Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  A doctor was in the seat next to him. The doctor coolly picked up a chunk of the pie, ants and all, and popped it in his mouth. He clicked his tongue and pronounced: “Speaking as a doctor, I can assure you this pie is perfectly edible.”

  “The two of us dined together for the ten days of the journey,” Glikman remembered, “demolishing all of the twenty pies and becoming connoisseurs, for the first and I hope the last time, of the singular taste of the Central Asian ant.”

  Shostakovich met Glikman at the Kuibyshev train station. The composer looked thin and nervously smoked his cheap, cardboard-filtered cigarettes. He told Glikman they would have to walk back to his apartment: a typhoid epidemic was sweeping through the refugee community, and he didn’t want to ride on public transportation for fear of catching it. Though he could have gotten a car from the government, he refused to request one. He didn’t want to be indebted to anyone. They walked through the crowded streets of Kuibyshev together. (Shostakovich, like many of the refugees, eventually did catch typhoid and spent several months in a sanatorium, feverishly writing his Second Piano Sonata.)

  Glikman stayed with the Shostakoviches for a month, sleeping on a sofa in the composer’s study amid the hubbub of the composer’s extended family. By the middle of May, a score and parts were ready for Glikman to take back to Tashkent. He flew back, and Shostakovich’s music was reunited with the orchestra of his own beloved school where he had studied and taught. It was given a triumphant performance there. Glikman wrote defiantly, “No material hardship could stifle the voice of the muses, nor could the guns. The fire of the spirit burned as fiercely as ever, there was no lessening of passion for music in general and for Shostakovich’s new symphony in particular. Everywhere there was a burning desire to hear this work performed.”

  Meanwhile, the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., had noticed that the microfilm score of the symphony had never arrived in America. It had gone missing entirely.

  On May 23, an anxious Soviet diplomat appeared at the U.S. Department of State, begging to know where the Shostakovich microfilm had disappeared to. It had supposedly left Moscow on an American plane on April 9.

  The Department of State made inquiries. They discovered that the pilot had never received any microfilm box and had no idea that he was supposed to be transporting the cargo to the United States.

  An eager public awaited “the greatest musical event of the year — and perhaps the generation”— and American conductors argued ferociously about who would get to play the piece first — but the score seemed simply to have vanished.

  We’re used to thinking of information as something that drifts through the air invisibly all around us. But in an age before satellite telecommunications, complex information could not simply shoot across the globe through the ether. Information was earthbound and had a solid, physical form (paper, film, photos). So geography mattered.

  The score of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony had to go either east or west to get to the United States. In either direction, it would have to pass through dangerous territory patrolled by Axis ships and planes — the Japanese to the east and the Germans to the west. In the cold, icy seas of the north, American shipping convoys fell prey to battleships. Airplanes found it hard to refuel when they could not touch down safely almost anywhere in Europe.

  This may explain the symphony’s somewhat eccentric route. We know now that the box of microfilm took an epic and surprising journey.

  It was stowed in a diplomatic pouch and flown to the Middle East. It landed in Tehran, capital of Iran, a hub of Soviet shipments from the west. (The Soviets and the British had in fact ousted the lawful shah of Iran just to make sure the country could continue to serve as a transportation corridor for oil and war matériel.) In Tehran, the diplomatic pouch was probably handed over to a courier who drove it in a truck across the desert into British territory. It went over the mountains and into Iraq. The roads were terrible, and the drivers were constantly jolted and thrown around. Tires that lasted eighty thousand miles on America’s highways were worn through after only four thousand miles of this rugged terrain.

  Passing along the same roads in the other direction was the early trickle of British and American Lend-Lease aid to Russia. The three Allied nations were working together desperately to try to find a reliable route for the delivery of armaments and food that wouldn’t be threatened by German U-boats or the Luftwaffe.

  As the aid flowed east from America to Russia, the symphony, a gesture of thanks and friendship for that aid, was driven east to west along the same route.

  The microfilm reached Cairo, Egypt. In the Libyan deserts nearby, massive Fascist tank armies were engaged in heavy fighting amid the sands. Cairo acted as British headquarters. The city’s streets were full of soldiers and spies. At tony clubs like the Kit Kat, afloat on the Nile, drunk English officers swapped stories while dancing girls and water boys listened in, taking notes for the Germans.

  Here, the Shostakovich microfilm was probably handed over to an American pilot. The Leningrad Symphony, composed in the frigid north, was flown out over the pyramids and across North Africa.

  It probably touched down once more in Africa — perhaps in Casablanca, perhaps in Accra — and then set off across the Atlantic. Flying the other way were B-52 and A-20 bombers being delivered to the Russians for their struggle against the Luftwaffe.

  The microfilm landed in Recife, Brazil, at a landing field that was, at that point, only a few metal Quonset huts. From there, a U.S. Navy plane flew the diplomatic pouch north to Florida, and from there, to Washington, D.C.

  Shostakovich’s symphony had crossed the majority of the earth’s continents.

  On May 30, the diplomatic pouch was delivered to the U.S. State Department. Someone there unsealed it and discovered the wooden box with the microfilm inside; it was passed along to the Soviet Embassy.

  On June 2, 1942, it was handed over to an agent from the Am-Rus Music Corporation. Am-Rus had been hired by the Soviet government to promote the work of Russian composers. They were responsible for getting Shostakovich’s score into the hands of American conductors.

  The agent from Am-Rus left the Soviet Embassy with the microfilm and went to lunch. It was there that he left the box on his tray. After a journey of almost twenty thousand miles — flown out of besieged Leningrad, taken by train across the width of Russia, flown again to Tehran, driven through the Middle East, bounced across the Atlantic — the priceless score almost ended up in the trash.

  The music agent took it to New York City the next day. The Am-Rus Music Corporation — three people in an office over the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street — now had to make hundreds of copies very quickly.

  This was not as easy in 1942 as it would be now. They worked day and night. The individual pages had to be blown up from the photographic negatives. The original images were weak and hard to read. The parts were riddled with errors. All of these had to be corrected. Given the wartime shortage of paper, the only thing they could find to print on was glossy and shone under the theater lights while musicians squinted at it, trying to make out the notes.

  The Am-Rus Music Corporation finally anointed conductor Arturo Toscanini — a noted anti-Fascist — for the piece’s American premiere. He would perform the Seventh Symphony over the air with the NBC Radio Orchestra. But it was summer, and all the musicians were on vacation. They had to be called back to New York. The clarinetist discovered that Russian clarinets had an extra hole. He had to bore his own. The head of the NBC music department was exhausted by the whole process: “I wouldn’t care if I never heard another word about Shostakovich’s Seventh. It has been one vast headache.”

  Toscanini and the NBC Radio Orchestra had only four rehearsals to prepare the huge piece. Nonetheless, they were deeply moved by the symphony. It was “the most thrilling experience of my musical career!” exclaimed one musician.

  Prompted by the tales of Leningrad under siege and the microfilm trip across several conti
nents, Americans went Shostakovich crazy. According to Eugene Weintraub, the Am-Rus agent in charge of promotion, he barely had to lift a finger to get New York wild about “this hot baby of a Seventh symphony.” Before the public even heard the symphony, they saw the photos of the composer in his firefighting gear. A painting of Shostakovich appeared on the front of Time magazine — the first composer ever to make it onto the cover. He stands in defiant profile, dreaming up a tune while defending burning Leningrad.

  The Time article acquainted Americans with the myth of Shostakovich. He was not some neurotic Bolshevik artiste or some Communist Party stooge, the article suggested, but just a regular guy. During the Russian Revolution he had been “a pale, slight, impressionable little bourgeois boy who clung to a servant’s hand in the battle-littered streets of Petrograd.” In propaganda for the Soviets, the last thing Shostakovich would have wanted said about him was that he had ever been “bourgeois” in the age of Lenin. That was enough to get you shot. Now, however, for an American audience, it was important to come from a middle-class family, to have had servants.

  And it was also important to prefer sports to music: “The climax of joy,” the composer is quoted as saying, “is not when you’re through a new symphony, but when you are hoarse from shouting, with your hands stinging from clapping, your lips parched, and you sip your second glass of beer after you’ve fought for it with 90,000 other spectators to celebrate the victory of your favorite team.” Everything in the article is designed to suggest that Shostakovich is really just like an American dad reading Time, sprawled on his sofa.

  The first performance of the Leningrad Symphony in the Western Hemisphere took place in England, at the studios of the BBC (the British Broadcasting Company). The London Philharmonic Orchestra had received its own copy of the microfilm, sent on a similar route through Cairo. Now, under the baton of Henry Wood, they performed the piece on June 22, 1942 — a year to the day after the Germans had launched Operation Barbarossa.

  And then, finally, came the much-anticipated American premiere of the piece. On July 19, 1942, Arturo Toscanini conducted what turned out to be one of the most famous concerts of the twentieth century, broadcasting the Seventh Symphony on NBC. Sent out on the airwaves, the music reached millions of homes, though somewhat garbled, supposedly, by heavy clouds.

  Americans in their living rooms, worried about fathers, sons, and husbands who had already been sent into battle overseas, leaned in close to hear the new war symphony. It was a phenomenon, the most anticipated piece of music in the world that night.

  The recording that remains of that performance is brittle, loud, and tinny. Many critics were unimpressed with the piece. The American public, however, was powerfully moved. Through their radios, the symphony spoke to each of them.

  But what did it say? No one seems to have thought that it was about Stalin, about that first assault on Leningrad during the 1930s. No one, at least, wrote that down. People heard it according to their circumstances and thought it was about the German advance. And they heard their own lives in this music: The symphony, a biographer wrote in 1942,

  tells the man who hears it, not the story of a stranger, but his own story. It makes him the hero of it; it cries out his own sorrows and celebrates his own victories. . . . Shostakovich states that at the beginning of the Seventh he depicts the peaceful life before the war in the quiet homes of Leningrad. But to a listener in Iowa it could mean the meadows and the rolling hills around his home. After the fantastic theme of war, Shostakovich has put into his music a lament for the dead — and the tears of a Russian mother and of an American mother are the same.

  All this talk about the similarity of the Russian citizen and the American patriot was often accompanied by pleas for aid. An organization named Russian War Relief held charity benefits where they played the music of Shostakovich and emphasized the new friendship between the heartlands of capitalism and communism. American propaganda spoke rousingly of the common fight against Fascist horror.

  Conductors all over the Americas scheduled performances of the Leningrad Symphony. In the United States alone, it was played sixty-two times in different cities before the end of the year. It was performed by an orchestra out in the California desert for an audience of twenty thousand tank soldiers about to be shipped off to North Africa. (“It was universal war music,” the Los Angeles Times wrote, “the language of a warrior over-leaping race and language and boundaries.”) It was broadcast on almost two thousand radio stations all across the country, from the mountains to the prairies, often played by a local symphony orchestra. In Ohio, for example, the Cleveland Orchestra tromped through this epic piece depicting Soviet blood and struggle on Sammy Kaye’s Sunday Serenade and The Pause That Refreshes on the Air, sponsored by Coca-Cola. It was a strange fate for a Communist war symphony.

  Meanwhile, an exotic dancer wrote to the Am-Rus Music Corporation to ask if she could do a striptease to the “invasion” theme. “What a movement that would have been,” agent Weintraub quipped.

  Hollywood clamored to produce movies about the symphony and its creator. Leopold Stokowski, who had conducted the music for Disney’s Fantasia, proposed a film in which Shostakovich’s music would accompany scenes of the composer in besieged Leningrad. Director Howard Hawks, best known at that point for screwball comedies in which wealthy dingbats fell in love and moved to Connecticut, bought the film rights to the symphony and its story. He hired American author William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury) to write the script. The movie, Battle Cry, was supposed to be a propaganda piece combining heroic stories from all the Allied nations. The Russian segment would have told the story of Shostakovich’s Seventh interwound with a fictional romance between two Soviet fighter pilots, a man and a woman. The story was not subtle. It was typical Hollywood: for example, the female aeronaut gives birth to their child in the cockpit of her plane while evading German flak fire during the Battle of Stalingrad.

  Later, she writes to her son about Shostakovich’s symphony: “You will hear that music one day, my son — the whole of the world will hear it — but not as we heard it . . . with guns blasting, shells screaming — buildings pulverized!” She takes a break in her letter writing for a brief bombardment. When she returns, she writes, “It was our music — he wrote it for us! He wrote it with hands singed from the fires of Nazi bombs — he wrote it with cold eating at his fingers, my son!”

  Hollywood hype here meets with wartime propaganda. Shostakovich was extremely uncomfortable with these Tinseltown exaggerations. He did not want to be a hero, and his hands had never been singed by Nazi bombs. He wrote to the Am-Rus Music Corporation saying that he didn’t want the project to go forward. Am-Rus agent Weintraub agreed: “We were inclined to respect his wisdom when the film people suggested gilding the lily by filming the composer with one arm in a sling, the other penning his music.”

  Shostakovich later remembered, supposedly, “At first it seemed that a wider celebrity might help me, but then I remembered Meyerhold and Tukhachevsky. They were much more famous than I, and it didn’t help them one bit. On the contrary.” The composer knew being too high-profile in Stalin’s Russia was often fatal.

  “I was just uneasy,” he said. “The Allies enjoyed my music,” but they didn’t seem to be opening up the European Second Front against the Nazis that Stalin wanted so much. “They shouldn’t have made such a fuss over my symphonies, but the Allies fussed, and fussed deliberately. They were creating a diversion, at least that’s how it was interpreted here in Russia. The ballyhoo kept growing, which must have irritated Stalin.”

  So, how successful was Shostakovich’s symphony in America? Obviously, it was a success in that it was one of the most talked-about musical events of the twentieth century.

  It clearly worked to popularize the Russian cause. As Life magazine reported, “By now it is almost unpatriotic not to like Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. . . . This work has become a symbol of the Russians’ heroic resistanc
e. People who temper their praise of the Seventh or express dislike of it are looked on as musical fifth columnists who are running down our brave Russian allies.”

  But did it actually work to increase aid?

  It did not produce the Second Front that Stalin hoped for so desperately. In the summer of 1942, the Allies were stretched too thin to think of attacking the Germans on European soil. Stalin was furious, but the British and American forces would delay the Second Front until 1944.

  On the other hand, American aid to Russia in the form of airplanes, tanks, ammunition, medicine, and food rapidly increased. It played a vital role in the Allied war effort, supporting the USSR in its battle against the invaders. President Roosevelt believed deeply in the strategic importance of this aid. Shostakovich’s symphony was the most visible element of a wider program to convince the public that assisting Russia at that desperate point in the war was essential. By January 1943, polls showed that 90 percent of Americans believed that food aid to Russia should be increased, even at the expense of domestic food supplies. Just a year and a half before, the Soviet Union had been viewed as an enemy.

  Now goods flowed copiously back to Russia over the path that the symphony had taken to America. U.S. donations to the Russian war effort had almost quadrupled in one year. As it turned out, the American bombers and tanks sent initially were not as useful as they might have been. (They were somewhat obsolete models and easily overcome by superior German technology.) What made a really substantial difference in the Russian war effort was radio equipment, food, industrial machinery, and the American jeep. The jeep became a favorite vehicle of Soviet troops for bouncing over rugged terrain, as did American-built motorcycles and the Studebaker automobile. In terms of food supplies, American aid provided the equivalent of “one pound of concentrated ration per day for 6 million soldiers, virtually the whole [Red] Army.” Aid on this scale was extremely important to the Soviet war effort and to eventual Allied success. During the negotiations over aid in the summer of 1942, Shostakovich’s symphony played a small but appreciable role in convincing Americans that aid like this was justified.