Dmytri Klebanov

Dmytri Klebanov was a Ukrainian composer whose career was destroyed in 1947 when Soviet authorities banned his First Symphony, written to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Babyn Yar massacre. The work, completed in 1945, was the first symphony about the Holocaust. After a single performance in Kharkiv in 1947, the piece was prohibited and Klebanov was stripped of his positions as head of the Kharkiv branch of the Union of Soviet Composers and dean of the Composition Department at the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute. He was accused of "distortion of historical truth about the Soviet people" for singling out Jewish victims rather than Soviet citizens generally, and labeled both a "rootless cosmopolitan"—code for Jew—and a "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist." His music remained largely unknown until after his death in 1987.

Born in Kharkiv in 1907 to a non-musical family, Klebanov was a violin prodigy who began learning the instrument at age six. A year later, he enrolled at the Kharkiv Institute of Music and Drama, becoming the youngest student in his class at age seven. He studied composition under Semyon Bogatyrev and graduated in 1926 at just nineteen years old.

After graduation, Klebanov joined the Leningrad Opera Orchestra as a violinist, where he played under conductors including Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber, and Otto Klemperer. He returned to Kharkiv to study conducting with Herman Adler and led the Kharkiv Radio Orchestra during the mid-1930s. In 1934, he was appointed lecturer at the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute.

His early compositions included the ballets Lelechnia (Little Storks) in 1937 and Svitlana in 1939, as well as a violin concerto in 1940. His earliest works—string quartets, a trio, songs, and instrumental pieces—were lost during World War II.

Wartime Evacuation and the Babyn Yar Symphony

In 1941, Klebanov was among 150,000 Jewish people apprehended by Nazi invaders and deported to Tashkent in the Uzbek SSR. The forced evacuation was part of a broader Soviet policy that had already sent millions of people from the western borders thousands of miles into eastern and central Siberia since 1936, under Stalinist repression.

While in Tashkent, Klebanov learned of the September 1941 massacre at Babyn Yar, a ravine near Kyiv where nearly 34,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. The atrocity prompted him to compose his First Symphony, which he dedicated "In Memoriam to the Martyrs of Babi Yar." He completed the work in 1945, basing it on Jewish traditional melodies, with the finale incorporating variations on "The Mourner's Kaddish" prayer.

Klebanov returned to Ukraine in late 1943, settling first in Kyiv before moving back to Kharkiv in 1945. Despite the virtual destruction of his country during the war, he resumed his musical career and was appointed to leadership positions in Ukrainian musical institutions.

The symphony received its premiere in Kharkiv in 1947 and was initially well-received in Ukraine. Plans were made for performances in Moscow, the Soviet Union's artistic centre, where success seemed assured. However, during rehearsals in 1949, the work was suddenly deemed unpatriotic for focusing on Jewish victims rather than Soviet casualties. The official party line held that those who perished during the war were all Soviet people, and singling out particular ethnicities was forbidden.

The performance was banned and Klebanov was publicly denounced. The critic who condemned him had written a favourable article about the symphony three years earlier, but by 1949 had reversed his position—likely to protect himself or align with official policy. This reversal illustrated the climate of fear that pervaded Soviet cultural life, where survival could depend on the kind of music one wrote.

Klebanov faced accusations of "bourgeois formalism" and "cosmopolitanism," and there were attempts to charge him with anti-Soviet activities. The attack on him was part of the broader campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" (a Soviet euphemism for Jews) that swept the Soviet Union after 1948, during which several poets, writers, painters, and sculptors were arrested or executed.

Adding to the charges against him was his String Quartet No. 4, written in 1946 and dedicated to the memory of Mykola Leontovych, a Ukrainian composer and separatist who had been murdered by the Soviet secret police in 1921. The quartet incorporated a melody by Leontovych that became known in the West as "Carol of the Bells." This dedication led to Klebanov being called a "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist," demonstrating the contradictory nature of the accusations against him.

Years in Obscurity

After his denunciation, Klebanov lost his prominent positions and any opportunities to have his music disseminated and published outside Ukraine became severely limited. He continued teaching but lived in relative obscurity, his career in ruins. His son Uri later noted that his father was fortunate compared to others—he escaped with a destroyed career rather than a bullet.

The restrictions on Klebanov eased somewhat during Nikita Khrushchev's "thaw" in 1960, when he was appointed professor at the Kharkiv Conservatory (later the Kharkiv Institute of Arts from 1963). He held this teaching position until 1987 and served on the jury of the third International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1966. Among his students were Valentin Bibik, Vitaliy Hubarenko, and Viktor Suslin. However, he never regained complete artistic freedom and acquired currency primarily within Ukraine, not beyond it.

Klebanov's Symphony No. 1 was not performed again during his lifetime. Despite the musical content being only minimally Jewish—a passage for solo oboe in the final movement that resembled a shofar and a mezzo-soprano solo—the dedication alone was sufficient to make it unacceptable. The symphony remained unperformed until 1990, three years after Klebanov's death, when conductor Ihor Blazhkov presented it in Kyiv. A 2011 performance in Kharkiv used a score copy containing numerous errors, as the original manuscript was unavailable.

His chamber music revealed a different compositional voice than his public works. The Piano Trio No. 2, completed in 1949, contained captivating themes and probing melodies that stood in stark contrast to a bombastic quintet written just four years earlier, in which Klebanov had stifled his creative instincts to satisfy Soviet ideology. His String Quartet No. 5 from 1959, written during a period when offending composers were simply ignored rather than persecuted, showed him experimenting with dissonance and bitonality.

Musical Output and Rediscovery

During his lifetime, Klebanov composed nine symphonies, two violin concertos, two cello concertos, six string quartets, a woodwind quartet, concertos for flute and harp, several operas including Red Cossacks (1972), ballets, nearly two dozen film scores, and about one hundred songs set to poetry by Taras Shevchenko, Heinrich Heine, and Aleksandr Pushkin. Despite this substantial output, only one of his works was ever commercially recorded during his life, and most of his compositions survive only in manuscript form.

Klebanov died in Kharkiv on June 6, 1987, his music largely forgotten. It was not until 2021 that the ARC Ensemble from Toronto's Royal Conservatory released the first commercial recording of his chamber works as part of their "Music in Exile" series, which focuses on music suppressed under repressive political regimes.

In 2024, the Babyn Yar National Historical and Cultural Museum obtained a photocopy of the original Symphony No. 1 manuscript and a more accurate handwritten copy, revealing that Klebanov had made important adjustments to the score after the 1947 premiere. Ukrainian composer Oleksandr Shchetinsky edited and prepared the musical material for performance, and on September 29, 2024, the National Honoured Academic Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine performed the work in its corrected edition at the National Philharmonic of Ukraine. The original score demonstrated that the symphony was rich in folklore of both Jewish and Ukrainian peoples, and that without it, the history of Ukrainian music remained incomplete.

Sources

"Symphony No. 1 'In Memory of the Babyn Yar Martyrs.'" Babyn Yar National Historical Memorial. https://babynyar.gov.ua/en/events/42/

"Klebanov, Dmytro." Encyclopedia of Ukraine. https://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages/K/L/KlebanovDmytro.htm

"Reduced to Anonymity: Ukrainian Composer Dmitri Klebanov." Interlude. https://interlude.hk/reduced-to-anonymity-ukrainian-composer-dmitri-klebanov/

"Chamber Works by Dmitri Klebanov: Resurrecting a Forgotten Composer." Interlude. https://interlude.hk/reduced-to-anonymity-ukrainian-composer-dmitri-klebanov/

"Klebanov Uncovered." The Royal Conservatory of Music. https://www.rcmusic.com/ggs/ggs-newsletter-archive/issue-20/klebanov-uncovered

"Ukrainian Composer Was Banned in Soviet Union." The Canadian Jewish News. https://thecjn.ca/arts-culture/ukrainian-composer-was-banned-in-soviet-union/