Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  Hitler released Secret Directive No. 1a 1601/41, codifying what everyone in German command had been saying about Leningrad for months. It was called “The Future of the City of St. Petersburg.” (He used the old, pre-Soviet name for the city, as if the last twenty-five years of history had not happened.) The memo ran:

  1. The Führer has decided to erase the city of St. Petersburg 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.

  2. The previous demands by the fleet concerning the maintenance of [St. Petersburg’s] dockyards, harbors, and similar important naval facilities are well known to [German high command]; however, the satisfaction of these does not seem possible in view of the general line of conduct with regard to St. Petersburg.

  3. We propose to closely blockade the city and erase it from the earth by means of artillery fire of all caliber and continuous bombardment from the air. . . . If a request of surrender is announced, it will be rejected.

  And so the Red Army, squeezed between two of the most brutal dictators in human history, fought on.

  Someone in power had discovered that Shostakovich was writing a new symphony. Word came down that, to boost morale, he should talk about it on the radio.

  On the morning of September 17, he put down his pen and set off for the radio committee headquarters. He walked through a surreal landscape.

  The air in the city smelled of “pulverized brick and melting iron.” Huge holes were blasted in the roads. There was no one to fix them. Much of the city no longer had any electricity. Wires sagged uselessly over the streets. Apartment buildings stood without walls.

  With houses sheared in half, Lidiya Ginzburg wrote, communal life was exposed in a devastated cutaway cross section:

  You begin to realize with astonishment that as you sit at home in your room you are suspended in space, with other people similarly suspended above your head and beneath your feet. You know about this of course, you’ve heard furniture being moved about upstairs, even wood being chopped. But all that is abstract, unpicturable, like the way we are borne along through space on a ball rotating about its axis. . . . Now the truth had been revealed in a dizzyingly graphic fashion. There were skeletal houses with preserved facades, shot through with darkness and depth.

  Collapsed roofs “hung at an angle and looked as if they were still sliding down, perpetually falling, like a waterfall.” Leningrad now literally resembled one of the fractured Cubist landscapes of the 1920s avant-garde — or, as Ginzburg remarked, one of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s stage sets.

  Just a few minutes before leaving for his radio engagement, Shostakovich had put the finishing touches on his final draft of the dancing second movement of the symphony. Perhaps, as he walked, he thought about what he would do in the third movement. Perhaps he thought about what he would soon say on air, though it may already have been written for him by someone else. He made his way past the massive revetments of the Peter and Paul Fortress and crossed the Neva. The bridge was studded with antiaircraft guns.

  At some point along his route to Radio House, an air raid struck the city. The whistles blew; loudspeakers called out warnings. The Luftwaffe was on its way.

  Shostakovich took shelter. As the planes snarled overhead and bombs detonated distantly, he was anxious: time was passing, and he did not like being late. He often would scold people for even a tardy minute.

  While the air raid continued, the radio simply broadcast the ticking of a metronome. This maddening, steady, even ticktock became the musical voice of the city under siege. It echoed through the streets whenever there was no programming — a heartbeat to mark the passing of the seconds.

  Then the all-clear sounded. Shostakovich came out of hiding and continued to make his way to the Leningrad Radio House. He arrived just in time.

  The building was in some disarray. Staff members had already started sleeping there instead of going home at night. Eventually, the whole staff would take up residence on the seventh floor, building crude cubicles to sleep in, sharing their food, their clothes, everything, to make sure that the official station was always broadcasting. Down on the fourth floor, exhausted journalists worked on programming.

  Shostakovich’s acquaintance Olga Berggolts was living there by that time. She officially was still living at the city’s block of writers’ apartments, a building called the “Tears of Socialism,” but she rarely went home. (It was not all selfless: she was having an affair with a coworker.) Though she had suffered greatly at the hands of the regime, she now turned her poetry to supporting the efforts of the city to remain strong in the face of the enemy. In her poems, she described and broadcast what people experienced all over the city — and so her poetry became, in many ways, the voice of the people. Many were expecting Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony to perform a similar role. Whatever his intentions for the piece might have been originally, this was the direction people were pushing him in: to understand the growing work as a testimony of Leningrad’s struggles and strength.

  He settled himself in front of the microphone. He was on air. He began to speak: “An hour ago I finished scoring the second movement of my latest large orchestral composition.” His voice was rough.

  If I manage to write well, if I manage to finish the third and fourth movements, the work may be called my Seventh Symphony. . . .

  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. All of us now are standing militant watch. As a native of Leningrad who has never abandoned the city of my birth, I feel all the tension of this situation most keenly. My life and work are completely bound up with Leningrad.

  He spoke rapturously and warmly of the city of his birth. He described it not as he had just seen it — with buildings mounded in sandbags, with empty windows gaping to the sky, with streets filled with rubble, with hillocks of debris. Instead, he recalled the city as those who lived there and loved it recalled it: as a city of wide avenues and gracious parks. Of course, he did not describe the city precisely as he had known it, shaken by revolution and hounded by terror. He described it, perhaps, as it had never quite been in his memory but had often been in his dreams.

  He closed by promising the people of his city, “In a little while I shall have finished my Seventh Symphony. At the moment the work is going quickly and easily. My ideas are clear and constructive. The composition is nearing completion. Then I shall come on the air again with my new work and wait anxiously for a fair and kindly appraisal of my efforts.”

  With that modest flourish, he signed off.

  As the radio committee had hoped, the story boosted morale around the city. “I am moved by the thought that while the bombs rain down on this besieged city Shostakovich is writing a symphony,” one woman wrote in her diary after the news had been picked up by the local Communist Party newspaper. “Leningrad Pravda’s report on it is tucked away between communiqués from the southern front and reports of petrol bombs. And so, in all this horror, art is still alive. It shines and warms the heart.”

  The night of the broadcast, Shostakovich and his family celebrated his progress with a small gathering at the apartment. A group of friends came by, and Shostakovich played them the two completed movements of the Seventh Symphony on the piano.

  He played them the march that inexorably repeated like the scuttling of “iron rats,” eventually growing to towering, ghastly dimensions. He played them the mischievous, strange little dance that followed.

  A composer who was there wrote in his diary, “[Shostakovich] told us of the over-all plan. The impression we all had was tremendous.” He was stunned at Shostakovich’s ability to take “surrounding experiences” and transmute them into “a complex and large form.”

  Outside, the air-raid alarms sounded: foghorns, factory whistles, loudspeakers.

  No one moved.

  Someone asked him to play the whole thing again.

 
; Shostakovich apologized and said that he had to take Nina and the children to the shelter in the basement. He excused himself.

  When he came back up, despite the air raid, he played his half a symphony again.

  The evening was a huge success. His friends were overwhelmed by his new work. It spoke somehow to what they all were feeling, trapped in that city.

  When they left, Shostakovich couldn’t calm himself down. He had ideas for the third movement — a slow Adagio he would eventually say described Russia’s “Native Expanses.”

  There was no electricity. He lit a candle and sat down.

  In the dark of night, he began to write again.

  SOURCES

  Sometime in the 1950s, if we are to believe the story, a great Russian composer approached a neurosurgeon. Some might say the composer was named Dmitri Shostakovich. This composer explained to the neurosurgeon “that he had a piece of metal embedded in his head and wondered whether it should be removed.”

  The composer — once again, let us say it was Dmitri Shostakovich — explained that during the Siege of Leningrad, a shell had exploded in the street, and that shrapnel had lodged in his brain.

  The neurosurgeon, somewhat surprised by this revelation, took some X-rays and then sat the composer in front of a fluoroscope. He could clearly see the metal fragment “in the temporal horn of the left ventricle (a cavity within the brain filled with cerebrospinal fluid).” He told the composer “it was probably advisable” to remove a large chunk of metal from his skull.

  The composer looked uneasy. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted the neurosurgeon to extract it. When he was pressed, he admitted sheepishly that “since the fragment had been there, . . . each time he leaned his head to one side he could hear music. His head was filled with melodies — different each time — which he then made use of when composing.” Conveniently enough, he could switch it off: “Moving his head back level immediately stopped the music.”

  The composer admitted he did not want to lose his metallic muse.

  The neurosurgeon referred the problem to the surgeon-general of the armed forces. The surgeon-general shrugged and said to leave the shrapnel there. “After all, a German shell will have done some good if it helps produce more music.”

  This bizarre story sounds like something written by one of Shostakovich’s writer friends, Daniil Kharms or Mikhail Zoshchenko. But is it true?

  It would be very surprising if it were. First of all, we have this story only thirdhand. The neurosurgeon (who remains nameless) supposedly told the story years after the fact to a Chinese neurologist, who published an article about it many years after that, in 1983. In his record of the encounter, he depicts the neurosurgeon being somewhat cagey about the name of the composer in question, for reasons that are unclear.

  The most damning argument against a shrapnel-based understanding of Shostakovich’s art is his schedule during the siege. Given what we know about his activities, he simply did not have time to be hospitalized with a serious head wound and to convalesce.

  No one at the time talked about a head wound. When she spoke later about the period, his daughter, Galina, old enough at the time to recall, did not mention her father being injured.

  The Soviet press made the most of everything Shostakovich did as he composed his Seventh Symphony. They never said a thing about shrapnel. If Shostakovich had been hit in the siege and bravely gone on penning his intermezzo, it would have been a tremendously useful piece of propaganda. The Sovinform Bureau flooded the airwaves and newspapers with morale-boosting tales of freak heroism: a soldier who was buried alive when a Panzer rolled over him but whose distinctive boots stuck out of the soil, so his friends could find him and save him; a plucky Russian nurse who escaped a Nazi death camp through song. The writer Vasily Grossman snidely called news items like this “Ivan Pupkin killed five Germans with a spoon” stories. They filled the airwaves when the real news was too grim to report. The Shostakovich shrapnel story, if true, would have been milked for all it was worth.

  The moment Shostakovich spoke over the radio, the story of the Seventh Symphony started to sparkle and to effervesce into myth. It became a public story used by others for their own ends. This does not mean that people lied — but people blurred details; they tugged; they nudged.

  Take, for example, Shostakovich’s stints on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory, watching for incendiary bombs. A photo of him dressed in a firefighter’s uniform became one of the most enduring images of the Great Patriotic War. It is quite likely that this photo was staged, however, and it’s not even certain he typically wore this uniform, in which he stands with the stiffness of a paper doll clipped into a new outfit.

  Though Shostakovich claimed that he had to stand guard every day, he also pointed out, “No firebombs fell on my sector and I never got a chance to put one out.” A Conservatory official, Aron Ostrovsky, later admitted to Shostakovich that he had arranged the schedule to make sure that the composer was not on the roof during times of real danger. We cannot really tell, given the swirl of contradictory accounts, whether Shostakovich was still standing guard regularly in September, when the bombing started, or whether he primarily was employed as a fireman in July and August, when he simply would have been watching the horizon for raids that hadn’t yet arrived.

  Shostakovich hated the way propaganda amplified his life and sought to make it heroic. It galled him. He was naturally shy. Fame was deadly in Stalin’s Russia. It marked you out for destruction.

  Shostakovich had a hard life during the war — because everyone did. His life was often in danger, but no more so than that of any other civilian. He knew that there were people suffering far worse than him. “The war became a terrible tragedy for everyone,” he later said. “I saw and lived through a great deal, but the war was probably the hardest trial. Not for me personally, but for the people. For composers and, say, poets, perhaps, it wasn’t so hard. But the people suffered. Think how many perished. Millions.”

  His own dislike of publicity and discomfort at fame, however, did not stop people from enlarging his story. Once his Seventh Symphony became famous, everyone tried to associate themselves with him. Stories about him multiplied. There are, for example, several versions of the events surrounding the fireman photograph. One of his soccer buddies claimed he went by one day with a photographer from the newspaper and they found Shostakovich training on the roof. They supposedly shot the pictures then. One composer even claimed that Shostakovich had never even acted as a lookout — he just stuck the fireman’s hat on his head for a photo op. (This tale seems to be a cynic’s rumor circulated by those who wanted to be “in the know.”) Everyone wanted to be able to tell a story about Shostakovich. Uneasily, he felt himself being transmuted into legend.

  In reality, phantom shrapnel in his head was the least of his problems.

  Why would a symphony become so important to a country? How could sounds quivering in the air make any difference when the skies were full of solid metal shards and chemical explosives?

  The answer is morale. “Morale is the big thing in war,” explained British general Bernard Montgomery. “We must raise the morale of our soldiers to the highest pitch. They must be made enthusiastic.”

  Hope and belief seem insubstantial. Unlike shrapnel, they leave no trace when they lodge in our heads.

  Yet ask athletes the secrets of their successes, and they will tell you of the importance of their mental state. Rage, pride, a taunt, or cheering on the sidelines can make the difference between success and failure.

  Hope, belief, and despair are not simply moods. They change our physical performance. They alter how quickly we react, how hard we fight, how quick we are to give up.

  Music can make a huge difference in how people see themselves and their struggle. We read, for example, of a Leningrad air raid. People crouched in a dark basement, terrified. Suddenly, an old man started to play upon his violin. “He is a really courageous person, and now I don’t feel frightened e
ither,” a diarist wrote. “There are explosions all around us, and he is playing the violin as if he is leading us to safety. . . . The terror was somehow less powerful — it had lost its grip on us. It was outside us now; and inside we had our music, and everyone felt its power. There was a most extraordinary sense of belonging.”

  Moods and attitudes increasingly made a difference in Leningrad, even as concrete splintered and wood collapsed. The mental toughness of Leningraders made them capable of an endurance that should have been biologically impossible.

  All the nations involved in the war used what we might call propaganda to change their citizens’ moods. What is the line between art and propaganda? Art is, after all, supposed to affect our mood, is supposed to win us over to some understanding. And “propaganda” is often just what we call another nation’s pride of country.

  The Nazis, cold and clinical as their theorists might have been, believed entirely in the importance of emotion, mood, and propaganda. Feelings made a tremendous difference in the world of flesh and metal. Hitler put it in his own inimitable way: “Any violence which does not spring from a firm spiritual base will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”

  The Nazis set out to make sure that their fanatical outlook was feared throughout the world. As Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the deadly SS, explained: “The reputation for horror and terror which preceded us we want never to allow to diminish. The world may call us what it will.”

  He got his wish: to this day, the Nazis are still used as the benchmark of human cruelty.

  It is not clear if this “reputation for horror and terror” always worked in their favor as they swept across the USSR, however. In many of the Soviet satellite states and provinces, the Nazis were greeted at first with joy by the local population, who assumed they were being freed from Stalin’s despotism. Some Latvians, Estonians, and Chechens even took up arms to fight against their local Soviet governments to ensure that the German invasion would go smoothly.