Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  The piece was used even more directly by Russian War Relief, which held benefit concerts of the Seventh and other Shostakovich works to gather funds for the Russian Red Cross and Red Crescent. In 1942, Russian War Relief donated about ten million dollars to support the Soviet people (a huge sum at the time), and furthermore shipped them about seven million dollars’ worth of clothes, medication, and even seeds to replant ravaged fields. They used Shostakovich’s music to alert Americans to the unbelievable suffering and strength of the Soviet people.

  The microfilm transfer of the symphony around the globe and its use to provoke donations of weaponry and foodstuffs remains one of the most striking stories of World War II. But there still was one story left to play out that was even more bizarre and astounding. There was one place that the Leningrad Symphony had not yet been performed: in the city of Leningrad itself.

  It was there, played by an army of starving, emaciated musicians, that Shostakovich’s Seventh was to receive its last — and most important — premiere.

  SOURCES

  There was no one left in Leningrad to play the Leningrad Symphony. It had always been a city of music, but it had fallen silent. Its best-known orchestras had fled before the Germans ringed the city. Only the Leningrad Radio Orchestra remained, and it had shut down in midwinter. Their last live broadcast had been on New Year’s Day, 1942. They’d played excerpts from an opera called The Snow Maiden. Later that night, the opera’s tenor had died of hunger.

  The final note in the orchestral logbook reads: “Rehearsal did not take place. Srabian is dead. Petrov is sick. Borishev is dead. Orchestra not working.”

  It went into hibernation as the city starved.

  In March, the Leningrad Party bosses decided music was needed to improve morale in the dying city. Posters appeared around town: “All Leningrad musicians please report to the Radio Committee.”

  The acting conductor of the Radio Orchestra, Karl Eliasberg, a thin man with peering spectacles, went from door to door, trying to find out which of his musicians still remained alive. He found them lying in dark apartments, emaciated. He himself was suffering from starvation.

  An oboe player named Ksenia Matus heeded the call. She had not played with the Radio Orchestra before, but according to her, she had dated most of its members. She prepared to go to the first rehearsal. “I grabbed my instrument and when I opened the case [the oboe] also turned out to have dystrophy. All the pads had turned green, the valves had turned green. The oboe wouldn’t play, but I took it as it was.” Eventually, she brought it to a repairman, who said he would fix it for dog meat. Matus told him it was being fixed for the Shostakovich piece, and he smiled with delight. He even agreed to accept cash.

  All the musicians who could stir themselves from their burrows showed up for the first rehearsal on March 30, 1942. There were only fifteen of them. They were dying of hunger, blackened with soot. The radio studio was freezing cold, like a cave of ice.

  Eliasberg, the conductor, shuffled to the front of the room. He addressed the few musicians sitting in front of him. “Dear friends, we are weak but we must force ourselves to start work.” He raised his arms for the downbeat. No one moved. The musicians sat shivering with cold and weakness.

  Once again, Eliasberg raised his gaunt arms. “He lifted his hands and they were trembling,” oboist Matus remembered. “To my imagination, he was a wounded bird, whose wings are hurt, and is about to fall. But he didn’t fall.”

  Creakily, the remains of the orchestra began to play. They were awful. The wind players could barely blow. The pianist had to warm bricks and put them on either side of the keyboard to keep his fingers moving.

  When it came time for a trumpet solo, there was silence. Eliasberg looked over at the first trumpet. He was on his knees. “It’s your solo,” Eliasberg said. “Why don’t you play?”

  The trumpeter replied, “I’m sorry, sir. I haven’t the strength in my lungs.”

  There was, an eyewitness remembered, “a terrible pause.” Eliasberg collected himself. Then he insisted softly, “I think you do have the strength.”

  That moment of belief was enough. The trumpeter raised the instrument to his lips and began to play.

  “Everybody did their best, but we played badly,” oboist Matus remembered. “It was hopeless.”

  The first rehearsal was scheduled to last for three hours.

  They broke up after fifteen minutes.

  The score for the Seventh was flown into Leningrad on a transport plane delivering medicine to the besieged city. Eliasberg finally got his hands on the precious piece, but there was little sense of victory. He despaired. “When I saw the symphony, I thought, ‘We’ll never play this.’ It was four thick volumes of music.”

  It called for a huge orchestra of more than a hundred players. He had only fifteen, and they were near death. He crept down the length of Nevsky Prospect to Communist Party Headquarters and informed the authorities that he needed more musicians if he was ever going to perform the Shostakovich. General Leonid Govorov, commander in chief of the Leningrad Front, agreed to pull wind players from the Red Army regiments surrounding the city.

  The Radio Orchestra could not immediately tackle the Seventh Symphony. In the meantime, they played pieces they already knew. Their concerts were broadcast on the radio, to break up the awful silence that came when none of the pundits had anything left to say and all that was heard was the deadening tick of the metronome. The orchestra’s first concert was on April 5. The hall was below freezing. The orchestra played some light waltzes.

  “When we finished the first piece the audience started to applaud, but there was no sound because everyone was wearing mittens,” Ksenia Matus remembered. “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.”

  Eliasberg was elated they had played at all. He noted other triumphs: “On May 1, under heavy shelling, we played the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky.”

  Trombonist Viktor Orlovsky was astonished by the audiences. “Listening to music gave the city’s inhabitants a form of escape, and an opportunity to rise above hardship and suffering. Even when the bread ration had been reduced to 125 grams, some would exchange their daily meal for a ticket to a classical concert.”

  The rehearsals ran every day from ten in the morning until one in the afternoon. Eliasberg, too weak to walk to the rehearsal hall, had to be dragged on a sled like a corpse. He and his wife were staying on the seventh floor of the Astoria Hotel. Once one of the city’s most exclusive and expensive spots, it was now a hospital for the starving. Its former glamour was gone: “The hotel is dead,” wrote one journalist who was convalescing there. “Like the whole city there is neither water nor light. In the dark corridors rarely appears a figure, lighting his way with a hand-generator flashlight or a simple match. The rooms are cold, the temperatures not rising above 40 degrees.” Adolf Hitler, predicting that he would take Leningrad in a few short months, boasted that he would be celebrating with champagne in the ballroom of the Astoria Hotel on August 9. Rumors said that the invitations were already printed.

  It is from this building that Eliasberg daily was dragged.

  The musicians got food for their efforts —“not really soup,” recalled Matus, “more water with a few beans in it, and a teaspoon of wheat germ.” This kept them from death, but during the rehearsals they still found it hard to concentrate. Eliasberg had to explain each point slowly two or three times before the musicians could understand. Sometimes, weakened by hunger, players simply toppled over and passed out.

  The recruits from military bands still had their frontline duties as well as their rehearsals. Captain Mikhail Parfionov, a trombonist from the Red Army’s Forty-Fifth Division wind band, recalled: “Rehearsals in the morning, then straight to the front for concerts
, then our military duties. One day we went from rehearsal to Piskayorsky cemetery to bury piles of corpses in mass graves. . . . We were back to rehearse the music next day.”

  Leningrad was thawing. The ice on the Neva was starting to groan and crack. (Trucks on the Road of Life now splattered through water that was axle-deep. Soon, they had to stop trips entirely until the routes could be undertaken by boat.)

  Tens of thousands of people came out of their chilly apartments and appeared on the streets and squares to start a citywide cleanup. They carted away debris. They cleared avenues. They had to move quickly: as the snow melted, piles of filth — corpses and manure — started to fester.

  “You should have seen it, what it was like,” remarked a survivor. “None of the people believed it could ever be tidied up. But as soon as the sun began to have a bit of warmth in it everybody turned out, just like a single person. There wasn’t anybody who didn’t come out on the streets. There were housewives and school children and educated folk — professors, doctors, musicians, old men and old women. . . . Some of them hardly had the strength to drag their legs.”

  They came together to plant vegetable gardens in public parks and odd strips of dirt. Outside Eliasberg’s windows at the Astoria Hotel, the grounds of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral were sown with cabbages.

  Even before the vegetable seeds were in the ground, people had started to devour any green thing that grew. “Grass, grass, grass,” wrote a diarist. “The whole city is eating different kinds of grass. At the garden fences children are calling out to each other, hauling grass through the rails, eating it as if they were rabbits.” City employees pasted lists of edible wild plants on walls and kiosks. People devoured dandelions and boiled nettles. In the nearby forest, small boys perched on tree limbs, eating new leaves like flocks of sparrows.

  As people came together to clean up the city and prepare for the next phase of the siege, many felt hope for the first time in months. “As they worked, people passed on their strength to each other,” a resident recalled. “And through this strength came an affirmation of our common cause. We would defy Hitler’s cruel order that our city should be erased from the earth. It would stay habitable. We were proud to be called Leningraders.”

  The musicians of the Radio Orchestra were not all so hopeful. Clarinetist Viktor Koslov drearily mocked the excitement of the populace. “‘Look, here comes spring!’ But what did it bring? Decomposing, dismembered corpses in the streets that had been hidden under the ice. Severed legs with meat chopped off them. Bits of bodies in the bins. Women’s bodies with breasts cut off, which people had taken to eat. They had been buried all winter but there they were for all the city to see how it had remained alive.”

  This was what the Leningrad Radio Orchestra struggled with as they set about to prove the importance of humankind’s better nature. In the face of Nazi scorn for Slavic “subhumans,” the Russians wanted to show that they were making art even as the Germans made war. They were resolutely remaining human — but what did that mean? What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking, too. A mouth that could devour or sing.

  The rehearsals for the Seventh started in earnest in July. Many of the musicians had to copy out their own parts by hand. A few of these copies remain. In the margins, they have doodled Red Army soldiers on the march and grim little Nazis goose-stepping.

  In contrast to the stories of rehearsals for the piece in New York and Kuibyshev, the Leningrad musicians did not feel deeply moved by the music as they practiced it. “To be honest,” said Captain Parfionov, the trombonist, “no one was very enthusiastic.” The piece was so long they never once played it all the way through until the dress rehearsal, three days before the performance. Clarinetist Viktor Koslov admitted, “It was a very complex piece of work, and we were only rehearsing piecemeal. Most of us felt daunted by it. We would start rehearsing, and get dizzy with our heads spinning when we blew. The symphony was too big. People were falling over at the rehearsals. We might talk to the person next to us, but the topic of conversation was hunger and food — not music.”

  Eliasberg tried to maintain the ensemble’s discipline. When musicians insisted, “It’s no good, I can’t play it,” he snapped, “Go on. No complaining!” One man explained that he had arrived late because he had been burying his wife. Eliasberg was furious. “This must not happen again. If your wife or husband dies, you must be at the rehearsal.”

  Three of the orchestral players died before they ever got to play the piece in full.

  The orchestra may have been too exhausted to appreciate what they were doing, but among the city’s population, excitement for the piece mounted. Diarists recorded their anticipation. “The event was unmissable,” one later declared. She tried to forget the Germans crouching a few miles away as she purchased her ticket. “This music had been dedicated to us, and to our city. Can you imagine the power of that?”

  The Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony took place on August 9, 1942. The day was chosen as a deliberate gesture of defiance: it was the date Hitler had boasted that he would be celebrating with a feast in the Hotel Astoria’s ballroom.

  The premiere did not merely require musical coordination. It also involved military action. General Govorov of the Red Army had spent the month of July fighting fiercely to repel another German assault and to ensure that Hitler’s triumphal meal never happened. Now the 9th had come, and Govorov realized that the Grand Philharmonia Hall would be an obvious target for bombing — lit up in the midst of a blackout. To ensure the performance would not be interrupted, he launched a diversionary attack on German lines on the opposite side of the city. He called the action Operation Squall.

  That evening, as the orchestral players tuned up and the audience filed into the auditorium, the Red Army pounded the enemy with three thousand high-caliber shells to draw fire away from the concert hall. Artillery officer Vasily Gordeev remembered, “First we hit the enemy’s batteries, next their observation points, their communication centers. . . . Later we shifted attention to their headquarters and kept them under continuous fire for two hours and thirty minutes. . . . The results? The results were that not a single shell exploded on the streets of Leningrad. An artillery squall across the whole front. And in this way the performance of the Seventh was made possible.” Later, when General Govorov met Karl Eliasberg, he wryly told the conductor, “We played our instrument in the symphony, too, you know.” Eliasberg had no idea what he was talking about. The public wouldn’t hear about Operation Squall for another twenty years.

  Meanwhile, the musicians finally were getting excited. Clarinetist Koslov remembered, “I awoke that morning a different man.” Ksenia Matus recalled walking to the hall with oboe in hand, “feeling strangely happy for the first time since the blockade.”

  The lights burned brilliantly in Philharmonia Hall. This in itself was surprising. “I’ll never forget that,” said Koslov. The lights had never been on during the rehearsals or previous concerts. “I’d forgotten what electric light was like.”

  The audience poured in: not just the city’s artistic circles, not just the Communist Party elite, but hundreds of others who had gone without food to hear the piece played. Many soldiers came straight from the front in their uniforms; a few still carried their automatic weapons.

  In the audience was an eleven-year-old boy named Yuri Ahronovitch, who had been on an evacuation train caught in one of the railway bombardments of the previous August. He had spent two months wandering by foot that fall trying to make it back to the city. He had managed to live through the winter. Now he came to hear what Shostakovich had written about Leningrad. He would later become a well-known conductor and would lead the Seventh Symphony himself.

 
Captain Parfionov of the trombone section looked out at the crowd. “It had been an everyday job until now. But we were stunned by the number of people, that there could be so many people starving for food but also starving for music. Some had come in suits, some from the front. Most were thin and dystrophic. Some I recognised from fishing before the war. That was the moment we decided to play as best we could.”

  Though it was summer, the orchestra was bundled up for the performance. “We were dressed like cabbages, with so many layers of clothes on,” said oboist Matus. The musicians’ bodies, racked with starvation, could not regulate heat. “It was too cold to play without gloves. We wore them like mittens with the fingers cut off; even then it was hard to move the keys on my instrument.”

  When Eliasberg shambled out onstage to conduct, his tailcoat and trousers swamped his emaciated frame.

  Now, as it had been heard in so many cities around the world, Shostakovich’s Seventh was finally heard in Leningrad itself. The confident first theme strode forth.

  It was heard not merely inside the hall that night. Loudspeakers broadcast it through the streets of the city, over the canals, past the sandbagged palaces. The army had set up speakers to blare it across no-man’s-land at the enemy lines, where German soldiers huddled in their trenches and gun emplacements.

  The whole of Leningrad heard the music that evening. A soldier in the Red Army wrote in his journal, “On the night of 9 August 1942, my artillery squadron and the people of the great frontline city were listening to the Shostakovich symphony with closed eyes. It seemed that the cloudless sky had suddenly become a storm bursting with music as the city listened to the symphony of heroes and forgot about the war, but not the meaning of war.”