Shostakovich wrote the Leningrad Symphony while
fighting fires during the siege.
On the morning of June 22, 1941, Dmitri Shostakovich went to the Conservatory.
That day he sat on the committee which examined graduation candidates. The exams proceeded in festive humor until a sudden hush descended on the hall as someone dropped a one word note on the desk -- "war."
Like millions of others, Shostakovich was caught up in the turmoil that engulfed Russia.
On June 30 the formation of a civilian Emergency Volunteer Corps began in Leningrad. Shostakovich promptly joined up. A month later a TASS reporter took the now famous photo of the composer on duty wearing his fireman's uniform.
Even while fire and destruction swept the country Shostakovich did not neglect his music. On August 29, the composer finished the complete draft of the first movement of his seventh symphony, after little less than a month and a half.
On September 8, the German army occupied Schlisselburg, cutting Leningrad off from the southeast. Fireman Shostakovich never saw as much fire as on that day, when clouds of smoke blotted out the sky.
At 7 am on September 17, Radio Committee editor Georgy Makogonenko called on Shostakovich. The composer was working on the last page of the second movement. Later that day Shostakovich went on the air.
"I speak to you from Leningrad at a time when brutal battle rages at its very gates... Two hours ago I finished the first two movements of a symphonic work. If I succeed in writing this composition well, if I manage to finish the third and fourth movements, then I may call it my seventh symphony.
"Why do I announce this? I announce this so that those listening to me now may know that life in our city goes on as usual ...."
This Monday, September 25, in observance of the composer's birthday, Maris Janssohns leads the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Philharmonic in a performance of what became known as Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony.
The symphony premiered in Kuybyshev (Samara), the city to which the bespectacled fireman was eventually evacuated, and where he completed the fourth movement. Performances soon followed in Moscow, and in still-besieged Leningrad. The score then journeyed in a roundabout manner first to London, and then to New York. Arturo Toscanini directed the American premiere in the Radio City Music Hall.
The overall tone of the first three movements is a warm affirmation of faith in life and the ultimate success of the city's defense, although in each movement there is a martial "interruption."
The sonata-design of the first movement is suspended by the relentless repetition, modeled after Ravel's "Bolero," of an innocuous march-tune over an unvaried drum tattoo, building in volume and texture to an awful crisis. And yet the march-tune, even when brayed out by the full brass choir, gives an impression not of an evil thing, but of a simple thing put to evil use.
The second movement begins in a gently wistful manner, as a somewhat sombre cousin to the "metronome" scherzo of the Beethoven Eighth. The trio is a shrewdly wrought struggle between music of bleak restlessness, and a march which seems initially to triumph over it.
The wind chorale and the string choir arioso of the third movement are astonishingly positive musical statements for a composer working in a city under such dire circumstances. The third movement contains some of Shostakovich's finest writing for the woodwinds, and it is music which earns its place in the repertory quite apart from the extraordinary conditions of its creation.
Perhaps ironically it is the fourth movement, written further away from the front-line, whose character is most deeply tinged with struggle. People in the heart of a crisis often shelve their sense of that crisis, and get on with the work at hand.
Also on Monday's program is Musorgsky's "Songs and Dances of Death" in Shostakovich's orchestration, sung by Marianna Tarasova.
Shostakovich's fascination with Musorgsky was deeply personal; in the '30s he prepared a new edition of "Boris Godunov," and re-orchestrated "The Khovansky Affair" in the late '50s. The orchestration of the "Songs and Dances of Death" was completed in the early '60s, and foreshadows a preoccupation with death in Shostakovich's own Fourteenth Symphony.
Death is the gruesome `hero' in four vividly depicted scenes. In "Lullaby," Death assures a grieving mother that he can sing more sweetly to her dying child. In "Serenade," Death sings beneath a young maiden's window, promising to free her from captivity. In "Trepak," Death covers an old drunkard in a blanket of forgetful snow. And at the last, Death is "The Field-Marshal," gloating over a battlefield strewn with the slain.