Dimitri Shostakovich
SYMPHONY Nr. 13, Op. 113
Jan-Hendrik Rootering, Bass
Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Dir: Mark Wigglesworth.
(BIS)
*
Pocas
obras han creado tanta expectativa, conflictos y pulsos de poder en su torno a
su estreno como lo hizo Babi Yar, la Sinfonía Nr.13 del genio soviético.
Pensada originalmente como una Cantata basada en poemas de Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
fue finalmente planteada como una Sinfonía Coral y después de muchas cancelaciones y declinaciones por parte de potenciales intérpretes, estrenada en Moscú, el 18 de
diciembre de 1.962 con la Filarmónica de Moscú, dirigida por Kirill Kondrashin.
A continuación las valiosas notas del director Mark Wigglesworth, quien además nos ha legado una de las grabaciones más modélicas y asertivas de ésta gran página sinfónica, grabación propuesta para la presente entrega:
Tombstones
By
19th September 1941, the German Army had reached Kiev and a week later the
following notice was put up around the city:
‘All
Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o’clock on
the morning of Monday, 29th September 1941 to the corner of Melnikovsky and
Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents,
money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Jew not carrying
out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot.’
Most thought
they were going to be deported and gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be
loaded onto trains. Some even arrived early to ensure themselves a seat.
Instead they were ordered towards a ravine known as Babi Yar and once there,
made to undress. Those who hesitated had their clothes ripped off by force.
They were then systematically shot and hurled into the gorge. If only wounded,
they were killed with shovels. Some, especially the children, were just thrown
in alive and buried amongst the dead. This continued for five days. Whilst the
soldiers rested at night, the remaining victims were locked in empty garages.
33,771 were killed on the first two days. As many as 100,000 in all.
Two
years later, while retreating over the same ground, the Germans decided to
cover up any signs that this had ever happened. The bodies were dug up by hand,
burnt, and all the evidence destroyed. But this wasn’t only of benefit to the
Nazis. It had become well known that plenty of native Ukrainians had assisted
in the monstrosity and, though whether they were forced to do it or whether
they willingly collaborated will never really be known, there was certainly
enough negative gossip around for it to be advantageous for many for the whole
event to be kept quiet. And when the young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was taken
to see the site twenty years later, the fact that there was no memorial on
display horrified him almost as much as the atrocity itself. The nightmare at
Babi Yar was unofficial, discussed only in whispers. For someone committed to
fighting anti-Semitism wherever it was found, as well as exposing the horrors
of the Soviet Union’s past, the absence of any commemoration was an injustice
he felt compelled to rectify.
Yevtushenko
was born in 1933 in Irkutsk to a family of Ukrainian exiles. He moved to Moscow
as a boy and attended the Gorky Institute of Literature. In 1961 he produced
the poem Babi Yar, attacking the Soviet indifference to the Nazi massacre. It
was first read in public by its author but came under immediate attack from the
authorities as it was Soviet policy to present the Holocaust as being
perpetrated against Soviet citizens as a whole rather than any specific
genocide of the Jews. Yevtushenko was criticised for belittling the suffering
of the Russian people by suggesting that it was only Jews who were the victims
of Babi Yar. No one had dared publish anything before that was so open about
domestic anti-Semitism and the poem was not allowed to be officially published
again until 1984.
In
Testimony, the memoirs that many believe he dictated to Solomon Volkov, Dmitri
Shostakovich explained his own views on anti-Semitism:
‘I
often test a person by his attitude towards the Jews. In our day and age, any
person with pretensions of decency cannot be anti-Semitic. The Jews are a
symbol for me. All of man’s defencelessness is concentrated in them. After the
war I tried to convey that feeling in my music. It was a bad time for Jews
then. In fact it is always a bad time for them. We must never forget about the
dangers of anti-Semitism and keep reminding others of it, because the infection
is alive and who knows if it will ever disappear. That’s why I was overjoyed
when I read Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar. The poem astounded me. They tried to
destroy the memory of Babi Yar, first the Germans, and then the Ukranian
government, but after Yevtushenko’s poem, it became clear that it would never
be forgotten. That is the power of art. People knew about Babi Yar before the
poem, but they were silent. But when they read the poem, the silence was
broken.’ He decided instantly to set it to music. ‘I cannot not write it,’ he
said to a friend.
The
so called ‘thaw’ of the post-Stalin era was rapidly coming to an end. The
publication in 1962 of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
had been personally allowed by Krushchev, but this led to publishers being
flooded with texts about the oppression of the past and the authorities soon
took fright, with the President wasting no time in starting to correct his
over-hasty liberalisation. On 17th December writers and artists were summoned
to the Kremlin to be given a dressing down. Krushchev attacked the decadence of
modern art, ominously quoting the Russian proverb: ‘The grave cures the
hunchback’. Yevtushenko replied that he thought it was ‘no longer the grave,
but life’. Although the reception marked the end of the thaw, eleventh-hour
attempts to stop the first performance of the Babi Yar symphony, scheduled for
the following day, were fortunately thwarted by the bravery of the performers
involved.
Mravinsky,
the conductor of the première of most of Shostakovich’s previous symphonies,
had declined to be involved with such a controversial work, and the composer
never really forgave him for what he felt to be an act of cowardly betrayal.
Instead Kirill Kondrashin was asked to conduct and, aware of an official desire
for the concert not to happen, he decided to make sure that two bass singers
were prepared for the solo role. His initial choice was probably not the ideal
candidate. During rehearsals the singer, Victor Nechipailo, had asked
Shostakovich why he was writing about anti-Semistism when there wasn’t any in
the Soviet Union. ‘No! There is’, came the furious reply. ‘It is an outrageous
thing and we must shout about it from the rooftops.’ It was not surprising that
the singer got cold feet and didn’t show up for the final rehearsal, though the
fact that he had been suddenly seconded into singing Don Carlos at the Bolshoi
that night gave him the excuse he may well have been looking for. And so it was
that Kondrashin’s safety net worked and his second choice, Vitali Gromadsky,
sang the first performance.
As if
this wasn’t quite enough stress for the conductor, Kondrashin was asked to take
a phone call in the middle of the final rehearsal from Georgi Popov, the
Russian Minister of Culture. He was asked if the symphony could be performed
without its most politically sensitive first movement. No, said Kondrashin. Was
there anything that might prevent the conductor from performing that night,
continued the threatening questions. The courage of Kondrashin to say no to
that too should not be underestimated with the benefit of hindsight.
The
concert went ahead with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in the Great Hall of
the Moscow Conservatoire. Nevertheless the planned live TV broadcast was
cancelled and the entire square outside was cordoned off by police, who didn’t
want the performance to be an opportunity for opposition demonstrations. The
hall itself was packed, save for the significantly empty government box and,
though the texts were unusually not printed in the programme book, the audience
could understand every word and the first night reception was one of
Shostakovich’s most triumphant of all. One line reported the event in the
following day’s Pravda.
It
must have been an extraordinary concert and it is very special for me that the
leader and principal cellist on this recording (Valentine Zhuk and Dmitri
Ferschtman) were, as young students, both present in the audience that night.
Shortly
after the première, Yevtushenko slightly rewrote the poem, finally agreeing to
the authorities’ demands to include some lines about the role of the Soviet
people in the war and to make it clear that it was not only the Jews who
suffered, but Russians and Ukrainians as well. Despite Shostakovich feeling
profoundly let down by Yevtushenko’s aquiescence, some say that it was
Kondrashin who asked Yevtushenko to ‘save’ the symphony by making the changes.
The government had said that, unless text revisions were made, further
performances would be banned, (or at least the work would be ‘not recommended
for performance’, which amounted to the same thing) and, as the proposed
changes were so slight, both conductor and poet felt that they were a small
price to pay for the survival of the work as a whole. Shostakovich did
eventually sanction the alterations and, without needing to change the music,
incorporated them into the score, which was finally published in 1971. In this
recording it is the original words that are sung.
What
Shostakovich loved about texts was the opportunity to be very specific in what
he wanted to express. ‘In recent years I’ve become more convinced that word is
more effective than music. When I combine music with words, it becomes harder
to misinterpret my intent.’ As if to maximise this communication, the word
setting in the symphony is almost entirely syllabic. Its rhythms correspond as
closely as possible to those of speech, with plenty of repeated notes and
stepwise, conjunct motion. Only very occasionally does the range widen to
heighten a particular moment, and the effect when this happens is devastating.
This fundamental simplicity is similar to folk-song, and the often purely
informative style of the singing makes the emotion all the more powerful. The
chorus, singing almost entirely in unison, alternates from a Greek tragedy
inspired universality to a very real, even at times operatic portrayal of vivid
scenes.
Shostakovich
originally only planned to set the Babi Yar poem but soon realised that it was
in fact just the first movement of a much bigger piece. The four other
Yevtushenko poems he chose to use for the rest of the symphony reveal a huge
kaleidoscope of Russian events, emotions, and ideas. It is a shame in a way
that the piece as a whole has become known as ‘Babi Yar’, for the work is about
even more than that.
The
second movement, Humour, expresses the traditional belief in the power of the
buffoon to make tyrants tremble, and the inability of leaders to muzzle it.
Court jesters are able to say what trusted advisers dare not mention, and the
ability of laughter to bring inner strength to the downtrodden was something
dear to Shostakovich’s heart. Though not a Jew, Shostakovich related to them as
an oppressed and powerless people and it was the same connection he felt with
the Russian women to whose strength, hard work, and dignity during the war he
pays tribute with the third movement, In the Store. The fourth movement, Fears,
is the only one whose text Yevtushenko wrote specifically for this piece. The
fact that Shostakovich asked for something new suggests that the subject matter
was something he didn’t want to leave out and it is with devastating irony that
he precedes the opening line, ‘Fears are dying out in Russia’, with the most
seriously terrifying music of the whole work. Between 1956 and 1965, nine out
of every ten Russian synagogues were closed. It is not surprising that the
initial optimism that followed the death of Stalin proved short-lived.
In
the final movement, Shostakovich glorifies the many who sacrificed their
careers by sticking to their beliefs. In turn he mocks those who sought to
further themselves by giving in to the authorities. It is those who kept their
integrity that we remember now, and people who sought success that we have long
forgotten. At first Yevtushenko didn’t understand the music of the final pages.
He had initially imagined something more heroic than the simple ‘harmony softly
slushing around dead bodies’. But he later came to understand ‘the power of
softness, the strength in fragility’ and realised that the fluttering
butterflies of Shostakovich’s hauntingly ethereal closing bars had elevated his
own texts to something far more than they could have been on their own. ‘After
all the suffering you need a little sip of harmony. A little sip of something
that is not connected with Stalin’s policies, something without Stalin’s
suffering. Something which is about us. A sense of eternity.’
Babi
Yar began life with Yevtushenko’s desire to commemorate the silent victims of
the past. Memory was also a fundamental concept for Shostakovich. ‘The majority
of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in
places unknown to anyone. I’m willing to write a composition for each of the
victims, but that’s impossible and that’s why I dedicate my music to them all.
The rarest and most valuable thing is memory. It has been trampled down for
decades. How we treat the memory of others is how our memory will be treated.’
An
official memorial at Babi Yar was not built until 1976. It did not mention that
most of its victims were Jews. It took a further fifteen years before that
injustice was finally rectified. As Shostakovich said: ‘Art destroys silence’.
©
Mark Wigglesworth 2006
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