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A Premiere Recalls the Horror of Babi Yar By BENJAMIN SOSLAND
Like many cataclysmic moments in world history, the story of what happened at a place called Babi Yar has assumed an almost mythical, unreal significance, due in equal parts to the considerable efforts that have been made to sustain and commemorate it, and to the fact that any retelling can never fully impart the true nature of the events that unfolded some 65 years ago.
On Sunday, September 28, 1941, German soldiers posted a sign in the Russian city of Kiev:
All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o'clock on the morning of Monday, September 29, 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. Any civilian entering flats evacuated by Jews and stealing property will be shot.
The following day, tens of thousands of Kiev's 175,000 Jews dutifully followed the instructions, falsely believing that they would be loaded onto train cars and relocated. As the crowd reached critical mass, German soldiers unleashed a barrage of machine gun fire. The killing would last for two days. More than 33,000 Jews, along with other "undesirables," including Gypsies and prisoners of war, were massacred. Their naked, beaten bodies formed a massive pile in a ravine called Babi Yar.
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| Dmitri Shostakovich (Photo courtesy of G. Schirmer Inc. ) |
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After World War II ended, various attempts were made to create a memorial at Babi Yar, but Soviet policies restricted such commemorations. In the 1950s, a dam was erected, and the ravine was filled with water. Poorly constructed, the dam gave way in 1961, flooding the surrounding area and causing considerable casualties. Shortly after the flood, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited what remained of Kiev. To him, the damage represented nothing less than a failed effort to cover up—literally—the events of Babi Yar. One of Russia's most outspoken and controversial artists, Yevtushenko was moved to write his now-famous poem, "Babi Yar." In it, the poet casts himself as a Jew throughout history.
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.
The vision is decidedly grim, as the poem conjures images of everyone from Jesus ("Here I perish crucified on the cross") to Dreyfus ("Hounded, spat on, slandered") to an anonymous boy in Bialystok who witnesses his mother being attacked by soldiers ("Beat up the Yids. Save Russia").
Yevtushenko's poem gained national prominence when Dmitri Shostakovich used it in the first movement of his Symphony No. 13, premiered in 1962. Subtitled "Babi Yar," the symphony calls for a large orchestra, a bass soloist, and a male chorus. The first movement contains Yevtushenko's complete poem. For his part, Shostakovich took pains to make sure every word is understood. Despite the forces involved, the orchestra is often a subdued, sinister presence, sometimes unleashing its full force as musical commentary on the most vivid sections of the poem. For example, a reference to Anne Frank ("transparent as a branch in April") is met with music of child-like innocence. The image is shattered when a gentle booming sound, first thought to be the melting ice of spring, turns out to be knocking on the door—a death knell—as the Frank family's hiding place is discovered. Faintly militaristic music becomes twisted, almost deformed as Yevtushenko accuses his countrymen:
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The anti-Semites have proclaimed themselves
The "Union of the Russian People!"
Throughout the entire movement, the male chorus sings in unison. Here, too, Shostakovich brings Yevtushenko's chilling words to the fore. In the hands of a large chorus of tenors and basses—male ensembles form the signature sound of Russian liturgical music—the notion of a proud "Mother Russia" is dispatched with biting irony.
I recently had the good fortune to attend the dress rehearsal for a "world premiere" setting of the first movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan. Through some Internet sleuthing, the museum's executive director, David G. Marwell, discovered the existence of a two-piano version, written by Shostakovich, which had never been performed. With the consent of the composer's widow—Mr. Marwell told me that the score had been sitting on a shelf in the Shostakovich home since its creation—the museum enlisted the necessary forces to perform the piece, including the husband-and-wife pianists and Juilliard graduates Misha and Cipa Dichter, the bass Valentin Peytchinov (an alum of the Juilliard Opera Center), and a large male chorus conducted by Patrick Gardiner. The performance coincided with the 65th anniversary of Babi Yar, as well as the 100th anniversary of the composer's year of birth.
It was an especially personal moment for the Dichters, as Mr. Dichter related in an e-mail message. "Participating in the world premiere of Shostakovich's two-piano setting of the 'Babi Yar' Symphony was, without doubt, one of the most moving experiences of our more than 40 years of playing concerts. There were so many levels of emotion that were opened up to us. First, Yevtushenko's chilling depiction of the horrors of that period brought back memories of our own families' plight during that period. My parents had escaped across Russia two years prior, and my wife's had fled in the '20s." Indeed, Yevtushenko's "chilling" words were difficult to avoid; they were read by the poet himself at the museum.
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| The Museum of Jewish Heritage commemorated the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre on Wednesday evening, September 27, 2006, with "Babi Yar Remembered: Yevtushenko and Shostakovich in Word and Song." From left: Bass soloist Valetin Peytchinov (standing with scarf) and pianists Misha and Cipa Dichter at the piano, as Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko reads his poetry against a backdrop of male singers from the Riverside Choral Society, Rutgers University Kirkpatrick Choir, and Rutgers University Glee Club. (Photo by Melanie Einzig ) |
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Born in 1933, Yevtushenko, a wiry, intense man with sunken cheeks and short gray hair, speaks in heavily accented English and dresses with considerable flair—he wore a seersucker suit in variegated stripes, a shiny yellow necktie, and two wrists full of beaded bracelets. He could rightly be described as "a character." During the course of a brief interview, I asked him about the censorship of his poem. "In [a] letter from Central Committee I was accused that I didn't say that together with some Jews were buried also some Ukrainians and Russians," he said. He believed that the letter was a fabrication. The official line in Soviet Russia was that anti-Semitism did not exist, and people like Yevtushenko and Shostakovich were propagating a myth. The poem was published in its original form, but was altered (they "edited a few lines," said Mr. Yevtushenko) for performance. Quickly after the premiere, the Soviet government banned the symphony. It was not played again until 1971.
In the "Babi Yar" Symphony, Shostakovich asks us as an audience to reflect upon events whose nature defies our darkest imagining. To describe the music of this work as dark is to use too mild a word. The first movement unfolds with the insidious inky blackness of fear and anger, regret, and bitterness. Shostakovich gives voice to his own conflicted, complicated relationship to his homeland and its history by holding up a single event, perpetrated by a few, as evidence of mankind's deepest failings. The impact of the message is made all the more palpable by Mr. Yevtushenko, who clearly internalized the horrific events of Babi Yar on an intensely personal level. His poem is not so much a diatribe against political inertia and collective collusion—although its political implications are blatantly, defiantly on its surface—as it is a public excoriation by a man whose pride in his country and expectations in humanity died on the outskirts of Kiev in the autumn of 1941.
After hearing two run-throughs of Shostakovich's two-piano setting during the dress rehearsal, I came away deeply moved, but fatigued. After my chat with Yevtushenko, as we made our way down to the museum's lobby, I wondered if there would always be certain aspects of history that I would never fully understand. For those of us who are fortunate enough never to have experienced repression, or worse, I wondered if the events of Babi Yar, and all the other places that have witnessed the very worst that humanity has to offer, will always be removed by a degree or two. After all, like music, historical events are temporal. Both exist in time—when they are gone, they're gone. Although we may be inexorably changed from having experienced them, the passage of time works to dull our senses, and to change our perspective.
Then as Mr. Yevtushenko and I exited the elevator it hit me like a slap in the face. Assembled in the lobby were 50 Holocaust survivors waiting to have their picture taken with the famous poet. Each had pinned a yellow Star of David, the scarlet letter of the Nazi regime, on his or her lapel. Whatever distance the passage of time had created suddenly disintegrated as I watched the eminent poet walk forward to greet the crowd. Benjamin Sosland, a D.M.A. candidate in voice, also serves as publications coordinator and assistant to the artistic director in the Vocal Arts Department. |
