Lucky 13

As a young man of 27, Dmitry Shostakovich treated the Soviet Union to a feast of sex, murder and dissonance in his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (revised in 1962 and retitled Katerina Ismailovd). At its first performance in 1934, Joseph Stalin loathed every note of it. He and the Communist Party denounced Shostakovich for his bourgeois musical tastes and, ever since, the composer has been sliding in and out of party favor. Too talented and far too famous to be squelched, he produced symphonies, ballets, choruses, chamber music. He alternately soothed the ultraconservative ears of the commissars with "music for the people" or outraged them by straying into atonality.

That part of the world which cared more about music than politics watched Shostakovich's career with concern. Left to his own devices, there was clear evidence that Shostakovich might develop into a great composer. But would he ever be given a chance?

In the late '50s and early '60s, after Nikita Khrushchev had rolled back Stalinism, it seemed that the time had come. The young poet Evgeny Evtushenko had just emerged as the public voice of the uneasy new freedom. His poem Babi Yar, a passionate denunciation of Soviet antiSemitism, read aloud to thousands of Russians, was becoming a symbol of popular outrage at past and present repression.

Grumpy Greeting. Boldly Shostakovich chose to compose his 13th symphony, basing it on Babi Yar. The 60-minute composition had five movements. Utilizing a large male chorus and a baritone soloist, Shostakovich used the complete poem for his first movement, choosing other Evtushenko verses for the remaining four. The 1962 Moscow premiere was an unequivocal public success. Government reaction was a different matter. Pravda treated the symphony with near silence--a grumpy one-line sentence to the effect that the performance had taken place. There were no reviews. The composition was withdrawn for ideological repairs. With a few lines added to the text, explaining that persons besides Jews had been murdered at Babi Yar, it was played again in 1963, then in 1965. Then it disappeared.

Or almost. A tape recording of the 1965 performance, brought out by Everest Records, reached the U.S. in 1967. The American Record Guide gave it a review, tracing the symphony's troubled background. As a result, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 developed a tiny but devoted flock of listeners. It was only this month, however, that the original version of the symphony finally received a full-scale performance outside the Soviet Union.

It was treated with lavish care by Conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Capacity audiences first in Philadelphia, then last week in Manhattan, roared approval of Shostakovich's grim, powerful music and offered special bravos to Ormandy and the black, Slavic sound of Finnish Baritone Tom Krause.

The symphony proved worth the long wait. Though it unveiled nothing new about Shostakovich's development, it did show a coherence and a meeting of passion and skill often absent from his work. The reproachful words of Babi Yar ("and I myself am like an endless, soundless cry over these thousands and thousands of buried ones") were projected by dirgelike music that sounded both angry and elegiac. Another movement, subtitled "At the Store," conjured up a never-never-land of country life, of clinking pots and pans, with cellos and double basses plodding through a long cycle of drudgery. But it was in the closing moments of "A Career" that Shostakovich came closest to fulfilling the hopes of his admirers. With the orchestra thinned to a graceful violin solo, the symphony melts into an oddly resigned tranquillity as Evtushenko muses, "Hail to a career, when the career is that of a Shakespeare or Pasteur . . . Why were they all belittled? The defamers are forgotten, only the defamed are remembered. Therefore I shall make a career for myself by not working at one." For the composer as well as the poet, the words were clearly autobiographical.

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