At the end of February 1942 the Radio Committee announced that the orchestra was being reconstituted, and broadcast an appeal requesting all musicians left in the city to report for registration. When only sixteen did so, Eliasberg hauled himself out of the
Karl Ilyich came out all starched, in tails. But when he raised his arms his hands shook. I had this feeling that he was a bird that had just been shot, that at any moment he would plummet to the ground. . After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he began to conduct.
When we finished the first piece the audience started to applaud, but there was no sound because everyone was wearing mittens. Looking out at the crowd, you couldn’t tell who was a man and who was a woman — the women were all wrapped up, and the men were wearing scarves and shawls, or even women’s fur coats. Afterwards we were all so inspired, because we knew that we had done our job and that our work would continue.12
Rehearsals for the Shostakovich began in mid-July, only a few weeks before the premiere. Scored for eight horns, six trombones, five timpanists, two harps and a minimum of sixty-two strings, the symphony far outran the Radio Committee’s resources, though extra brass players were drafted in from military bands, and given manual workers’ ration cards. Microfilm of the score arrived by air from Sweden, and each musician copied out his own part by hand. The male players were provided with jackets and the females with dark dresses — though they looked, the oboist remembered, as if they were hanging on coathangers. On the morning of the concert — its date the first anniversary of that on which Hitler was said to have planned to hold a victory banquet at the Astoria — General Govorov mounted a special Operation Squall, so as to prevent disruption from air raids or barrages. Inside the grandee-packed auditorium the performance itself was ragged, but the atmosphere overwhelming. ‘Some wept’, remembered a woman in the audience,
because that was the only way in which they could express their excitement, others because they had lived through what the music was now expressing with such force, many because they were grieving for those they had lost, many because they were overcome with the mere fact of being present here in the Philharmonia.
During the finale everyone stood: ‘It was impossible to listen sitting down. Impossible.’13 The besieging Germans, hearing the music ring out from loudspeakers across no-man’s-land, are said to have realised at that moment that the war in the East would never be won — Leningrad was invincible, and so was Mother Russia.
It is a wonderful story, but seems to resonate more in retrospect than it did among Leningraders at the time. Few diarists mention the concert, and then only in passing. The chameleon Seventh — by turns menacing, nervy, terrifying and transcendent — perhaps better suited the summer of 1941, when Shostakovich wrote it, than numbed, emptied 1942. As Vera Inber, who attended the Leningrad premiere, wrote in her diary when she got home, ‘The rumbling approach of the German tanks — there it was. But the shining conclusion is yet to come.’14 Later the symphony became a pawn of the Cold War, played to death in the Soviet Union and written off as a bombastic slice of Stalinism in the West. Shostakovich was able to clear its name only posthumously, via memoirs written by friends. Composing the famous ‘Fascist’ pipe and drum march, he explained, he had had in mind not only the Nazis but ‘other enemies of humanity. . I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began.’15
The other great recovery story of 1942 is that of Leningrad’s children. At the beginning of the siege children aged twelve and under made up just under 20 per cent of Leningrad’s civilian population of 2.4 million. By May, 170,000 had either died or been evacuated over the Ice Road, and thousands more had been orphaned or left without care.16 One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva:
