Shostakovich's Thirteenth: A Project Prospectus
Shostakovich’s Thirteenth: a project prospectus
The question
TL;DR: what did the symphony do to the people who heard it? My working reading: it made a community of its listeners.
The work
- Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony (1962) sets five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko for a bass soloist, a chorus of basses, and orchestra.
- Its first movement takes its words from «Бабий Яр» (“Babi Yar”), a poem about the ravine outside Kyiv where German units murdered the city’s Jews in September 1941, and about the silence that followed.
My question
What did the symphony do to the people who heard it?
My working reading
- Shostakovich used the symphony itself, as a form, to make a community of his listeners.
- In that community, Jewish suffering at Babi Yar could be heard alongside the audience’s own suffering under Soviet rule, political and otherwise.
- The other four movements, about humor, queues, fear and careers, help mark out that reading.
- So do the single bass voice and the chorus that sings almost entirely in unison, like the Soviet mass song.
- Khrushchev-era politics, above all its antisemitism and the ways Soviet people fashioned themselves, are central to it.
That is a working reading, not yet a finding.
Where it started
TL;DR: an undergraduate thesis, a talk and two essays; now taken up again at full length.
The history
| When | What |
|---|---|
| As an undergraduate | A thesis, at a conservatory of music, toward a Bachelor of Music; presented as a talk at a humanities symposium |
| A few years later | Two short essays |
| Now | Taken up again, at full length, as I experiment with the life of an independent scholar |
What the talk argued
The symphony as a monument: poet and composer together moving two suppressed pasts, antisemitism and Stalinism, into public speech.
Two observations I’m still carrying into my research
- The music avoids the “Jewish” idiom Shostakovich used elsewhere, which leaves it open.
- The chorus sings in unison, like the Soviet mass song.
What the essays added
- The mass-song idiom declaims identity as truth.
- The other four movements carry the linkage between Jewish and Soviet suffering.
What this project brings
TL;DR: the theory read in the original, the first receptions, two recordings, the audience itself, and the method in the open.
The theory, read in the original
- Paul Bekker’s 1918 claim that a symphony’s power is to form a community of its listeners.
- The Russian translation of it that Boris Asafyev edited in 1926.
- Asafyev’s theory of “symphonism” and intonation.
- Ivan Sollertinsky’s types of symphonic drama.
This is the line of thought the Thirteenth’s first critics stood in. I’m reading it in Russian and German, translating the key texts myself.
The immediate receptions
Each work arrived into a reaction that is itself evidence. I treat that first reception as a critical envelope around the work, to investigate and analyze in its own right.
| Work | Its first reception |
|---|---|
| The poem (1961) | Its attacks in the press, and the readers’ letters that defended it |
| The symphony (1962–63) | The Party’s meetings with the intelligentsia; the one short notice after the premiere and the editorial that followed; the changes made to the text under pressure in 1963; a letter from the performances in Minsk that year reporting how the audience reacted |
Two recordings, two rooms
| Recording | Words | Room |
|---|---|---|
| Kirill Kondrashin, live, December 1962, during the premiere run | The original words | Its first audience in the hall |
| Kondrashin, in the studio, 1967 | The revised words | No audience at all |
Everything I can learn about how those performances differed, and about the audiences who heard the work in those years, feeds one question: does the music mean differently when the words, and the room, change?
The audience itself
- The literature on Soviet self-fashioning, on how Soviet readers and listeners took in socially critical work, and on identification and emotion in listening.
- These are new lines of research for this project, and they are where it goes furthest beyond where it began.
Method in the open
How the work is organized, what the tools do, and where the line sits between my judgment and an AI research assistant’s help are set out on how this research works.
The argument, as it stands
TL;DR: each part of the argument, at its level. None is a claim yet.
- Working reading: productive, not yet tested.
- Hypothesis: stated so evidence could tell against it.
- Claim: tested, and I stand on it.
| Part | Level |
|---|---|
| The symphony uses the symphonic form to make an identity community among its listeners, joining Jewish suffering to their own | Working reading |
| Poet and composer erect a monument, bringing two suppressed pasts, antisemitism and Stalinism, into public speech | Hypothesis (argued in the thesis) |
| The absence of a borrowed Jewish idiom leaves the music open, making room for the Stalinist subtext | Hypothesis (argued in the thesis) |
| The unison chorus takes up the idiom of the mass song, which declaims identity as truth | Hypothesis (argued in the thesis, extended since) |
| Movements 2 to 5 extend the reading to the suffering of Shostakovich’s fellow citizens | Working reading |
| The single bass voice is meaningful | Working reading |
| Khrushchev-era cultural politics, its antisemitism and Soviet self-fashioning, are central, not background | Working reading |
| The work sits on the line between the sincere and the ironic Soviet generations | Working reading |
The path ahead
TL;DR: one ordered path, the event first and the writing last. It will change as I learn.
The order
- The ground: setting up the citation and translation tools, and one hearing of the whole symphony, score shut, before I read anything about it.
- The event: the poems, the premiere, and the documents of 1961 to 1963, read before any theory.
- The theory: Bekker, Asafyev and Sollertinsky, then the Mahler bridge from their theory to Shostakovich, then the theory of community, memory and many voices.
- The Soviet reading of the symphony, as its own critics and scholars wrote it.
- The contexts: the Jewish question in Shostakovich and in Soviet policy, and the Thaw and Soviet self-fashioning.
- The other voices: recent studies of the Thirteenth, read as sparring partners.
- The score and the recordings, analyzed in full once I know what to listen for.
- The writing: a first short essay once the theory is read, and at the end a long study built from the argument as it stands then.
Alongside: two translation projects
- Boris Asafyev’s Musical Form as a Process, both books, running alongside the reading from the start.
- The libretto: the five poems as Shostakovich set them, with the lines changed in 1963, made into a bilingual text as part of the event.
Follow along
- The full list of sources, in order, with ticks as I finish them: the sources page.
- Dated notes along the way: the research log.