When the last road into Leningrad was severed by German forces on 8 September 1941, the Siege of Leningrad began. Over the next 872 days the city that had at one point been a thriving cultural hub would be starved into a place where citizen would eat wallpaper paste, saw dust, and eachothers corpses to stay alive. By 27 January 1944, roughly 1.5 million people had died. In the first few months of the siege, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the majority of his 7th Symphony, which would be dedicated to Leningrad and so that, as Shostakovich stated in a radio interview, “the people of Leningrad listening to me will know that life goes on in our city”. While it may not have directly ended the Siege of Leningrad, the premiere of the Leningrad Symphony influenced the outcome, the effects on the people inside the city, and strengthened the Grand Alliance against the axis powers.
The Siege of Leningrad had, for several months, the effect that Hitler had desired. A quarter million people died in the first three months, and as winter dragged on the morale of the city plummeted. In the face of cold and starvation people were forced to make nightmarish decisions. A soldier that returned from the front to find his daughter dead wrote “There is much that is revolting, but that’s life: a mother of four children takes the baby from her breast in order not to die herself. The baby will die. But then three others will live, who otherwise, without their mother, would die”. Food rations were slim, brothers would kill each other for ration coupons, and parents would murder their own children.
Many Leningraders kept journals, not only because the Leningrad Party encouraged them too but also to maintain mental stability. The city also heavily supported the premiere of the symphony. The Leningrad Party sent out a call for musicians, and they were rewarded with additional food rations, a show of the value of the symphony during times when food was so rare. Additionally, there were only 15 surviving musicians in the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, the only remaining orchestra in the city. The search to fill out the rest of the 105 players needed for the piece went on. Members of the militia were recruited to play, and if ever a siren went off during rehearsals they would have to leave and return to duty. Another example of how seriously the piece was taken. The piece was so lengthy and the musicians were in such a poor condition that they could only practice small sections at a time, adding on portions each time. Before they could play the full symphony, they would play smaller pieces in concert that were broadcast across the city, and those that attended concerts were obviously lightened. Some citizens would exchange food ration slips for tickets, event when the portion for individuals was reduced to a mere 125 grams of bread a day.
The day of the premiere, August 9, 1942, was selected carefully as an act of defiance. It was the date Hitler had claimed he would be celebrating the city’s prompt defeat with a feast in the ballroom of Leningrad’s Hotel Astoria. When the day of the premiere came, the orchestra had only played through the piece in full once, as that was all they had the strength to do. Moreover, three members of the orchestra had died since rehearsals began. In the hours before the Leningrad Premiere of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, Operation Squall took place. Though it was not revealed to the public for twenty years after the fact, General Govorov of the Red Army launched a diversionary attack on German lines opposite the city. It consisted of three-thousand high caliber shells to drive fire away from the concert hall, the only building in the entire city with lights on that night. They hit the German’s batteries, observation points, and communication centers, keeping them under constant fire for two and a half hours. Not a single shell exploded during the premiere. Meanwhile, the audience poured into the concert hall. The city elite, higher-ups of the Communist Party, hundreds of civilians who had gone without food to buy tickets to hear the piece, and soldiers who still carried weapons with them. The hall was not heated, but they had turned on the lights, and many people had said they forgotten what electric light was like. It gave the people of Leningrad a story to tell, a sense of belonging, and transformed them from victims into the pride of Russia. As a woman in the audience recalled, “It was so meaningful for all of us… it was not an impression, but a staggering experience”. Those in the hall were not the only people to hear the premiere. After Operation Squall, loudspeakers had been placed
The hope that citizens felt in that moment may not have immediately manifested itself, but little did they know the effects of the symphony had spread far beyond the boundaries of the city. Despite Shostakovich’s historically tumultuous relationship with the government, they would rely on him as German forces advanced further into their country.
Relations between Russia and the United States had been tumultuous for years leading up to WWII. Citizens from each country lacked knowledge of the other and generally regarded each other disdainfully. In addition, mere months after openly allying with Nazi Germany, they were now asking for free aid against them and for the people of Russia and Leningrad. Despite the lack of an immediate ability to grant the request, Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to send them air shipments. However, many disagreed with this generosity. Realizing what they needed was a means of convincing Americans that they were not the cold hearted, rude capitalist’s nightmare that they were often portrayed to be, the Russian government turned to Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony. It was stowed in a diplomatic pouch and began a long and turbulent trip to the United States. As the three Allied nations scrambled to find a safe route for delivery of armaments and food, the symphony, a symbol of thanks for that assistance, was driven along the same route. It was delivered to the US State department and then the Soviet Embassy on May 30. From there it was passed onto an agent from the Am-Rus Music Corporation, who had been hired to promote the work of Soviet Composers. They were responsible for getting the score to American conductors.
Beginning with the American Premiere in New York in July 1942, it was performed 62 times in the 1942-43 season. The symphony was wildly popular, and in a TIME Magazine article released one month after its arrival in the states and with a painting of shostakovich on the cover, claimed that “not since the first Manhattan performances of Parsifal (in 1903) had there been such a buzz of American anticipation over a piece of music”. The article portrayed Shostakovich as an average guy. A person excited by sharing a drink with friends over a football game. It, along with other news of the time changed the West’s view of Russia, and the symphony now served as a reminder of the people in Leningrad and showed that even in the midst of siege, they were still normal people, capable of composing symphonies. Shostakovich’s 7th had convinced the American government and public to aid Russia and in that way influenced not only the effects of the Siege of Leningrad, but also changed Russia’s position in the war.