Dmitri's Dacha

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

The text of the first movement was objected to. There was a revised text that the censors accepted, but nowadays I'm pretty certain that all recordings would use the original text. Even with the changes, the symphony got very few performances.

The other interesting thing is that the text of the 4th movement, "Fears", was written by Yevtushenko specifically at Shostakovich's request for use in the symphony. The other movements were pre-existing poems, but "Fears" was new. And I've just read (maybe for the first time) that some lines in "Fears" were also censored and changed.

Thanks for the information. Fascinating history.

[Karl Henning]

From Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered

The year 1962 was a year of particular importance in Shostakovich's life, bringing him private happiness and creative success. Early in the year he met Irina Supinskaya, a young literary editor, whom he married in November. She brought to his life the freshness and energy of youth, and stability and order to his home. As his health deteriorated, she was to look after him with tactful care and devotion.
In the spring, Shostakovich completed a cantata on Evtushenko's poem 'Babi Yar'.  He shortly went on to extend it into a five-movement symphony, his thirteenth, scored for bass soloist, bass chorus and full symphony orchestra. Shostakovich's departure from the purely instrumental symphonic form (albeit his last two symphonies were tied to programmes) fulfilled a need for dramatic expression that had been stifled in the wake of the criticisms of Lady Macbeth in 1936. For Shostakovich the choice of Evtushenko's poems seemed most auspicious. The poet belonged to a generation young enough to be unintimidated by the years of terror. Shostakovich saw these poems as an expression of the problems of civic responsibility. Hence, in this symphony he was able to demonstrate openly his concern for the horrors and injustices of recent Soviet history. Soon Shostakovich found himself embroiled in a political controversy on account of the texts. For him this was a further corroboration of the fact that the explicit nature of words always spelt trouble. The party aired its 'opinion' on the ideological faults of  'Babi Yar'. This had the desired effect of frightening off performers of the Thirteenth Symphony, and indeed of making Evtushenko revise the poem.  However, even if the 'Thaw' was drawing to a close, the freedom tasted in the last few years had also given artists a new courage. In the conductor Kirill Kondrashin Shostakovich found an artist absolutely committed to his work. The authorities were unable to stop the premiere of the Thirteenth Symphony, which went ahead to wild public acclaim on 18 December 1962.
Only days after this concert, the premiere of Katerina Izmailova (the revised version of the opera Lady Macbeth ) took place at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko theater in Moscow. The rehabilitation of this work was of great symbolic importance to Shostakovich.

[Karl Henning]

From Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered

On 27 March 1962 Shostakovich completed his setting of Evtushenko's poem 'Babi Yar' to music'  initially his concept was to write a one-movement cantata. By this time Evtushenko was already being subjected to a campaign of criticism. The poet was accused of belittling the role of the Russian people, who had taken the brunt of suffering during the war years, by writing of the exclusively Jewish victims of the 1941 Nazi massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine in the town of Kiev [...]
In effect Shostakovich set  'Babi Yar' as a series of scenes (The Dreyfus Affair, the Belostok pogroms, and the story of Anna Frank),  which serve as extended interludes to the main refrain of the poem. This solution also dictated the compositional structure of the symphony's first movement. The theatrical element is achieved by graphic illustration; for instance the mockery of the imprisoned Dreyfus by ladies poking umbrellas at him through the prison grate can be heard in the accented pair of quavers of mocking brass. The following grotesque G minor episode vividly depicts the Jewish boy's terror. Kicked to the floor by the perpetrators of the program, his futile pleas for mercy only goad them on to further violence committed under the slogan 'Beat the Yids and Save Russia'. Shostakovich's attitude to such misjudged chauvinism is made evident through musical comment, when he transforms the accompaniment of slurred crotches into accented syncopation, creating a parody of the 'style Russe' of the song 'Akh, vy seni, moi seni' (Oh, my hay, my hay!' . Unlike the familiar version we know from Stravinsky's Petrushka, it is set in the minor and in the grumbling register of bassoons and low brass.
The menacing build up in the Anna Frank 'scene' illustrates the hunting down of the victims, while Anna deludes herself that she is hearing the cracking of ice in spring. (Here Shostakovich effectively pits the power of the large male chorus against the single line of the soloist.) The image of the breaking down of the door unleashes a section of overwhelming terror and violence in the orchestra, leading to the movement's culmination with the return of the original theme in three fortes (fff) and in full tutti.

[Madiel]

The Anne Frank episode is my go-to example for why knowing what is being sung about is valuable.

I didn't really know the first time I heard the symphony what was being sung, except in vague terms (I had a copy of Andre Previn's recording that didn't come with the text but it had some general liner notes).

The 2nd time, I had the text and translation. The Anne Frank bit, especially how it ends with the door being broken down as described in the above post, hit me like a thunderbolt.