Shostakovitch’s Leningrad Symphony

Under remarkable wartime conditions, this is the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on August 9, 1942.  To look at these people you would not know that all of them, without exception, are malnourished and under German artillery fire.  The orchestra itself fought fatigue to be able to learn and then perform the massive work of defiance dedicated by the composer to the city itself.  

I recently completed Prit Buttar's excellent two-volume history of the Siege of Leningrad. I was struck by much in the books, but nothing of a non-military nature surpassed the extraordinary story of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony as described by Buttar in To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-1942. It's one of those intersections of history and art so improbable that it almost feels like myth, except that it happened among bombings, starvation, and bureaucratic terror.

Shostakovich had already been through his own siege long before the Germans arrived. In the 1930s, Stalin’s regime had denounced his Fourth Symphony as "formalist," a word so elastic that it could mean anything or nothing at all—and often meant death. Buttar recounts how he was summoned by the NKVD and fully expected to vanish, as so many of his friends had: "He spent the weekend saying farewell to his family, believing that he was certain to be arrested and would then disappear." (Buttar, p. 61) Only sheer luck saved him when the officer who had interrogated him was himself arrested. That narrow escape became part of Shostakovich’s permanent psychological landscape. You can hear that terror—and the discipline of surviving it—in nearly everything he wrote afterward.

When the Germans encircled Leningrad in 1941, Shostakovich refused to leave. He joined a volunteer firefighting brigade, stationed on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory, ready to extinguish incendiary bombs. The famous photograph of him in his firefighter’s helmet, which later appeared in Time magazine, was not staged at first. He was actually doing that work while beginning the Seventh Symphony. Buttar writes that he, his wife Nina, and their children were still in the city, trapped when the rail lines were cut near Mga: "A train carrying a large number of children passed through Mga on 25 August, even as German forces attacked the town. When the railway line was cut, further evacuations overland became impossible." (p. 209) In those conditions, Shostakovich composed the first two movements of the Seventh Symphony, marking the manuscript with the abbreviation "VT" for vozduzhnaya trevoga – air raid alarm – whenever he had to stop writing to take shelter.

The Seventh opens with a sense of uneasy calm. The first movement’s now-famous march theme begins with almost cartoonish simplicity, a melody so ordinary it could have been borrowed from an operetta. Then, with each repetition, it grows louder, denser, more mechanical, until it becomes a juggernaut. What began as almost comical turns terrifying—a musical embodiment of totalitarian invasion, whether by Hitler or by Stalin. For Shostakovich, the distinction may have been academic. The repetition is the point. The human spirit is being worn down by machinery, by ideology, by noise.

The second movement is a memory of civility and spriteliness—a scherzo that waltzes and teases, but with that ironic, brittle humor Shostakovich used when sincerity would have been fatal. It’s the sound of a mind trying to recall normal life while the world caves in.

By September 1941, the siege was just beginning, and the authorities decided that Shostakovich was too valuable to Russian culture to risk losing. His wife insisted he leave. He resisted until the very end, not wanting to abandon his city, but he was eventually evacuated east to Kuibyshev (now Samara), where he finished the third and fourth movements. Buttar quotes his radio address to Leningraders shortly before his departure: "If I manage to write well, if I manage to finish the third and fourth movements, the work may be called my Seventh Symphony... I’m telling you this so that the people of Leningrad listening to me will know that life goes on in our city." (p. 217) Those words, broadcast to a starving population, were as important as the music itself. He was giving the city a voice when speech was impossible.

The symphony was premiered in Kuibyshev on 5 March 1942, and Shostakovich, still under Stalin’s shadow, dutifully called it his weapon: "My music is my weapon. We are struggling for the highest human ideals in history... I dedicate my Seventh Symphony to our struggle with Fascism, to our coming victory over the enemy, and to my native city, Leningrad." (p. 321) That public dedication satisfied the regime, but privately he knew it was also about another kind of fascism, the one within. The Kuibyshev performance was broadcast by radio to the malnourished remnants of Leningrad, who listened from dark, unheated apartments, wrapped in rags, imagining the orchestra they could not see. The emotional effect was immense. The first movement’s relentless buildup became, for them, the sound of endurance itself.

Copies of the score were smuggled to the West, and soon the symphony became a global event. In the United States, it was hailed as a masterpiece of wartime defiance. Toscanini conducted it, and American critics wept. Time magazine put Shostakovich on its cover in his fire helmet. For the Allies, it was the perfect symbol—a heroic Soviet artist standing firm against Nazi aggression. The political narrative worked. What few realized then was that the symphony’s real subject was survival under any tyranny. Shostakovich had crafted a work that could be read as propaganda but heard as truth.

The Leningrad performance itself came later, and it remains one of the most staggering stories in the history of music. The score was flown into the besieged city. Buttar describes the scene with clinical astonishment. The conductor Karl Eliasberg, of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, was so weak from hunger that he had to be pulled to rehearsals on a sled: "At that stage, Eliasberg had only 15 players in his orchestra... Govorov promised to help and over the following weeks groups of musicians who were serving in the army units defending Leningrad were released for rehearsals with Eliasberg." (p. 352) The orchestra was rebuilt from the living and the half-dead. Musicians copied out their own parts by hand, collapsing during rehearsals, three dying before the concert could even take place.

Rehearsals lasted only minutes at a time. The players built up endurance slowly, starting with shorter works like Tchaikovsky’s Sixth. When they finally began working through fragments of the Seventh, the piece’s sheer size—over an hour of music for more than a hundred musicians—seemed absurd. Eliasberg kept them going by sheer will. One oboist remembered him shouting at a trumpeter who said he was too weak to play: "‘What do you mean you don’t have the strength? And do you think we have the strength? Let’s get to work!’" (p. 355) Buttar’s account reads like a Soviet parable rewritten by Kafka.

The date chosen for the concert was deliberate: August 9, 1942—the day Hitler had planned to celebrate his conquest of Leningrad with champagne at the Astoria Hotel. Instead, that night, in the same city he had vowed to destroy, starving musicians performed Shostakovich’s symphony to a packed audience. Buttar writes that citizens traded their meager rations for tickets. German artillery was expected to shell the concert hall, so the Soviets launched Operation Shkval ("Squall"), a massive artillery barrage to silence enemy guns while the performance took place (p. 355). It worked. As the orchestra began, the city was quiet except for the music. Loudspeakers carried the performance across Leningrad and beyond the front lines, so that even German soldiers could hear it through the smoke and summer air.

The audience was skeletal, dressed in their finest coats and rags, but engaged and attentive. Buttar quotes an army trombonist who later said, "We were stunned by the number of people, that there could be so many people starving for food but also starving for music." (p. 356) When the final movement ended and the brass roared out that uneasy triumph, the city wept. It wasn’t a victory march; it was resurrection by sound. One of the surviving musicians, Kseniya Matus, said years later, "That symphony has stayed with me the way it was that night... Music is life, after all. What is life without music? This was the music that proved our city had come back to life after death." (p. 356)

It’s easy to forget that art can do that—pull a people back from the brink, if only for an hour. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony is not a subtle work. It’s massive, repetitive, even exhausting. But it’s also one of the purest artistic responses to catastrophe ever created. The music refuses despair. It insists on existence. It turns the noise of war into human rhythm. Even now, when I listen to that brutal first movement, I can hear not just armies and artillery but the sound of a man on a rooftop in Leningrad, listening for bombs, still writing. That’s the true heartbeat of the symphony—a mixture of fear, pride, exhaustion, and some stubborn little ember that refuses to go out.

The Seventh remains a challenging piece to love, but impossible not to respect, and is one of my second-tier favorite symphonies. It’s a monument to brave resilience. For the people of Leningrad, it was a mirror of their survival; for the world, it became a reminder that even amid horror, creation was still possible. It’s less a symphony about war than a symphony about continuing to be human in its midst. Buttar’s account captures that miracle in a unique way. And after reading it, I’ll never hear those snare drums the same way again.

Shostakovich in his fireman's uniform.  He helped fight numerous fires mostly from air bombardment in the early weeks of the German attack.  He was evacuated rather quickly, however, though he initially lingered to help.