yevtushenko wrote "Fears" at the composer's request.^[6]

[edit] Premiere

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 criticised it before the premiere, and threatened to stop its performance. Conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky and bass singer Boris Gmïrya foresaw political dificulties; both withdrew their participation in the premiere. Shostakovich then asked Kyril Kondrashin to conduct the work. Two singers were engaged, Victor Nechipailo to sing the premiere and Vitaly Gromadsky in case a substitute were needed. Nechipalio dropped out at the last minute. Kondrashin was then put under pressure to drop the first movement.^[1]

The premiere went ahead, but afterwards Yevtushenko was forced to change his poem, replacing a stanza which declared "I am every old man shot dead here, I am every child shot dead here," with a stanza mourning the ethnic Russians and Ukrainians that died alongside the Jews at Babi Yar. Thereafter the work was infrequently performed until more recently.^[1]

[edit] Bibliography

Fay, Laurel, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: 2000).
Layton, Robert, ed. Robert Simpson, The Symphony: Volume 2, Mahler to the Present Day (New York: Drake Publishing Inc., 1972). ISBN 87749-245-X.
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). ISBN 0-520-21815-9.
Schwarz, Boris, ed. Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillian, 1980), 20 vols. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.