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Dmitri Shostakovich鈥檚 Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the 鈥楬olocaust of Bullets鈥� at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces together the events leading up to the controversial first performance by speaking to people who witnessed it in a Moscow concert hall 60 years ago: the composer鈥檚 son Maxim Shostakovich, the poet鈥檚 sister, Elena Yevtushenko and the music critic Iosif Raiskin.

One March day in 1962, the young Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko got an unexpected phone call. Dmitri Shostakovich was on the line asking if he had permission to set one of his verses to music. The poem, Babi Yar, denounces the massacre of 34,000 Jews in a ravine near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. It condemned not only Nazi atrocities, but also the Soviet Union鈥檚 state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. Officials responded by launching a vicious campaign against the poet and banning readings or new publications of his work.

So, Yevtushenko was delighted by the famous composer鈥檚 moral and artistic support. According to his sister Elena, he felt the music had 鈥渕ade the poem ten times stronger鈥�. But, as Maxim Shostakovich explains, the Soviet authorities tried to prevent the symphony from ever reaching an audience. The composer鈥檚 son recalls how his father was consumed with anxiety ahead of the premiere, still haunted by his narrow escape, decades earlier, from Stalin鈥檚 secret police.

Pauline Fairclough, author of a recent Shostakovich biography, says that, despite all the pressures, the composer never stopped experimenting with musical forms. Concert pianist Benjamin Goodman describes Shostakovich鈥檚 鈥榳ord painting鈥� technique and the ways in which he conveys Yevtushenko鈥檚 verse in music to create a sombre, chilling, but ultimately consoling choral symphony. At the Babyn Yar Memorial site in Kyiv, Lucy is shown fragments of a Russian rocket which hit a nearby apartment building last spring. In the midst of a new, 21st-century war, she reflects on the nature of artistic and political courage and parallels between the Khrushchev era and Russia under Putin today.

Producer Tatyana Movshevich