On August 29, 1941, elements of the German Sixteenth Army seized the strategically important railroad town of Mga, some thirty miles southeast of Leningrad, the old Russian capital formerly known as St. Petersburg. A desperate counterattack by Soviet units defending the celebrated city of Peter the Great and Lenin recaptured Mga the next day, but on the thirty-first, Wehrmacht soldiers again wrested the town from the Red Army’s grip. By early September it was clear that the German advance post would hold, effectively severing the last railroad line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union, a fact trumpeted in a communiqué from German army headquarters declaring that ‘the iron ring around Leningrad has been closed.’

This act signaled the beginning of the most prolonged, brutal, and dramatic siege of World War II. Leningrad’s struggle not only earned it a place in the military annals of the Soviet-German war but also inspired a monumental musical composition that continues to serve as a living reminder of its epic ordeal.

A native of Leningrad, Dimitri Shostakovich composed most of his Seventh, or Leningrad, Symphony from the besieged city. (Library of Congress)

The shocking news of the German attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, had reached Leningrad at midday June 22 as loudspeakers throughout the city broadcast the voice of Commissar for Foreign Affairs V.M. Molotov announcing the bare facts and proclaiming: ‘Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.’ Among the thousands of Leningraders hearing the news was a thirty-four-year-old composer whose music was among the most valuable cultural material Communist Russia exported to the outside world. While not exactly a household name, Dimitri Shostakovich was familiar to classical music lovers in such faraway places as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. His distinctive, original, and emotionally communicative symphonic works marked Shostakovich as one of the premier talents of modern music.

From the perspective of the Soviet leadership, an internationally recognized figure such as Shostakovich was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the regular inclusion of his music in concert programs in the capitalist West seemed to validate the Soviet system’s accomplishments. On the other hand, the language of music is far less precise than the written word or even visual representations. Kremlin arbiters of taste and ideas could never be sure if the sounds of a Shostakovich composition were truly extolling the glories of a Communist society — or ironically commenting on its many shortcomings, which were never to be openly acknowledged.

By his birth and training, Shostakovich was very much a Soviet artist. ‘We Soviet musicians are constantly searching for a new style,’ he announced in 1942. ‘We must continue…ceaselessly perfecting ourselves,…never for a moment forgetting that our art serves our people.’

The rise and fall and rise again of his reputation mirrored the changes within his country as the Communist dictator Josef Stalin consolidated state controls over all aspects of everyday life. Through works such as his delightfully insouciant Symphony No. 1 (1924-25) and his scandalously R-rated opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1930-33), Shostakovich established himself on the international scene. Such an independent voice was anathema to the Stalinist system of top-down control, and in 1936 the brash young composer was formally castigated for his ‘deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds.’

It was a time of show trials, followed by executions or harsh imprisonments for those denounced as enemies of the state, so this official censure had serious implications. The composer eventually responded to the charges with his Fifth Symphony (1937), a piece that — on one level at least — expressed the loyal response of a good Soviet citizen-artist to criticism by following an approved path (struggle ending in triumph) in an accessible musical language readily grasped by the masses. (The work’s quality is such that it remains among the Shostakovich pieces played most often, while its message is ambiguous enough that some current writers hail its subtle subversiveness.) The Fifth Symphony’s immediate success proved a timely rehabilitation for the composer. Just six months prior to its premiere, Shostakovich had seen his powerful friend and patron, Red Army Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, arrested, tried, and shot for treason.

The start of the Great Patriotic War stirred Shostakovich as it did millions of his countrymen. He tried twice to enlist in the Red Army but was turned down because of his poor eyesight. He then joined a Home Guard unit drawn from members of the Leningrad Conservatory (where Shostakovich taught), and the world-famous composer spent several weeks laboring to build defensive lines that Soviet military leaders were belatedly erecting around the city.

Shostakovich was next transferred to a firefighting brigade, where he was posted to extinguish any incendiaries that might land on the conservatory’s roof. This assignment proved largely symbolic, as the school’s directors always found excuses to keep their most valuable faculty member busy elsewhere.

Nonetheless, on July 29, 1941, Soviet propagandists posed fireman Shostakovich for a number of photos that were widely distributed and which came to symbolize the unshakable determination of Leningrad’s defenders. Shostakovich had also turned his prodigious talents to arranging small musical works for the spare instrumental combinations used to entertain troops at the front. In addition, he wrote some original marches and a suitably rousing patriotic anthem that concluded with the words: ‘The great hour has come, Stalin leads us to battle, his order is law! Go boldly into dread battle!’ Then, on July 19, Shostakovich began composing a large-scale symphonic work.

According to an old Russian proverb, ‘When guns speak, the muses keep silent.’ While war, soldiers, and the dramatic scenes of battle have been a subject for art almost since the first weapon was raised in anger, the disruptive and destructive nature of military actions makes it difficult, if not impossible, to complete anything as sophisticated as a symphony amid the turmoil. Yet this is what Shostakovich set out to do.

‘I couldn’t not write it,’ he later said. ‘War was all around.’ Declared musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky: ‘No composer before Shostakovich had written a musical work depicting a still-raging war, and no composer had ever attempted to describe a future victory, in music, with such power and conviction, at a time when his people fought for their very right to exist as a nation.’

The period between June 22 and July 19 had been marked by a seemingly endless series of German victories and Red Army defeats. Taking full advantage of superior organization, effective tactics, and flexible battle plans, Adolf Hitler’s forces swiftly shattered all Soviet efforts to halt them. Thanks to utterly misplaced confidence in their defensive schemes, Russian military planners were rocked by disaster after disaster as one position after another was either bypassed or encircled. While their eyes were firmly on the prize of Moscow, German commanders realized that taking Leningrad was an important precondition, so its capture loomed large in Hitler’s strategy.

When Shostakovich began writing his symphony, German columns were pressing Red Army troops who were struggling to hold a line stretching southeast from the Gulf of Finland along the Luga River to Lake Il’men’, some seventy-five to one hundred miles south of Leningrad. By the time he had completed a full copy of what became the first movement of his new symphony, it was September 3 and German forces were consolidating for a direct assault on the city, their shells even reaching Leningrad proper.

At a time when entire contemporary symphonies rarely exceeded twenty-five to thirty-five minutes in length, Shostakovich lined out a war symphony that was gargantuan in size by finishing a first movement that itself lasted more than twenty-six minutes. He was writing at what one commentator later termed an ‘incredible speed.’ The Soviet propaganda line was that the momentous events animated the composer; however, it is also likely that he drew upon material already sketched out for other purposes, even before hostilities began. As Leningrad conductor Nikolai Rabinovich remembered, Shostakovich professed to having found his inspiration in the experiences of ‘those ordinary Soviet citizens before whose heroism he bowed in admiration….’

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