Dmitri Klebanov
Dmytro Lvovich Klebanov was born in 1907 to a working-class Jewish family in Kharkiv, Ukraine. A musical prodigy, he enrolled at the Kharkiv Conservatory at age 16, where he would later return as professor of composition (and where he would meet his wife Nina, the conservatory director). His burgeoning reputation as a composer in the Soviet Union in the 1930s speaks to his talent and tenacity at a time when Stalin’s government was targeting and disappearing Ukrainian artists and intellectuals—a period known as the Executed Renaissance.
When the Nazi army invaded Ukraine in 1941, Klebanov and his family, along with thousands of other Soviet Jews, were relocated to Uzbekistan; they returned home in 1944 to find horrific destruction and loss of life, including Klebanov’s brother, a soldier in the Soviet army. With this backdrop, Klebanov immediately began work on his First Symphony, dedicating it to the victims of the September 1941 massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews at the hands of the occupying Nazis at the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv (some 17 years later, Babi Yar would also be the theme of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13).
Klebanov’s Symphony No. 1 premiered in 1946 in Kharkiv, and its public success moved it to be submitted for the 1949 Stalin Prize. The score’s arrival in Moscow, however, led not to commendation, but condemnation: Stalin’s cultural authorities connected the symphony’s dedication to its Jewish melodic influences, and claimed that by using such sources, Klebanov had “unpatriotically” and “insolently” dedicated it specifically to Jewish, rather than Soviet, victims of the massacre.
Any additional performances of the symphony were canceled, and Klebanov found himself blacklisted. His wife’s stature as conservatory director likely saved him from deportation or worse, but a ruling by the Union of Soviet Composers stripped him of his titles as Head of the Kharkiv Conservatory’s Composition Department and as Chair of the local Composers’ Union. Klebanov was allowed to remain at his post in Kharkiv, but was he effectively shunned and isolated. He would not hear his symphony again before his death in 1987.
From its first notes, the symphony invokes a curious specter: Beethoven’s famous Ninth Symphony, with its descending fourths and fifths over a rustling bed of tremolando strings. At the same time, this first theme conjures an image of falling, as if into the Babi Yar ravine itself. A gentler, nostalgic second theme is introduced in contrast, based on the opposite motion of a rising fourth.
The Scherzo second movement opens with mysterious celli and basses and soon becomes a rousing, brutal dance in 3/4 time. A romantic arioso theme for the violins opens the middle Trio section, which slowly builds to a raucous climax and settles back to a softer sequence of yearning woodwind solos.
The third movement, a funeral march, recalls the nostalgic second theme of the first movement with its rising fourth, now a dark and somber solo for the bass clarinet. An animated, ferocious middle section summons the first theme of the first movement once again, before a final, grand statement of the Funeral March theme collapses into the most evocative moment of the symphony: the March theme, sung wordlessly by a contralto vocal solo. The ghost of a synagogue cantor, perhaps—a victim of the massacre.
The Finale erupts in a bombastic paraphrase of the Presto Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, leading to a series of cello-bass recitatives interspersed with recollections of previous movements of the symphony—again, the same architecture as Beethoven’s finale. Klebanov’s recitatives have a singspeak-like intonation that seems to evoke a Hebrew recitation: the Mourner’s Kaddish prayer, perhaps. An English horn solo emulates a shofar, the traditional ram’s horn blown during the Jewish High Holidays.
Klebanov then builds a tightly-constructed fugue, its boisterous subject built around the intervals of the recitative motif, which leads to a reprise of the opening Presto. What follows can only be described as a satire of the Ode to Joy itself, introduced with soft celli and basses in the same way Beethoven presents his famous melody. Klebanov’s mock-Ode theme undergoes a series of dramatic variations before ending up a militaristic trumpet duet punctuated by orchestral cannon fire. The recitative returns, now in an aggressive, off-kilter ostinato, which leads finally to the coda: the return of the first movement “Babi Yar” theme, now rising victoriously as an exuberant brass fanfare, in conversation with the Hebraic recitative in the low voices below.
It does not strain the imagination to interpret these references to Beethoven as an act of defiance against Ukraine’s erstwhile invaders, holding up a mirror to the Germanic music the Nazis once touted as proof of their own superiority while juxtaposing it against Jewish-inspired melodies. “Despite their atrocities against our people,” the subtext might read, “we are still here.”
Program note written by Music Director Nicholas Hersh