Taking a detour away from the Scottish theme today to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
I’ve chosen the first movement of Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony. It is fitting with the day – apart from its words it is not “easy” music to listen to. The video has a helpful translation of the Russian text – but it is probably worth a little extra background as well.
On 29 and 30 September 1941, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered approximately 33,771 Jewish civilians at Babi Yar. This was one of the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust.
The music is a setting of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko – some words from wikipedia:
In this movement, Shostakovich and Yevtushenko transform the 1941 massacre by Nazis of Jews at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, into a denunciation of anti-Semitism in all its forms. Shostakovich sets the poem as a series of theatrical episodes — the Dreyfus affair, the Białystok pogrom and the story of Anne Frank — lending the movement the dramatic structure and theatrical imagery of opera. For instance, the mocking of the imprisoned Dreyfus by poking umbrellas at him through the prison bars may be in an accentuated pair of eighth notes in the brass, with the build-up of menace in the Anne Frank episode, culminating in the musical image of the breaking down of the door to the Franks’ hiding place, which underlines the hunting down of that family. The Russian people are not the anti-Semites, they are “internationals”, and the music is briefly hymn-like before dissolving into the cacophony of those who falsely claim to be working for the people.