St Petersburg полностью

The famous theme in the first movement Shostakovich had first as the Stalin theme (which close friends of the composer knew). Right after the war started, the composer called it the anti-Hitler theme. Later Shostakovich referred to that “German” theme as the “theme of evil,” which was absolutely true, since the theme was just as much anti-Hitler as it was anti-Stalin, even though the world music community fixed on only the first of the two definitions.132

Another important testimony comes from the daughter-in-law of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister before the war who was then dismissed by Stalin. She recounted attending Shostakovich’s piano performance of the Seventh Symphony in a private house during the war years. Later the guests discussed the music:

And then Shostakovich said meditatively: of course, it’s about fascism, but music, real music is never literally tied to a theme. Fascism is not simply National Socialism, and this is music about terror, slavery, and oppression of the spirit. Later, when Shostakovich got used to me and came to trust me, he said openly that the Seventh (and the Fifth as well) was not only about fascism but about our country and generally about all tyranny and totalitarianism.133

Shostakovich could speak this freely, of course, only in a very narrow circle of friends. But even in his statements for the Soviet press, he attempted to hint as much as possible about the hidden agenda of his Seventh Symphony, insisting, for instance, that the “central place” in the first movement was not the “invasion episode,” which was the first thing journalists asked about, but the tragic music that followed the episode, which the composer described, characteristically, as “a funeral march or, rather, a requiem.” And Shostakovich continued his commentary, trying to imbue every carefully chosen word with hidden meaning for future listeners. “After the requiem comes an even more tragic episode. I do not know how to characterize that music. Perhaps it is a mother’s tears or even the feeling that the sorrow is so great that there are no more tears left.”134

Shostakovich’s words echo in a remarkable way not only the general mood of Akhmatova’s Requiem but especially one of her “memorial” poems that belong to the same period—a poem written in 1938 in response to news of the demise of a close friend, Boris Pilnyak, in the cruel machine of the Stalinist terror:

O, if I awaken the dead with this,

Forgive me, I cannot do otherwise:

I miss you like my own

And envy all who weep,

Who can weep in this terrible hour

For those who lie at the bottom of the ditch.

But my tears have boiled dry without reaching my eyes,

There have been no tears to refresh my eyes.

Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and Akhmatova’s Requiem are brought together not only by the same horrible initiating impulse (the Stalinist terror in Leningrad), not only by a common artistic model (Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms) and the requiem character dominant in both works, but also by the similarity of creative method, which permitted Shostakovich and Akhmatova to tackle such a daunting theme. The effect of the Requiem was achieved in large part by the almost schizophrenic splitting of the central figure of the narrator into the images of mother and poet. Shostakovich also brings in the composer as a protagonist of his symphony.

In Shostakovich’s later works the autobiographical element is announced unambiguously by including the composer’s musical signature, the motif DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B). In the Seventh Symphony Shostakovich signals his presence more subtly. For instance, in the second movement he introduces a wild theme that could be called the “theme of the condemned.” The programmatic meaning of this musical theme can be deciphered without doubt because of the way Shostakovich used it subsequently in two later instances—in “Six Songs” to the words of English poets (1942) and in the Thirteenth Symphony (“Babi Yar,” 1962). Both times Shostakovich uses that particular theme to illustrate the same image—a defiant dance of the condemned man before execution:

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,

Sae dauntingly gaed he,

He play’d a spring, and danc’d it round

Below the gallows-tree.

Undoubtedly, in choosing this poem by Robert Burns, “MacPherson’s Farewell,” for his vocal cycle, Shostakovich was identifying himself with its hero, who exclaimed,

I’ve liv’d a life of sturt and strife;

I die by treacherie:

It burns my heart I must depart,