Symphony for the city of the dead : Dmitri Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad

382 Pages·2017·20.12 MB·English

by  Anderson

Prologue
PART ONE
The Death of Yesterday
The Birth of Tomorrow
Life Is Getting Merrier
PART TWO
Friendship
Barbarossa
The Approach
The First Movement
The Second Movement
The Third Movement
Fables, Stories
Flight
Railway Car No. 7
Kuibyshev and Leningrad
An Optimistic Shostakovich
The City of the Dead
My Music Is My Weapon
The Road of Life
Symphony for the City of the Dead
PART THREE
Cold War and Thaw
Author’s Note
Source Notes
Bibliography
Photography and Image Credits
An American agent
met with a Russian agent one bright
summer morning when the world was collapsing in the face of Nazi terror. It
was June 2, 1942; the Second World War was not going well for the Allied
forces. Most of Europe had already been conquered by the Nazi German
onslaught. France had fallen, and so had Norway, Denmark, Poland, Belgium,
and Czechoslovakia. Now the Germans were deep inside Russia, clawing away
at the country’s innards.
The American agent and the Soviet agent may have spoken of these things
when they met. They may have talked about the need for cooperation between
their countries, which were now allied against the Nazi threat. All we know is
that after they spoke, the Soviet agent passed a wooden box to the American,
who took the box and left the building.
Inside the wooden box was a strip of microfilm that, when unrolled, would
stretch over a hundred feet long. It contained hardly any words: just lines and
dots and ancient monastic symbols in complicated arrangements.
The Russians hoped it would help change the course of the war.
The microfilm had taken a long route to get all the way from Russia to
Washington, D.C. It had been flown by plane to Tehran, then driven across the
deserts of the Middle East and North Africa to Cairo. From Cairo, it had been
put back on a plane and flown to Brazil, and from there, to the United States.
Now it was about to embark on the final leg of its journey — to New York City.
First the American agent stopped for lunch at a cafeteria. He got up from the
table to go to the bathroom. When he came back, the table was empty. The box
with the microfilm was gone.
He had just lost one of the most widely discussed documents of the war.
Panicked, he scanned the room: People ate. Knives scraped across plates. A
busboy retreated toward the trash cans with a tray full of garbage.
There, on the kid’s tray, tipping toward the peelings and rinds, was the box.
After a journey of ten thousand miles across steppe, sand, sea, and jungle, the
microfilm almost ended its trip in the trash.
The agent stopped the kid short of dumping the microfilm. He retrieved the
box. The stupid accident was averted.
The agent set out for New York City. There was a lot to be done. In the next
few weeks, hundreds of copies of the documents encrypted on that strip needed
to be made, and people were already clamoring for it to be made public.
By the day the Soviet agent and the American agent met to pass along the
microfilm, the Germans had conquered most of Europe and then had poured east
into Russia. They seemed unstoppable. Their tanks had swarmed across the
fertile fields of Russia’s southern provinces, destroying villages as they went.
And in the north of Russia, the city of Leningrad, once the country’s capital, had
been surrounded for nine months, locked within its rivers and its trenches,
blasted daily by air raids and long-range artillery.
The document on the microfilm concerned the city of Leningrad.
More than a million people trapped inside the city were blocked off almost
entirely from the outside world. Over the winter, they had been without
electricity, without running water, without food, without firewood, and almost
without hope. Families ate wallpaper paste and sawdust. Women prowled
basements for corpses to eat, and there were rumors that gangs of men who had
turned cannibal went out at night to hunt for victims in alleys. Germans rained
down incendiary bombs on the roofs and strafed the squares and avenues during
nightly air raids. Adolf Hitler had demanded that the city and all its inhabitants
be utterly destroyed.
Secret Directive No. 1a 1601/41: “The Führer has decided to erase the city of
[Leningrad] from the face of the earth. I have no interest in the further existence
of this large population point after the defeat of Soviet Russia.”
German high command felt it would be too costly to feed all the prisoners of
Leningrad if they were captured, and Hitler considered the Russian Slavs, like
the Jews, to be an inferior race, fit only for slavery or extermination. His vision
was to make “room to live” for his Aryan cohorts. Russia would become
breadbasket, oil field, and Teutonic playground in the thrilling gymnastic future
of the triumphant Nazi Reich.
In New York, on June 3, the microfilm was unspooled and stretched across an
illuminated table. Men inspected it with magnifying glasses. Contained on the
film was not, peculiarly, the plans for some technological secret — a submarine
or the atomic bomb. It was not some fragment of Enigma code or unscrambled
German battle order.
Instead, the microfilm contained 252 pages of the musical score for the
Seventh Symphony of a nervous Russian composer named Dmitri Shostakovich.
Its codes and symbols would be translated by an orchestra of more than a
hundred and would be broadcast to millions sitting by their radios — but we are
still arguing today about what secret messages the piece contains, what cries for
help.
The score included few words: a few typical performance directions in Italian,
as was the tradition. And, on the first page, an inscription in Russian: “Dedicated
to the city of Leningrad.” For this reason, it was called the Leningrad
Symphony.
Why had the Soviet government arranged so carefully for this piece to be
shipped to the West across battle lines, across a Middle East that was swarming
with Fascist tanks, across seas festering with enemy subs? How could it possibly
be worth it?
And who was the composer of this desperately sought-after score? Dmitri
Shostakovich spent the first several months of the Siege of Leningrad trapped in
that city under fire, writing much of his Seventh Symphony in breaks between
air raids. He had first announced that he was working on the piece over the radio
in September 1941, just a few weeks after the Germans had started shelling the
city. He had explained his intentions to an audience of thousands.
The day of his radio broadcast, Shostakovich almost missed his appointment
to speak on the air. As he was walking through the streets of the city, the
Germans started their daily assault. Sirens howled. An urgent voice barked over
the loudspeakers, “This is the local defense headquarters! Air raid! Air raid!”
Shostakovich scampered to a bomb shelter. Planes roared over the city’s spires
and canals. Explosions echoed through the Classical avenues. The composer hid
until the all-clear sounded.
As a result, by the time he got to the radio studio, he was almost late. The staff
rushed him in front of a microphone, and he delivered his message in his high,
tense tenor. It buzzed out of radios all over the city where buildings burned and
windows gaped without glass.
“An hour ago I finished scoring the second movement of my latest large
orchestral composition,” he told his fellow citizens.
In spite of the war and the danger threatening Leningrad, I wrote the first
movements quickly.
Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this so that the people of Leningrad
listening to me will know that life goes on in our city. . . .
Leningrad is my country. It is my native city and my home. Many thousands
of other people from Leningrad know this same feeling of infinite love for our
native town, for its wonderful, spacious streets, its incomparably beautiful
squares and buildings. When I walk through our city a feeling of deep conviction
grows within me that Leningrad will always stand, grand and beautiful, on the
banks of the Neva, that it will always be a bastion of my country, that it will
always be there to enrich the fruits of culture.
We still have the piece of paper on which he typed out the message he read on
air. Shostakovich must have left it on a desk at the radio station when he was
finished with the announcement. It was used for scrap paper. On the other side,
the studio director scribbled his notes about the lineup of radio shows for the
next day’s broadcasts: instructions on how to construct barricades, suggestions
for how to defend your home against German troops, and, finally, the recipe for
Molotov cocktails. This was not a drink but a homemade explosive, a bottle of
gasoline stuffed with a rag, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav
Molotov.
Everyone in Leningrad was on the front line.
Shostakovich’s attachment to his native Leningrad is more complicated than it
might seem from his brave and defiant declaration. In the course of his short life,
he had been named both a Soviet hero and an enemy of the people. And
similarly, Leningrad itself had been renamed several times since Shostakovich’s
birth, seen as both Russia’s prize jewel and a canker on the hide of the body
politic. The Communist government had celebrated Leningrad as the cradle of
Soviet Russia — and had punished its citizens viciously for supposed crimes