Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, Op. 113 (‘Babi Yar’)

Program notes

About the Work

Babi Yar is a ravine on the edge of Kyiv. On 29 and 30 September 1941 the German occupiers shot some 34,000 Jews there, and the killing went on at the site until 1943. For years afterwards the Soviet authorities raised no memorial, and the fact that most of the victims were Jews went unspoken. In September 1961 the young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem in the Literaturnaya gazeta that began from that absence and turned it into a denunciation of antisemitism, in Russia’s past and in its present.

Shostakovich read the poem and decided almost at once to set it. By the spring of 1962 he had finished what he first thought of as a one-movement symphonic poem for bass soloist, a chorus of basses and orchestra. Then he found further poems by Yevtushenko that he wanted to add, and asked the poet to write one more. The single movement grew into a symphony of five, completed on 20 July 1962. The other four poems have nothing to do with the massacre. They deal with the power of humour to outlive every tyrant, the patience of women queueing in the shops, the memory of fear under Stalin, and the difference between a career and a conscience. Together they make a portrait of Soviet life as Shostakovich saw it. The nickname ‘Babi Yar’, taken from the first movement, is not in his manuscript.

Getting the work performed was a struggle. Shostakovich took the score to the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky in Leningrad, who declined to conduct it, and the refusal caused a rift between the two men. Kirill Kondrashin took it on. Officials pressed for the concert to be called off until the last moment, but it went ahead on 18 December 1962 in Moscow, with the Moscow Philharmonic and the bass Vitaly Gromadsky. Kondrashin later remembered the applause that broke out after the first movement and the long ovation at the end. The Moscow press printed nothing about it. Under official pressure Yevtushenko then supplied eight substitute lines for the first movement, on Soviet patriotic themes, and these were used in the performances that followed. Today the original text is sung.

What to Listen For

The sound of this symphony is like no other. There are no high voices: one bass soloist and a chorus of basses who sing almost throughout in unison, as a single massive voice, often repeating or answering the soloist. The vocal writing follows the rhythm of speech, in a manner that goes back to Mussorgsky, and the words are always in the foreground.

I. Babi Yar (Adagio). A bell tolls, and the voices begin with the poem’s starting point: that no monument stands at Babi Yar. The soloist takes the poet’s part, imagining himself in turn as Dreyfus, as a boy in the Białystok pogrom, and as Anne Frank, and the music moves through these scenes like episodes of an opera. Listen for the violence with which the orchestra breaks in on the quiet Anne Frank episode.

II. Humour (Allegretto). A raucous, mocking scherzo. Rulers have tried to buy humour, to kill it and to lock it up, and each time it gets away.

III. In the Store (Adagio). A slow, bare lament for the women who queue patiently in the shops. At its very end the chorus leaves its unison for two soft, harmonised chords, like an amen.

IV. Fears (Largo). The darkest music in the work, harmonically unsettled from its first bars. ‘Fears are dying out in Russia’, the chorus sings, in tones that suggest they are not dead yet. The mood lifts only once, for a parody of a Soviet marching song.

V. A Career (Allegretto). After so much darkness, two flutes open the finale with a gentle, almost innocent tune. The poem is an ironic attack on careerists and their cynical self-interest, and a tribute to those who do real creative work whatever it costs them; bassoon and trumpets add their own sarcastic comments. The symphony ends softly and lyrically, with the bell that opened it sounding again in the last bars.