St Petersburg полностью

And not avengéd be.

Another side of the author’s personality in the Seventh Symphony appears in the third movement, where the hero seeks shelter from mortal concerns in high art. Shostakovich characterized this movement as an “adagio with pathos, the work’s dramatic center.” The composer tied the genesis of this music to his strolls through the city during the white nights, when the majestic architecture of old Petersburg was particularly impressive against the pale background of the shimmering gray Neva and the pearly skies.

Shostakovich could have added that in a musical sense this movement is the most indebted to Stravinsky, this time for his Musagète ballet of the late 1920s, Apollon Musagète, with its imperious themes carried by the strings. For Shostakovich the connection of Stravinsky’s ballet with Petersburg’s architecture was indisputable. In the Seventh Symphony he pays homage to both with the help of musical borrowings from Apollon Musagète, adding in the process his own lonely figure to the idealized Petersburg landscape. In that sense the third movement can be interpreted as the composer’s attempt to flee the harsh real world, the realm of unbridled terror, into an imaginary ideal world of art, ruled by Apollo and his muses.

This attempt to escape was doomed to failure, both in art and in life. Even though the Seventh Symphony was conceived as an esoteric work, a radically different fate awaited it.

As early as September 17, 1941, just two months after Shostakovich started writing down the symphony, he was summoned to Leningrad radio to tell the whole country about his new work. As one of the producers of the broadcast later recalled, a special car was sent for Shostakovich and as they drove to the Leningrad Radio Committee, the composer was given the editorial “The Enemy Is at the Gate,” in the latest issue of Leningradskaya pravda: “Leningrad has become a front. The enemy is counting on the workers of Leningrad to lose heart and become confused, not to think clearly and thereby disorganize the defense of our great city. The enemy has miscalculated!”135

It was explained in no uncertain terms to Shostakovich that his radio talk had to be a variation on this theme. And he read a prepared text that announced he was writing his Seventh Symphony “so that the Leningraders who are listening to me now will know that life in our city is going on normally.”

The life of Leningrad, like that of any besieged city, had very little normalcy about it, but for the major propaganda machine that was gearing up, this fact was insignificant. After the radio announcement, Shostakovich’s new patriotic work made the newspapers—first the local ones, then Moscow’s Pravda, which set the tone for subsequent coverage in newspapers throughout the USSR. The fact that Shostakovich was composing a symphony in besieged Leningrad was turned into a national symbol of the determination of the city and the country to resist the Nazis to the very end. The talented writer Alexei Tolstoy, a leading propagandist of the Stalin era, captured that well in his lengthy article in Pravda, “At a Rehearsal of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony,” written in the dramatic style of the day.

The Seventh Symphony is the creation of the conscience of the Russian people, who have undertaken mortal combat with black forces without hesitation.… Hitler didn’t scare Shostakovich. Shostakovich is a Russian man, and that means an angry man, and if you get him good and angry, he’s capable of fantastic exploits.

The performance of the symphony was organized with great urgency, considering the war. Shostakovich completed the orchestration on December 29, 1941, in Kuibyshev (Samara), where leading ministries and theaters had been evacuated from Moscow, including the Bolshoi. And on March 5,1942, the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, one of the best in the Soviet Union, performed it under the confident baton of Samuil Samosud, who had earlier performed the premieres of Shostakovich’s operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth. The concert was broadcast all over the country, and it was announced that the performance was in Moscow, not Kuiybyshev, where it was really taking place; this was part of the propaganda plan.

On the title page, Shostakovich had inscribed “Dedicated to the city of Leningrad.” In that way, the “secret” dedication, as the composer had planned it before the war, became an open one. But he continued to worry, often repeating before the premiere, according to his friends, “They won’t like the symphony, they won’t like it,” in his nervous manner. He was afraid that the audience would not get its hidden message.