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Articles from Sequence II:
BRITTEN War Requiem
CORIGLIANO Of Rage and Remembrance: Symphony No.1
An Inktroduction by Benjamin Chee
This was the beginning of what we know today as the Holocaust. By the
end of the war, close to six million victims would be claimed in this
insane act of genocide which lasted only just under four years. The
numbers are staggering, the atrocity is unimaginable. It was a
calculated act of hate unmatched in any instance in history before or
since, and names indelibly associated. One of the foremost that comes
to mind is Babi Yar.
Babi Yar is located in the northwest suburbs of the city of Kiev; a
large, unremarkable dirt-sided ravine in its own right. The immediate
geography of rolling hills, dotted with weather-beaten clumps of
bracken, and rocky, infertile land is only slightly less forboding
than the gray, industrial anvil-headed clouds over Kiev. The Lubiankov
cemetery - ironically a former Jewish burial ground - stands at one
end of the ravine, marking the end of Melnik Street. Today, a
50-foot-high bronze sculpture stands about a mile from this place,
erected by the Brezhnev government in 1974 in mute testimony to the
massacre.
On September 27th and 28th, 1941, posters throughout Kiev ordered the
assembly of Jews for "resettlement". The crowds were then led out of
the city towards the place of death. The watchman at the old Jewish
Lubiankov cemetery near Babi Yar describes how
There is also, understandably, a certain element of socialist
doctrinal content in Shostakovich's music, working behind the Iron
Curtain in the post-war years, as it were. One must also recall
Stalin's infamous decree of 10 February 1948, after a three-day
conference of the Communist Party Central Committee, which accused a
number of composers, including Shostakovich, Khachaturian (never mind
he wasn't acutally Greater Russian but Georgian) and Prokofiev,
of "representing formalistic perversions and anti-democratic
tendencies alien to the Soviet people" and "infatuation with confused,
neurotic combinations which turns music into cacophony". Israel
Nestyev, Prokofiev's biographer, added, "It was necessary to help the
talented artists overcome their delusions and to bring their creations
into accord with the demands of the people."
In the wake of this nonsensical lambast, coming as it did from Stalin,
said composers were forced to recant their artistic credo and toe the
party line, as it were, in their subsequent output. Not until several
years later, in 1953 when Stalin died, did the inclement musical
climate in Russia begin to thaw, and works which were hitherto
unpublished or unperformed finally appeared. And the authorities, as
authorities go, never really did grasp the underlying subversiveness
behind Shostakovich's music - the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, for
example, were his self-confessed requiem not just for countrymen who
perished in the Great Motherland War, but also those killed on
Stalin's orders before the war.
It therefore comes as no surprise that Shostakovich would return to a
familiar theme as a setting for his Thirteenth Symphony. Technically,
the work is fairly straightforward - the words are set syllabically,
following the contours of the musical language in simple harmonic
style and accented beats. (Prokofiev, it should be mentioned here,
also adopts a similar style in his vocal settings of text). There are
five movements, each movement set to a different poem. The poetry is
mainly in prose form.
To perform the work, Shostakovich explicitly specifies a male bass
chorus to the size of forty-to-hundred strong, with a bass soloist.
This chorus sings in unison throughout, save for a short cadence in
the third movement. The orchestra is - as already stated - augmented:
triple woodwinds, a kitchenful of percussion (including tambourine,
triangle, wood blocks, castanets, chimes and piano), two
obbligato harps (although four are preferred), plus a minimum
of sixty-four strings. Ironically, despite the massive forces deployed
here, the full ensemble only appears sparingly. This is, of course, to
accentuate the effect on such an occasion.
This work also tips its hat in the direction of Mussorgsky (for whom
Shostakovich had just orchestrated Songs and Dances of Death
before starting on this symphony) and Mahler, with whom Shostakovich's
music shares a very articulated affinity of mood and awareness of
human mortality. They also share a common denominator in the way of
requiring large orchestral forces - not merely an act of extravagance
or megalomania, as ignorant critics might accuse, but the fulfillment
of a grand conception on the part of the composer to bring the message
of the work across.
The tonality of this symphony lies in B-flat minor, a fairly rare key
which does not immediately bring to mind another symphony in a similar
key. It is in this key which the first movement, the poetical setting
of "Babi Yar" (from which the symphony derives its name) begins,
alternating with the secondary key of G minor.
The Soviet authorities had the most problems with the potentially
subversive setting of this poem - so much so that at the premiere, the
Moscow Conservatory was cordoned off for security and the text omitted
from the programme book - and changes were demanded, even though the
poem had been published and in circulation for some years already. A
source of this problem might have been, from the tone of the poem, the
implicit reference to anti-Semitic atrocities - and thus, it
had to be clarified that it was not only the majority of Jews who were
murdered at Babi Yar, but also Russians and Ukranians. Nonetheless,
"Babi Yar" still ends on a note of defiance (Shostakovich here marking
a quadruple sforzando - sffff ):
"Humour", the second movement, turns away from the solemnity and
brooding of the massacre, and rejoices instead in the vitality of the
human spirit. "Humour" himself is personified as a Till
Eulenspiegelian prankster, a cheeky and irreverent character who
eludes tyrants, insults authority and throws defiance in the face of
authority. To quote the motto of a 17th century French harlequin,
castigat ridendo mores - "it corrects morals by laughter".
Quite appropriately, this setting is in the sunny key of C major.
The next movement, "In the Store", pays tribute to the women of
Russia: the guardian angels and breadwinners of their families,
fighting a different kind of war from their men away at the front line
and enduring hardships with a steely strength. The movement is
predominantly in the slightly raised key of E minor, which continues
without a pause, via the major third of E, G sharp (i.e. A flat), to
the fourth movement, "Fears".
Unlike any of the other movements, "Fears" is not cast in any
particular key, as the text reminisces about the paranoia in the older
Russia of bygone years and with a wry twist of irony, states that
there are new fears dawning - the ambivalent atmosphere created with
sustained notes (accidental G sharp) drawn by the cellos and
doublebasses. This movement also carries on without a pause into the
next, thematically and structurally linking the last three movements.
Talent is talent, whatever name you give it.
The poem concludes much as an exhortation to follow the examples of
those who bravely followed their careers in the face of hostility and
opposition, and the music also returns full circle: ending on a B-flat
major triad with an A-flat over, concluding the symphony with wistful
beauty that postulates an acceptance of the difficulties of social
existence (as much in Russia as anywhere else) and the horrors that
are visited upon it.
The entire paean itself thus assumes the form of a requiem, to
Russians (and humanity at large) in the wake of the Great Motherland
War. It is Shostakovich's cry from the heart that speaks directly to
present-day society; it is also a memorial for the dead of the
Holocaust, and a comfort for the living mourning.
Benjamin Chee visited
Auschwitz-Birkenau in late 1997, and has not forgotten.
Return to the Requiem Cycle Index... or read other reviews from archives of the Inkvault.
556: 3.8.1999 ©Benjamin Chee
...(they) formed a corridor and drove the panic-stricken people
towards the huge glade, where sticks, swearings and dogs who were
tearing people's bodies, forced them to undress, form into two columns
going towards the mouth of the ravine ... they found themselves on the
narrow ledge above the precipice, twenty to twenty-five metres high,
and on the opposite side were the Germans' machine guns. The killed,
wounded and half-dead fell down and were smashed there. The next
hundred were brought and everything repeated again. Children were
taken by the legs and thrown alive into the Yar.
In the space of 36 hours, the Einsatzkommando unit reported the
murder of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, one of the first and worst
atrocities of the Holocaust. And it did not end there: over the next
two years, the site would claim over 100,000 victims. An inscription
at the base of the commemorative monument states, "Here, in 1941-43,
the German Fascist invaders executed over 100,000 citizens of Kiev and
prisoners of war." It does not, however, say why they were killed.
When Shostakovich, in 1962, set the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko to
symphonic music for bass soloist, male chorus and large orchestra, he
was actually addressing subjects with which he had always been
grappling with in his artistic manifesto: the ideological themes of
war and revolution, prejudice and racism, as well as more ecumenical
issues like the roles and symbiosis between society and the artist.
I am each old man who was shot here,
I am each child who was shot here,
No part of me can ever forget this.
Let the "Internationale" thunder out
when the last anti-Semite on the earth
has been finally buried.
The final movement, "A career", is equally full of droll irony about
the pursuit of one's vocation in the face of political and
bureaucratic opposition - comedy here used as a device for pointing
out unpleasant truths in subtle ways - using no less an example than
that of Galileo against the church, and pointing out that
They're forgotten,
those who hurled curses,
but we remember
the ones who were cursed.