Leningrad

summoned to the Radio House to make a national broadcast, from a text closely echoing Leningradskaya Pravda’s ‘The Enemy is at the Gates’ editorial of the previous day. He was speaking, he told listeners, from the front line. But though a battle to the death was joined outside the city walls, inside life went on as normal, as proven by the fact that two hours ago he had completed the first movement of a new symphony.

The first person to hear the symphony’s outline, on a ‘steel-grey, depressing sort of day’ six weeks before, had been his secretary, Isaak Glikman:

He told me that he wanted me to hear the first pages of his new work. After a moment’s hesitation he played the exposition and variation of the theme depicting the Fascist invasion. We were both extremely agitated; it was a rare event for Shostakovich to play with such manifest emotion. Afterwards we sat for a while in silence, which Shostakovich finally broke with the words (I wrote them down) ‘I don’t know what the fate of this piece will be.’ After another pause he added, ‘I suppose that critics with nothing better to do will damn me for copying Ravel’s Bolero. Well, let them. That’s how I hear war.’4

Equally moved was the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who was among a group of musicians Shostakovich invited to his flat to hear a fuller run-through two days after his broadcast.

Unanimously we asked him to play it again. But the sirens rang out — another air-raid alert. Shostakovich suggested that we take a short break while he helped his wife and children, Galina and Maksim, down to the air- raid shelter. Left to ourselves, we sat in silence. No words seemed appropriate to what we had just heard.5

Realising the new work’s propaganda value, in early October the authorities evacuated Shostakovich and his family by air to Moscow. From Moscow they travelled, in a chaotically overcrowded train (for a horrible half- hour the symphony’s manuscript was thought lost), to the Volga town of Kuibyshev. There, despite shared living quarters and desperate anxiety for his mother, sister and in-laws left behind in Leningrad, Shostakovich finished the Seventh’s orchestration.

Its various premieres — in Kuibyshev on 5 March 1942, in Moscow (in the Kremlin’s Hall of Columns) on the 29th, and in London and New York in June and July — were sensations. ‘The Seventh Symphony’, Pravda exulted after the Kuibyshev performance, ‘is the creation of the conscience of the Russian people. . Hitler didn’t scare Shostakovich; Shostakovich is a Russian man.’6 Attending the Moscow concert, Olga Berggolts passionately wished that her dead husband could be there too — ‘Oh what sorrow that I can’t tell Kolya about it. How terrible and unfair that he can’t hear it. . Inside I was weeping all the time, listening to the first part, and was so exhausted from the unbearable tension that the middle section disappeared somehow. Did they hear it in Leningrad?’7 For Alexander Werth, also listening in Moscow, the symphony reflected ‘infinite pity for the Russian people’, and its sinister pipe and drum march, repeated eleven times at ever-increasing volume, the feeling that ‘naked evil, in all its stupendous, arrogant, inhumanly terrifying power’, was overrunning the country.8

The symphony’s London premiere — held on the first anniversary of Barbarossa — was broadcast across the Empire. Its opening movement, the announcer intoned in what he was instructed should be a ‘sincere’ and ‘enthusiastic’ voice, introduced two themes. The first was ‘straightforward and sturdy, like the plain, tanned faces of the millions of Soviet men and women who gathered together on Sunday 22 June last year, in the midst of peaceful, joyous life’. The second symbolised the German invasion — ‘the theme of the Fascists — brutal, senseless, implacable’. (References to its ‘insidious’ and ‘sardonic’ nature were cut from the script.) ‘If you have ears to hear and heart to feel’, the announcer sonorously concluded, ‘I am sure you will agree that that music tells a story of sublime heroism, of unquenchable faith in victory.’9 A proms performance followed under the baton of Sir Henry Wood, for which six thousand people packed the Albert Hall.

In New York the symphony sparked a tussle between the great conductors Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, both of whom lobbied the Soviet embassy for the honour of directing its first performance. Toscanini and his NBC Orchestra won, and though Shostakovich privately loathed his interpretation (‘He minces it up and pours a disgusting sauce all over it’), it glued millions of Americans to their radios. Time magazine celebrated the event by putting ‘Fireman Shostakovich’ on the cover, strapline ‘Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad, he heard the chords of victory’. During the 1942–3 season the symphony was performed sixty-two times in the United States, many of the concerts turning into public demonstrations of support for a second front. Determined not to be outdone again by NBC, CBS paid the Soviet government $10,000 for whatever symphony Shostakovich composed next. Shostakovich himself, though praised to the skies in the Soviet press, was unnerved by it all — ‘A new success’, he later said, ‘meant a new coffin nail.’10

The Seventh’s final and most poignant premiere was that held in Leningrad itself, on 9 August 1942. The city’s more prestigious orchestras having been evacuated as the siege ring closed, the performance fell to the Radio Committee Symphony, directed by Karl Eliasberg. Though severely depleted by the draft, the orchestra had continued to perform as the mass-death winter set in. It had given its last public concert (of Tchaikovsky) on 14 December, in the Philharmonia’s freezing blue and white Great Hall, and its last live broadcast on New Year’s Day 1942, of excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden (the lead tenor, I. A. Lapshenkov, barely made it through his aria and died the same evening). A few weeks later Berggolts overheard Makogonenko dictating a memo: ‘Leader, first violins — dead. Bassoon — near death. Senior percussionist — dead.’11 Twenty-seven members of the orchestra had perished altogether.

At the end of February 1942 the Radio Committee announced that the orchestra was being reconstituted, and broadcast an appeal requesting all musicians left in the city to report for registration. When only sixteen did so, Eliasberg hauled himself out of the statsionar in the Hotel Astoria and hobbled from apartment to apartment urging the bedridden on to their feet. The first rehearsals, an oboist remembers, were only forty minutes long, and she was embarrassed to see friends’ faces dirty with soot, and lice crawling over their collars. Meals were provided, though most took the extra food home to their families. A first concert — of waltzes, and extracts from The Nutcracker and Swan Lake — was held on 5 April, in the vast Aleksandrinsky Theatre. The oboist watched Eliasberg mount the podium:

Karl Ilyich came out all starched, in tails. But when he raised his arms his hands shook. I had this feeling that he was a bird that had just been shot, that at any moment he would plummet to the ground. . After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he began to conduct.

When we finished the first piece the audience started to applaud, but there was no sound because everyone was wearing mittens. Looking out at the crowd, you couldn’t tell who was a man and who was a woman — the women were all wrapped up, and the men were wearing scarves and shawls, or even women’s fur coats. Afterwards we were all so inspired, because we knew that we had done our job and that our work would continue.12

Rehearsals for the Shostakovich began in mid-July, only a few weeks before the premiere. Scored for eight horns, six trombones, five timpanists, two harps and a minimum of sixty-two strings, the symphony far outran the Radio Committee’s resources, though extra brass players were drafted in from military bands, and given manual workers’ ration cards. Microfilm of the score arrived by air from Sweden, and each musician copied out his own part by hand. The male players were provided with jackets and the females with dark dresses — though they looked, the oboist remembered, as if they were hanging on coathangers. On the morning of the concert — its date the first anniversary of that on which Hitler was said to have planned to hold a victory banquet at the Astoria — General Govorov mounted a special Operation Squall, so as to prevent disruption from air raids or barrages. Inside the grandee-packed auditorium the performance itself was ragged, but the atmosphere overwhelming. ‘Some wept’, remembered a woman in the audience,

because that was the only way in which they could express their excitement, others because they had lived through what the music was now expressing with such force, many because they were grieving for those they had lost, many because they were overcome with the mere fact of being present here in the Philharmonia.