Discussion
This paper investigates how Mieczysław Weinberg’s Symphony No. 6 (1962–63) constructs a musical site of memory for the Babi Yar massacre, within the framework of cultural memory. While Soviet cultural discourse largely erased the specifically Jewish dimension of wartime suffering, Weinberg’s symphony re-inscribes that silenced memory through musical means.
Composed in the immediate aftermath of the controversy surrounding Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony (Babi Yar), Weinberg chose a more introspective and spiritual mode of commemoration. Its use of a children’s choir—an emblem of socialist optimism in the Soviet context—becomes instead the spectral voice of the murdered Jewish children. Textual differences between the Yiddish original of Samuel Halkin’s poem Tife griber, royte leym (“Deep Pits, Red Clay”), its Russian translation, and the modified version used in the symphony reveal the Soviet effort to neutralize or universalize Jewish suffering. Weinberg, however, restores this lost identity and specificity through musical language—triggering Jewish cultural memory via Yiddish modal inflections and Kaddish-like melodic gestures. Through musical symbols of death and war, fragmented repetition, and displaced rhythmic structures, Symphony No. 6 also embodies the sonorities of trauma.
Ultimately, the work stands as a sound monument—a counter-memorial that resists Soviet narratives of heroism and silence. As James E. Young observes, “the more memory comes to rest in its exteriorized forms, the less it is experienced internally.” This study aims to explore how Weinberg’s musical language decodes and reconfigures memory, combining close musical analysis with socio-cultural contextual interpretation.
