Was Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto a Hidden Homage?

Shostakovich’s direct quotation from the Odessan street song “Bagels, Buy My Bagels!” (Bubliki, kupite bubliki!) in his Second Cello Concerto Op. 126 (1966) featured an unusual style, even in relation to some of his other compositions referencing popular and Jewish music. The song is widely known as one of the icons of the Odessa underworld. Shostakovich’s use of this melody as one of the main leit-themes of the Concerto can be compared to the use by the non-Jewish Andrei Sinyavsky of the Jewish pseudonym Abram Tertz, a bandit from the Odessa underworld—the only locus of freedom to tell the truth in a totalitarian society. The time of Shostakovich’s address to this song remarkably coincided with the famous Soviet trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel in the fall of 1965 and their final sentencing (February 1966) to years in a Gulag camp. The dramaturgy of Shostakovich’s Concerto, written in the same spring of 1966, demonstrates the transformation of the theme of “Bagels” into a tragic image. The totality of circumstantial evidence suggests that this opus could be the composer’s hidden tribute to the feats of Russian heroic writers.