Symphony for the City of the Dead: Part Two

Exactly a year to the day after the French capitulated, Hitler would stage his massive invasion of the USSR.

Stalin scoffed, “There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him too?”

Stalin may have slept fitfully; he may have lain awake, staring at the ceiling.

Stalin insisted that the bombing raids might well be some turncoat German attempting to start a war with Russia without Hitler knowing.

He had written most of an opera (Rothschild’s Violin) under Shostakovich’s tutelage.

Since the deed was performed by conscripted citizens of Kaunas, the Nazis could report it neatly as a “spontaneous self-cleansing action.”

Hitler issued an order that his soldiers did not need to worry about the usual rules of civilized warfare when fighting the Russian “subhumans”: “The troops must be aware that in this battle, mercy or considerations of international law with regard to [the Slavs] are false. They are a danger to our own safety and to the rapid pacification of the conquered territories.”

They did not make particularly effective ditchdiggers, Shostakovich remembered in his putative memoirs...

The military set up checkpoints throughout the streets and on the city’s perimeter to control all entrance and egress.

Then, like grazing beasts, barrage balloons (great lozenges and blimps) drifted up and took their places in the summer sky.

People had to be careful as they whispered their updates; there was a new law announcing that “defeatists” who spread “false rumors provoking unrest among the population” could be arrested and tried by a military tribunal.

The trucks carry fly wheels, cog wheels, lathes, small machine parts, all kept separate, carefully greased and wrapped in parchment.

We were both extremely agitated; it was a rare event for Shostakovich to play a new work with such manifest emotion.

One of the bitter experiences of the starving citizens during the Siege of Leningrad was glimpsing the children of a few well-connected Communist Party members eating ham sandwiches or leaving juicy rinds of fat on their plates. Corruption, unfortunately, was rife.

In the background, like a stage set, a tasseled lamp hangs above a window and a samovar sits on an elegantly set table.

At the same time, a peremptory brutality trickled down through the ranks.

Leningrad now literally resembled one of the fractured Cubist landscapes of the 1920s avant-garde—or, as Ginzburg remarked, one of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s stage sets.

He played them the march that inexorably repeated like the scuttling of “iron rats,” eventually growing to towering, ghastly dimensions.

Given what we know about his activities, he simply did not have time to be hospitalized with a serious head wound and to convalesce.

Take, for example, Shostakovich’s stints on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory, watching for incendiary bombs.

The Nazis, cold and clinical as their theorists might have been, believed entirely in the importance of emotion, mood, and propaganda.

Hitler put it in his own inimitable way; “Any violence which does not spring from a firm spiritual base will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”

They began an insistent, ceaseless guerrilla war, running through the woods and hiding in holes in the ground to harry the Wehrmacht.

They said, “We're giving you a respite until the 21st. If you do not surrender, we will grind you to a pulp.”

In particular, the people who heard it that day were struck by the first movement, in which “Shostakovich takes a monotonous Prussian march, sets it in the style of the most banal music-hall tune, then relentlessly and ingeniously turns it into a grotesque parody that implicitly, and with enormous force, stigmatizes the nonentity of German Nazism.”

“He looked completely bereft. He was holding a sewing machine in one hand and a children’s potty in the other, while his wife Nina Vasilyevna stood beside the children and a mountain of stuff. I helped them load their things on to the train. Later, when I made my way home from the station, I was struck by the number of howling dogs roaming the snowy streets, having been abandoned by their owners.”

The Moscow Metro system was famous for its splendor, the marble colonnades and gleaming arches that welcomed commuters.

Knowing what he did about the plight of Leningrad and the precarious situation of the country as a whole, Shostakovich couldn’t work on his piece.

Their speech slurred as their vocal cords atrophied.

These ghastly decisions were made in a welter of starvation, which sharpened the senses but confused thought.

One family (a father, a mother, and a thirteen-year-old boy) were arrested for stealing bodies from a hospital morgue, presumably for resale as food. A nurse was arrested for purloining amputated limbs from the surgery room floor.

In Bomb Shelter No. 3, hundreds of scholars hunkered down by candle stubs, barely alive, slowly scratching out monographs on the art of the Netherlands or Sumerian philology.

In Bomb Shelter No. 3, hundreds of scholars hunkered down by candle stubs, barely alive, slowly scratching out monographs on the art of the Netherlands or Sumerian philology.

A district nurse concluded: “I found in my work that it was not only nutrition that was conducive to survival, but morale.”

Some chose to respond to the crisis by giving in to their hungriest, most brutal selves: others fought to work together, to recall the trappings of a civilization that lay in heaps around them.

To make things worse, an intense cultural difference soured negotiations over the aid packages: the Americans expected profuse thanks and shows of gratitude from the Russians: the Russians were much more hardheaded and practical, knowing that they were taking the brunt of the Germans’ military might.

Very softly, with the rattle of drums, Shostakovich’s irritating little march starts—plucky, even twee.

After the oddly lilting second movement, the stark, lonely fanfares of the third, the watchfulness and brave struggle of the fourth—the piece ends in final triumph.

They were sick and emaciated. Shostakovich wrote to his friend Glikman that Maria and young Dmitri were all right but that Sofia was “nothing but skin and bone.”

A telegram from Shostakovich to conductor Arturo Toscanini, via the Russian Embassy and agent Eugene Weintraub: "Dear friend, I'm happy to know you'll conduct my Seventh Symphony. I'm confident that with your consummate, inherent talent and superlative skill you'll convey to [the] public of democratic America [the] concepts which I've endeavored [to] embody in this work."