Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  A woman in the hall remembered, “It was so meaningful for all of us. We realized that this concert might be the last thing we’d do in our lives.”

  “One cannot speak of an impression made by the symphony,” wrote a composer in the audience. “It was not an impression, but a staggering experience. This was felt not only by the listeners but also by the performers who read the music sheets as if they were reading a living chronicle about themselves.”

  It was not only the Russians who reacted. The Germans listened, too, as the music rose up through the leafy streets and above the gilt barrage balloons. It barked out of the radios in the Wehrmacht barracks. Years later, a German soldier told Eliasberg, “It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad.” That was enough in itself. “But something else started to happen. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and death — the will to stay human.”

  The symphony meant many things to many people. To many Americans, it forged strong ties of kinship and friendship. To many Russians, it sang of the hope of victory. It may have shamed some Germans into realizing that they could no longer despise the Slavs as subhumans. But for the people of Leningrad, it meant something else entirely: it gave them an identity. “We listened with such emotion, because we had lived for this moment, to come and hear this music,” remembered a woman who was in the hall that night. “This was a real symphony which we lived. This was our symphony. Leningrad’s.”

  Like the spring cleanup that brought people together in the streets, the symphony showed them that they belonged. It gave them a story to tell about themselves in which they were heroes and in which their hideous trials were a mark of pride. It transformed them from victims into the pride of Russia.

  This suggests some of the power of stories.

  Not long ago, English journalist Ed Vulliamy sought out the musicians who remained from that orchestra, and in a series of deeply moving interviews, recorded their memories of that night. He found clarinetist Viktor Koslov watching and rewatching videos of Leningrad’s tragedy, as if still trying to make sense of it — or as if it were the only thing that made sense of anything else.

  Koslov gestured to the suffering on the screen (the corpses on sleds, the shattered buildings). “It’s what we lived with every day! It’s what we walked past on the way to rehearsals. Ah, but the concert itself — it was our answer to the suffering. I have seen it in my sleep many times, and still hear the thunder of applause from the audience. That will be the last image before my eyes when I die.”

  As the brass blared out the finale, bringing back with triumph the striding theme that had begun the whole work, Captain Parfionov began to wobble with exhaustion. “It was so loud and powerful that I thought I’d collapse.”

  He saw the audience rising in their seats, however, “willing [the orchestra] to keep going.”

  With a mighty blast, the Leningrad Symphony was over.

  There was silence. And then, of course, the wild applause. “It felt like a victory,” remembered trombonist Viktor Orlovsky. “At the end, our conductor, Eliasberg, received one bouquet of flowers from a teenage girl.” This was remarkable because no one in the city grew flowers when they could grow vegetables. The girl turned to the orchestra and explained, “My family did this because life has to go on as normal — whatever happens around us.” The players could not restrain themselves any longer. They turned and embraced one another. They kissed. It was like they had been through a battle.

  Sitting in the audience, diarist Vera Inber had little doubt the symphony was about the city. “The rumbling approach of German tanks — there they were.” But she pointed out that part of the piece was just fantasy: “The shining conclusion is still to come.”

  For many, however, that night seemed to mark a turning point.

  Eliasberg stooped in his oversize tailcoat. “When we had finished, everyone was satisfied. Me? I was shattered, that’s all.”

  Leningrad Communist Party boss Andrei Zhdanov invited the whole orchestra — or those who didn’t have to return immediately to the front — to a huge gala reception. He greeted the musicians personally and told them how proud he was of them. Ksenia Matus was delighted with the spread. “On the table there was beefsteak and — oh, everything delicious was there! It was the first we had eaten since the beginning of the siege.” Unfortunately, they weren’t used to rich food, and after gobbling it all down, they vomited it all up.

  It didn’t matter much, said Matus. “No one could feed us, but music inspired us and brought us back to life. In this way, this day was our feast.” More important, the Germans were not singing the Horst Wessel Song at Leningrad’s Astoria Hotel. “They never had their party,” said Matus. “Instead, we played our symphony, and [later] Leningrad was saved.”

  Eliasberg remembered that night for the rest of his life. (It was to be the high point of his career.) “People just stood and cried. They knew that this was not a passing episode but the beginning of something. We heard it in the music. The concert hall, the people in their apartments, the soldiers on the front — the whole city had found its humanity. And in that moment, we triumphed over the soulless Nazi war machine.”

  In 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Leningrad performance, the same orchestra was called together in the same hall to play the piece again. By that time, only fourteen of them remained alive. Their reunion recalled that first rehearsal in 1942, except that age had now seized those whom siege had not.

  Trombonist Mikhail Parfionov met again with oboist Ksenia Matus. “Dear Edith,” he said, “when we first performed this together we were young and beautiful.”

  She replied tartly, “And now?”

  Gallantly, he answered, “Now, dear Edith, you, at least, are more beautiful than ever.”

  Ksenia Matus mused to Vulliamy, “So many years have passed since that day and memory is a funny thing, like drying paint. It changes color as it dries. But that symphony has stayed with me the way it was that night. Afterwards, it was still a city under siege, but I knew it would live. 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.”

  SOURCES

  The story should end there, but of course it does not. History does not allow for perfect cadences.

  The performance of the Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad is remembered now as a turning point in the assault, but only because it changed the way people saw themselves and the war effort. It shaped memory. In fact, the siege went on for another year and a half — but people recognized that the worst was over. Step by step, Leningraders reclaimed their city.

  Already, things were changing. A flotilla of warships, freighters, and barges carried hundreds of tons of supplies to the city across Lake Ladoga. At the end of the summer, pipes were laid under the lake so Leningrad would not be as short of fuel when the winter came. The NKVD, in one of its secret dispatches, reported more good news to the Kremlin: “In connection with the improvement of the food situation in June, the death rate went down by a third. . . . The number of incidents of use of human flesh in food supply decreased. Whereas 236 people were arrested for this crime in May, in June it was just 56.” As autumn arrived, the city laid in supplies for the winter and increasingly shipped out noncombatants, who fled to their families elsewhere.

  In December 1942, General Govorov planned a major offensive against the Germans in another attempt to break the iron ring around the captive city. He gathered forty-five hundred powerful guns and mortars on either side of the Wehrmacht blockade and prepared to push from both sides. “By the beginning of January,” said Govorov, comparing his assault to a Shostakovich symphony, “all the musicians in our artillery orchestra knew their scores, and we were ready to launch our own offensive.”

  Operation Spark, as it was called, began on January 12, 1943. A bombardment of German positions lasted hours. Fleets of mighty Katyusha rocket
launchers blasted away at Nazi gun emplacements. Soviet planes streaked through the sky. A surprise infantry force on skis crossed the snows of frozen Lake Ladoga to retake Shlisselburg, looking much like the knights in Eisenstein’s movie Alexander Nevsky fighting the Germans six hundred years earlier. For days, the Red Army kept up a fierce attack.

  By January 18, they had broken through the German encirclement of the city. At eleven o’clock that night, radio announcer Yuri Levitan declared over the airwaves, “Troops of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts have joined together and at the same time have broken the blockade of Leningrad.” Soldiers from inside the city and outside the blockade ring swarmed together and embraced in joy.

  The siege would go on — but the blockade was over. “This snowy moonlit night of January 18–19 will never vanish from the memory of those who experienced it,” writer Vera Inber told the people of the city over the radio. “All of us will experience happiness and grief in our lives. But this happiness, the happiness of liberated Leningrad, we will never forget.”

  Poet Olga Berggolts raved, “The cursed circle is broken.”

  Quickly, the Soviets built a makeshift railroad running through the corridor of recaptured territory. One of the construction workers remembers, “We were determined to get foodstuffs into the city as quickly as possible. The Nazis kept the whole route under constant surveillance. Our trains and trucks could only travel at night, and even then there was constant artillery shelling. But when things got bad, we thought of the women and children we were trying to reach.” In just three weeks, food and other supplies were being brought to the city by train. It was not an easy journey. In contrast to Lake Ladoga’s Road of Life, train engineers spoke of this new railway as the Corridor of Death. The Germans still shelled the tracks regularly. (Crews had to repair the tracks twelve hundred times in 1943.) But by February, supplies were pouring into Leningrad.

  Dmitri Shostakovich spent several months that winter in a sanatorium recovering from typhoid fever. After that, he went to work in Moscow. Soon, out in the countryside, staying in a henhouse he’d been granted by the government, he was writing his Eighth Symphony. It is a powerfully distressed piece, unremitting in its depiction of war.

  The Eighth, being gloomier, did not get quite the reception the Seventh did, but that hardly mattered. The Seventh had brought him the gratitude of his whole nation. “The Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich is significant beyond the bounds of a merely musical event,” wrote one Soviet commentator. “It has become a cultural entity of our people, a fact of political and social significance, and an impulse to struggle and victory.” Stalin’s regime could not have been happier with the composer. When propagandist Aleksandr Fadeyev announced the government’s wishes for creative artists of all kinds, Shostakovich was held up as the great example: “Let us try to create now, during the war, works that are real, serious, big, but ones that can be used right now as weapons, not set aside for later. . . . Make it, for now, like the Seventh Symphony.”

  In Moscow, Shostakovich found himself writing music for the NKVD’s song-and-dance troupe. It may seem strange that he agreed to this. Many of his friends had been hounded or killed by the NKVD. Why would he agree to provide light entertainment for the men who had tortured and executed Meyerhold? (Though at the time, he could not have known Meyerhold’s fate for sure.)

  This was the way Dmitri Shostakovich survived. He was a mixture of defiance and compliance. “He was only a man,” conductor Kurt Sanderling said. “He was a coward when it concerned his own affairs, but he was very courageous when it concerned others.” When the NKVD approached him and told him to start dreaming up dance numbers, he was, supposedly, “too scared to refuse.” It is easy to blame him when we ourselves are safe, when we do not have a family watched by agents willing to kill, when we do not have imprisoned relatives whose survival depends on our good behavior.

  For the NKVD, Shostakovich wrote a suite of nostalgic, light music called “Native Leningrad,” remembering his hometown. He wrote a song called “Burn, Burn, Burn.” It was about torches used during the blackouts. It became a national hit.

  He sat sullenly in the meetings as the NKVD officers talked about what entertainments they preferred. He perked up once: when they requested music for a dance number about soccer. “May I compose the music for ‘Soccer,’ if you have nothing against it?” he asked. A colleague mused, “I don’t know why he was so keen on writing soccer music. He was a funny man. . . .”

  The NKVD’s enthusiasm for soccer was as intense as Shostakovich’s, however. At the time, NKVD head Lavrentii Beria and Stalin’s son Vasily were engaged in a cruel game of fan favoritism, arresting, releasing, and kidnapping again the Dynamo team’s manager, Nikolai Starostin. Beria wanted Dynamo to lose, so he had Starostin seized and sent to a labor camp. Vasily Stalin wanted the man to head up the air force soccer team, so he sent his own plane to airlift Starostin out of exile. The hideous tussle went back and forth, a game played with Starostin’s life. Even the entertainments of the NKVD could carelessly destroy people.

  Shostakovich did use his new connections with authority to help composers who were destitute, in exile, or on the front. One day when he was in Moscow, for example, he received the score of a symphony from a young composer named Mieczysław Weinberg. Weinberg, a Polish Jew, had been living in Warsaw with his mother, father, and sister when the Nazis invaded in 1939. The Polish government announced that Jewish men should flee the city before the German SS arrived. Young Weinberg took his little sister and ran. Unfortunately, his sister complained that day that her shoes chafed. She wanted to go back to their parents. He let her return and kept moving east.

  She was with her parents in Warsaw, therefore, when the Nazis arrived and shipped them all to a concentration camp in Trawniki, where they were massacred. Weinberg knew none of this. He fled through the countryside, making his way across fields and farms, through scenes of ghastly carnage, until he reached the border of Russia. He was lucky to be let through. He had to keep running, however, when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa.

  By the time he wrote to Shostakovich, he was in the city of Tashkent, married to Natalya Mikhoels, the daughter of a prominent Russian Jew. He was unknown, just a composition student, but he deeply loved Shostakovich’s music.

  The older composer looked at Weinberg’s First Symphony and was impressed by its energy and ingenuity. He arranged for Weinberg to be brought to Moscow and supported as a composer. Weinberg became one of his closest friends. Shostakovich needed real friends.

  For the first several months Shostakovich was in Moscow, his family was still in Kuibyshev. Shostakovich spent his lonely nights playing cards with other composers. One of them, a young, burly writer of light operas, Tikhon Khrennikov, had been in Railway Car No. 7 with Shostakovich when they fled Moscow. As they watched each other carefully, playing poker, neither could have known that in a few years, Khrennikov would denounce Shostakovich publicly in front of the Composers’ Union and would bring about his downfall.

  They played their cards carefully.

  The tide had turned. The Russian war effort now won its victories, the names of which are enshrined in military history: the apocalyptic fight for Stalingrad; the struggle for Kharkov; the liberation of Kiev; the colossal tank battle of Kursk, an epic clash of three thousand armored vehicles (from a tiny tank only two feet high to massive giants designed by Porsche) all rumbling through fields of sunflowers; and Operation Bagration, a Soviet counteroffensive launched on the third anniversary of Hitler’s invasion. Russian industry was back on its feet. Transplanted factories were producing thousands of tanks and planes monthly, many of the new models (like the Yak-9 fighter plane) even better than the older Western prototypes they were based on.

  On January 14, 1944, the last vestige of German Army Group North was finally forced away from Leningrad. The citizens who were left in the city (not many — only 575,000, down from 2.5 million at the beginning of the siege) climbed up onto their
rooftops to watch the final shelling. On January 27, General Govorov declared, “The city of Leningrad has been entirely liberated.” The siege had lasted 872 days. It is the longest siege in recorded history.

  “Suddenly Leningrad emerged from the gloom before our gaze,” wrote Olga Berggolts. “To the last crack in its walls, the city was revealed to us — shell-pitted, bullet-riddled, scarred Leningrad, with its plywood windowpanes. And we saw that despite all the cruel slashes and blows, Leningrad retained its proud beauty. In the bluish, roseate, green and white of the lights, the city appeared to us so austere and touching we could not feast our eyes enough on it.”

  Now that they were on the offensive, the Red Army pounded the Germans backward at an astonishing rate of fifty miles a day. In Moscow, where the Shostakovich family finally reunited and decided to settle, there was an air of excitement, even celebration. Concerts were no longer interrupted by air-raid sirens and detonations; they were interrupted by the firing of cannons announcing new victories: rivers crossed, cities taken.

  Red Army soldiers marching through Germany saw that the tables had been turned. One wrote: “Estates, villages and towns were burning. Columns of carts, with dazed German men and women who had failed to flee, crawled across the landscape. Shapeless fragments of tanks and self-propelled guns lay everywhere, as well as hundreds of corpses. I recalled such sights from the first days of the war”— from the days, in other words, just after Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa and swept into the USSR.

  As the Red Army drove deep into German territory, its troops began to come across the death camps. The full dimensions of Nazi atrocities became clear.

  At the same time, the soldiers’ years of suffering and loss, their utter disgust at the cruelty of the enemy, led them to commit atrocities of their own. Civilian populations from the Baltic nations to the Balkans succumbed to mass executions and individual brutalities. Witnessing the savagery of the Red Army, a Hungarian wrote: “They were simple and cruel like children. With millions of people destroyed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or in the war, death to them had become an everyday affair. They killed without hatred and let themselves be killed without resisting.”