Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M. T. Anderson

Author:M. T. Anderson [Anderson, M. T.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780763680541
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2015-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Shostakovich’s symphony was born amid this struggle of ideas and hopes and fears. Hearing about it, people around Shostakovich buzzed with stories about him, some true, some reasonably true, and some far, far less true; to make things more complicated, Shostakovich himself occasionally also liked a good story. For this reason, who knows whether we can trust any given detail?

In later years, Shostakovich often told this story about the siege:

He was walking down one of the shell-pitted streets of the city. There was a funeral procession in front of him. (This was when there still were funerals for the dead, because death was still unusual in Leningrad. A few weeks later, no one would have bothered to bid the dead good-bye.) A band played Chopin’s famous funeral march while a flatbed truck bumped along the road with the open coffin in the back. The mourners paced along behind.

Then came the shock: the corpse sat up.

People shrieked and fainted away.

“Can you imagine,” Shostakovich said, “it wasn’t a corpse they were going to bury, but someone who was in a state of lethargic sleep.” The deceased was just fine.

The band, apparently more alert than the rest of the family, stopped playing the funeral march and swung into a lively rendition of the “Internationale,” the Communist national anthem. The procession rejoiced, like some kind of Bolshevik New Orleans funeral party.

“Yes,” Shostakovich claimed, “I saw this with my very own eyes.”

One of his best friends, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, recorded this story. He said Shostakovich often told it. But Rostropovich didn’t believe a word of it.

In the latter part of September, Shostakovich worked on the third movement — the Adagio — of his new symphony. During breaks, he’d go out into the streets for fresh air and inspiration. “Sometimes I’d wander off quite a distance from home, forgetting that I was in a city under siege that was regularly fired at and bombed.

“I looked at my beloved city with pain and pride. It stood singed in fires and tempered in battles. It had suffered the deepest anguish of the war and it was even more glorious now in its stern grandeur.”

The bombings and shellings continued. On September 19, the Luftwaffe launched one of the most devastating air raids of the whole siege. Six waves of bombers, 264 aircraft in all, blasted at the city for more than seven hours. They dropped 528 high-explosive bombs and almost fifteen hundred incendiaries. Between air assaults, the German guns fired a hundred artillery shells into the belly of the city. Iconic buildings had holes smashed right through them: Gostiny Dvor, the old marketplace; the Engineers’ Castle; the Russian Museum; and the Church of the Spilled Blood, with its gaudy onion spires. When the bombs were not actually falling, people in the city could hear a dull roar as crippled buildings collapsed. Gostiny Dvor burned quietly for more than a week.

The death toll was huge.

The Germans dropped leaflets over the city. They said, “We’re giving you a respite until the 21st.

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