On 20 August, the Germans closed the ring around their flank objective, Leningrad. On 4 September, Field-Marshal von Leeb raised his baton: Air raids and bombardments began.—Don’t worry, comrades, said our radio, we’ve halted them at the Ligovo-Pulkovo Line…—On 6 September, an enemy communiqué announced that encirclement was “progressing” toward a victory, and two days later Leningrad’s last railway connection was lost. On 22 September, Hitler the Liberator with his usual kindness issued the following “Directive on the Future of the City of Petersburg”: The Führer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the earth… After the defeat of Soviet Russia, there is no interest in the further existence of this large inhabited area. (In his favor, we ought to note that he was worried about exposing his soldiers to epidemics.)
Within this killing-zone remained two hundred thousand ill-equipped Red Army men, and three hundred thousand citizens hardly trained or armed at all, but gloriously enrolled in the People’s Militia. Pale, weary women toiled with their hair tucked up, packing explosives into the shell casings which stood in rows before them like immense metal bottles. Their counterparts in Moscow were doing the same. Everyone was ready for the future, for death.
Comrade Zhdanov summoned the activists to a meeting and announced with his usual melodrama: Either the working class of Leningrad will be turned into slaves, and the best among them exterminated, or we shall turn Leningrad into the Fascists’ grave.
The Party promised to be merciless against deserters. The Party warned that no selfish individualism would be tolerated. Shostakovich had heard it all before.
His Seventh or so-called “Leningrad” Symphony was by some accounts already underway before the invasion. In August 1939, when the faithful demanded to know why in defiance of all his promises that undistinguished Sixth Symphony had failed to memorialize Lenin, Shostakovich twitched, slid his spectacles up his nose, smiled to the utmost of his cunningly hidden spite, and announced poker-faced that the Seventh would be program music of a wisely sycophantic species at last: First movement—Lenin’s youth. Second movement—Lenin leading the October storm… These words got eagerly reproduced in Leningradskaya Pravda, Moskovskii Bolshevik and suchlike organs of our trusting Soviet press.
The joke went further: The capitalist publication Current Biography proclaims in its last number to be published before the Hitlerites attacked Russia that early in 1941, Shostakovich completed his Seventh Symphony, dedicated to the memory of Lenin.
I’ve also read that it was not until July, by which time Army Group North had already overrun all the pillboxes of the Stalin Line, that the actual composition commenced. (The Fascists are cutting all the wires! cried his colleague Yudina, but when he asked which wires and with what result, she wasn’t sure; she’d heard it from a loudspeaker.) Meanwhile, a certain Comrade Alexandrov has assured me that Shostakovich accomplished nothing before August.—The more one studies these various assertions, the more peculiar they become; it’s as if on a summer’s night the many canals of Leningrad were to join together and rearrange themselves into a spiral!—According to the next revision of his biography, by the end of July he’d completed only the first movement, which he provisionally re-entitled “War.”
Does it matter which version is true? Musicologists tell me that it does. What, then, do we mean by “already underway?” I myself credit the formulation of that sad and angry torchbearer N. Mandelstam, based on what she’d learned from her martyred poet-husband and his muse, her rival, A. Akhmatova, that the whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is relayed from an unknown source… Let’s suppose that her description applies to music as well as it does to poetry. Whom did Shostakovich hear calling him? A certain woman with long dark hair comes to mind (you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me), but I ought to suppress this fantasy, which shows utopian individualism at its worst. The allegation that during this period he was wounded by a German shell fragment which, taking up residence within his brain, gifted him with sublime melodies whenever he tilted his head, is an equally colorful falsification.—Why not grant that harmony and sense descended upon him by grace alone? The pen flickered down the staves of his score-sheets, vivifying everything. Behind the blackout curtains, the candle kept shining every night in Shostakovich’s study. Chords and motifs trolled between his ears like tank-silhouettes probing the dark teeth of antitank concrete.
Establishing the date of inspiration for the first movement is particularly crucial, since its infamous Rat Theme, the marionette in eleven variations, evokes the madness of German Fascism. What indeed might it represent, had its conception occurred while we were still friends with Hitler the Liberator? (Here’s a hint: In the Rat Theme some critics claim to find a mixture of “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Merry Widow”; but there may also be a trace of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.24)
Whatever conclusion we penetrate to, there will always remain deeper levels of meaning, undiscovered bunkers, within the Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich escapes us; he’ll die free. The conductor Mravinsky once wrote of him that everything has been heard in advance, lived through, thought out and calculated.
He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.
In August, the leaflets raining out of enemy airplanes advised women to wear white so that they’d be recognized as noncombatants. In spite of our loudspeakers, some of them believed. Their white dresses as they shoveled in the brown antitank trenches made them perfect targets. But then, so did the any-colored dresses of the housewives, who got blown to bits while they waited in bread queues. Fortunately, his wife had paid attention when he’d warned her: Ninotchka, their promises may be new, but their tricks are old. They’re Fascists!—And Nina, wearing earth-brown, got passed over, although she came creeping home that night with her face spattered with other women’s blood. History repeats itself. For instance, Comrade Stalin promised me the moon, but right after that he kicked me, metaphorically, you know, on my ass! Wasn’t that a joke? And just when Elena finally felt ready to marry me, Nina announced she was pregnant, when actually… That was her joke. So that’s how it is. Life calls for the highest order of deafness; then we can be, so to speak, happy. It’s actually almost more than I can take. Why wasn’t I, you know, born deaf? From his rooftop post, Shostakovich could hear the strafing and the screaming, with our loudspeakers trying to shout it out. Crash and crash! The linden trees on Nevsky Prospect were falling. The screaming was new to his experience. Back in peacetime, when he and Nina had sat at home in terror, waiting for the knock on the door, they’d heard the shots across the city, but the screaming had been muffled under stone. It was now that he began to entertain the thought that a ringing shriek was at least more free than murder overmastered by silence. His music, how should I say, developed accordingly.
24
One critic has even read into this symphony a two-note “Stalin motif” which first appears in bars four and five.