Leningrad Symphony: A Symphony of War

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On March 5, 1942, Kuybyshev briefly became the cultural capital of the world when Shostakovich’s Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony was played in the Palace of Culture for the first time. Everything about it was larger than life — including its length (approximately eighty minutes) and the oversized orchestra it required. Yet, incredibly, the massive, abstract work forged as a symbol of resistance to fascism became a cultural icon in the Soviet popular mind. The symphony’s Moscow premiere some twenty-four days later was just as moving and emotionally powerful. Even the urgent blare of air raid sirens could not restrain the audience, whose applause rang out for twenty minutes once the music had ended.

Already plans were underway for the worldwide dissemination of the work. In a journey whose cloak-and-dagger aspects seem somehow appropriate, the score was handled like a high-priority state document. It was copied onto 35mm film, packed into a small tin box, and shipped out via plane to Tehran, then by automobile to Cairo, and finally on a plane to the West. English radio listeners first heard it on June 22 — a year to the day after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.Three of America’s most distinguished conductors — émigrés Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, and Arturo Toscanini — vied for the right to introduce the Leningrad Symphony in the United States. The Russian Koussevitzky landed the concert premiere, but it was to follow a nationwide radio broadcast by the NBC Symphony.

English-born Leopold Stokowski (something of a cult figure thanks to his lofty presence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia) had alerted NBC officials to the forthcoming symphony as early as December. At that time, Stokowski was sharing the NBC podium with another classical celebrity, Italian Arturo Toscanini, well known for his opposition to Benito Mussolini’s rule. Because of his foresight in scouting the work, and his own history of presenting other Shostakovich compositions to American audiences, Stokowski expected to do the honors with the Leningrad Symphony radio broadcast. NBC had other plans, however.

The company had created the NBC Symphony expressly for Toscanini, and even though its relations with the often-temperamental musician were rocky at times, he was still their most marketable cultural personality. Stokowski and Toscanini exchanged some polite letters, each advancing his claim to the U.S. premiere, but in the end it was Toscanini’s to decline. After reviewing the score (’I was deeply taken by its beauty and its anti-Fascist meanings,’ Toscanini wrote), the Italian maestro decided he would direct the work’s American premiere.

The concert was scheduled for July 19, 1942. All these high-art maneuvers took place at a time when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was actively promoting the Soviet Union as America’s new ally. Through books, films, op-ed pieces, and other means, the government and national media churned out stories emphasizing Soviet sacrifices and heroism, some even comparing life under Stalin favorably to the American way of life (reaching its most effusive expression in the epic Warner Brothers movie Mission to Moscow). All the while, the U.S. government downplayed the darkly tyrannical nature of Stalin’s regime and its recent cynical dismemberment of Poland and imperialistic war against Finland.

During the week of the NBC premiere of the Leningrad Symphony, Time magazine featured composer Shostakovich on its cover, replete with fire helmet, over the caption: ‘Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad he heard the chords of victory.’ Inside that issue was an extended article titled ‘Shostakovich and the Guns’ that outlined his life story, the symphony’s dramatic genesis and travels, and the artistic scrimmage to first perform it in the United States. Time proclaimed the piece ‘a musical interpretation of Russia at war.’

The July 19 radio broadcast was opened by the ubiquitous Ben Grauer, announcing that the program was dedicated to Russian War Relief. Then the president for that charitable agency read a telegram from Shostakovich expressing his gratitude for the fund’s efforts. Grauer returned to tell the story of the symphony’s epic journey to America, closing with the reading of another ‘radiogram’ from Shostakovich to Toscanini that sounded committee-written: ‘I am confident that with your consummate inherent talent and superlative skill you will convey to the public of democratic America the concepts I have endeavored to embody in the work.’ Following a performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ the NBC Symphony under Toscanini played the Leningrad Symphony. After it was over, the Russian War Relief official spoke once again of that country’s battle against the ‘Hitler hordes’ and offered more praise for this’symphony written within range of gunfire’ before the program closed with a war bond appeal. NBC later estimated the listening audience at twenty million.

Reaction in the United States was divided between the music critics (who mostly did not like it) and everyone else (who mostly did). The New York Herald Tribune’s Virgil Thomson complained that the piece’seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not very musical and the distracted.’ The populist American poet Carl Sandberg proclaimed that the composition had been ‘written with the heart’s blood,’ while novelist Erskine Caldwell wondered, ‘Who in hell can defeat the nation that wrote such music!’ As a piece of propaganda art and as music written for the moment, the Leningrad Symphony more than met the need. There were no fewer than sixty-two performances in the United States during the 1942-43 season.

All those glittering galas paled before the shabby one that took place in Leningrad itself. During the time that the piece was making its way across the globe, Soviet fortunes on the Leningrad front had not dramatically changed. Efforts by the Red Army to open a secure corridor to resupply the city had failed, and violent German counterattacks showed no lessening in their resolve. Despite all the privation, or perhaps because of it, the decision was made to bring Shostakovich’s symphony to Leningrad.

Once again, this lengthy, expansively scored composition proved a rallying point for patriotic fervor. With the famous Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra evacuated to the east, an orchestra had to be cobbled together around the pitifully small core of the city’s Radio Orchestra, augmented by every musician who could be summoned from retirement. Even then, a call was issued for drafted musicians serving at the front, and it reached a point where some of the necessary brass players had to be forcibly pried loose from their units. Many of the instrumentalists were so weak from starvation diets that initial rehearsals ended within fifteen minutes and extra rations had to be authorized. After the conductor fainted from exhaustion while walking home following one run-through, worried officials secured a bicycle for him. Only a single 252-page conductor’s full score could be brought in through the blockade, making it necessary for copyists to work day and night to prepare the more than twenty-five hundred pages of individual player parts. In the face of all these formidable obstacles, a performance of the symphony took place in Leningrad on August 9, 1942.

Karl Eliasberg, who conducted on that occasion, noted that Soviet artillery pounded known German battery positions just prior to the concert in order to silence them. The performance was carried throughout the city via a loudspeaker network, and, in a psychological move, additional monitors projected the music toward the German lines. While the quality of the playing can only be imagined under the harsh circumstances, the historic moment was less about art and more about expressing defiance. A playwright in that ragged audience wrote, ‘People who no longer knew how to shed tears of sorrow and misery now cried from sheer joy.’

‘One cannot speak of an impression made by the symphony,’ reported another present. ‘It was, not an impression, but a staggering experience.’ More than a year of suffering still faced Leningraders, who would not see the siege lifted until early 1944. By that time perhaps as many as one million of the city’s civilian population had perished.

Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony was not the only concert work to be created as an artistic response to events of World War II. In America especially, composers did their part by writing works large and small. One of the biggest was a nearly hour-long paean (forgotten today) to the U.S. Army Air Forces; among the briefest were Aaron Copland’s still-popular Fanfare for the Common Man as well as his perennial occasion piece, A Lincoln Portrait.

In the years immediately following the conflict, the passions of the Cold War and changing tastes in music made it easy for critics to deride the Leningrad Symphony as a bloated, vulgar composition of no lasting consequence. Yet, like Mark Twain commenting on his premature obituary, the piece lives on, in concert performances and recordings. A new generation of music writers is finding levels of meaning beyond the events surrounding its birth, and many today view it not as a battle piece but as an artistic commentary on totalitarianism.

Post-Cold War assessments aside, the Leningrad Symphony stands as a courageous artistic expression forged in the crucible of conflict by one of the twentieth century’s greatest symphonists. When compared to other military events of the Soviet-German war — Moscow’s defense, the struggle for Stalingrad, the fight for the Kursk salient — most of what happened on the Leningrad front generally merits less attention. Yet despite this, and even though the winds of change have recast the city of Peter and Lenin once again as St. Petersburg, the story of Leningrad endures in no small measure because the Leningrad Symphony continues to bring the story of its tremendous suffering, sacrifice, and eventual triumph to new audiences. At a time when Soviet arms could not deliver even a symbolic victory to convince the West of its viability, a Soviet artist did. ‘It is, if you like,’ said Shostakovich, ‘a polemic against the statement that ‘when the cannons roar the muse is silent.” Continuing his thought in the Time magazine article, the composer declared, ‘Here the muses speak together with the guns.’

This article was written by Noah Andre Trudeau and originally published in the Spring 2005 edition of MHQ. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History today!

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Tags: Music, Social History

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