Silent Screams and How to Hear Them: Censorship, Artistic Integrity, and Shostakovich's 13th Symphony By Elizabeth Spencer In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, composers struggled to create music deemed acceptable by the censorious new regime. By the 1930s, the creative parameters were sufficiently established for the genre of Soviet Realism to emerge. It would remain the official musical style of the Soviet Union until the reforms of the late 1980s. Working within and against such boundaries, Dmitri Shostakovich used music to understand the world around him. That he maintained his artistic integrity in the face of repressive strictures make his one of the most revered names among Russian composers. While much of his musical portfolio was deemed by official ears to comply with Soviet Realism, a few of his more personal works fell afoul of state censors. Notable among these was a five-movement1 masterpiece, the result of an extensive collaboration with the radical Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, that is known to contemporary audiences as Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony. Each movement interweaves a Yevtushenko poem with Shostakovich’s musical orchestration and addresses social injustices the Soviet government would prefer to deny, but from which the artists refused to look away. They include poverty, gender inequality, and the religious discrimination by which the Soviet state attempted to erase the memory of a WWII-era massacre of Jewish people that did not fit its propagandist narrative. The lyrics and orchestration of Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony combine to invoke injustice with an urgency that continues to ring true. Together, 1 A movement is defined in music as being a self-contained part of a composition. Akin to how chapters are in a novel. 72
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