symphony no. 13 (shostakovich)

The Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor (Opus 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. The work has five movements:

Adagio (Babi Yar)
Allegretto (Humour)
Adagio (In The Store)
Largo (Fears)
Allegretto (A Career)

More of a song cycle than a symphony, it is a vocal setting of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko on the WW II Babi Yar massacre and other topics. The first poem, Babi Yar, implicitly criticises Soviet anti-Semitism. It was released during a thaw in Soviet censorship, but even so it was criticised before the premiere by Nikita Khrushchev, who tried to stop its performance. The premiere went ahead, but afterwards Yevtushenko was forced to add a stanza to his poem claiming that Russians and Ukranians died alongside the Jews at Babi Yar. Thereafter the work was infrequently performed. The work is strongly influenced by Mahler and Mussorgsky.

External link

Texts of the poems in Russian and English translation.

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