Symphony for the City of the Dead: Part Three

History does not allow for perfect cadences.

A flotilla of warships, freighters, and barges carried hundreds of tons of supplies to the city across Lake Ladoga.

It is a powerfully distressed piece, unremitting in its depiction of war.

He was a mixture of defiance and compliance. “He was only a man,” conductor Kurt Sanderling said. “He was a coward when it concerned his own affairs, but he was very courageous when it concerned others.”

For the NKVD, Shostakovich wrote a suite of nostalgic, light music called “Native Leningrad,” remembering his hometown.

Shostakovich did use his new connections with authority to help composers who were destitute, in exile, or on the front.

Young Weinberg took his little sister and ran. Unfortunately, his sister complained that day that her shoes chafed.

On January 14, 1944, the last vestige of German Army Group North was finally forced away from Leningrad.

“To the last crack in its walls, the city was revealed to us—shell-pitted, bullet-riddled, scarred Leningrad, with its plywood windowpanes. And we saw that despite all the cruel slashes and blows, Leningrad retained its proud beauty. In the bluish, roseate, green and white of the lights, the city appeared to us so austere and touching we could not feast our eyes enough on it.”

“To the last crack in its walls, the city was revealed to us—shell-pitted, bullet-riddled, scarred Leningrad, with its plywood windowpanes. And we saw that despite all the cruel slashes and blows, Leningrad retained its proud beauty. In the bluish, roseate, green and white of the lights, the city appeared to us so austere and touching we could not feast our eyes enough on it.”

The survivors lived, as another woman wrote, “without electric light or gas, without water....We are living like ghosts in a field of ruins...a city where nothing works apart from the telephones that sometimes ring, glumly and pointlessly, beneath piles of fallen masonry.”

The Nazis left nothing but a blasted shell. They had stolen the statuary, blasted through the floors, delighted in desecrating Russia’s proud history.

His fanaticism worked well for him early in the war, surprising and shocking the world as he conquered nation after nation.

The same delusional self-confidence, however, encouraged him to overextend his Wehrmacht forces, picking a fight on his Eastern Front, in Russia, while he still was fighting the British in the west. His military leaders warned him of the stupidity and risk of this move, but increasingly, he did not listen.

He ignored the intelligence of spies. He disdained the warnings of the capitalist Allies.

Yet, after he recovered from the shock of almost complete defeat, his ability to treat his own citizens like fodder, to ignore their sufferings when it was convenient, often led to victories, however costly.

It is unclear, though historian Robert Service is not alone when he contends, “The ultra-authoritarian features of the Soviet regime caused harm to its war effort.”

It is unclear, though historian Robert Service is not alone when he contends, “The ultra-authoritarian features of the Soviet regime caused harm to its war effort.”

Shostakovich had been eulogized in the West. He had appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

They pointed out that Shostakovich’s music was catnip to the bourgeois, decadent West.

He attacked Shostakovich personally as a formalist whose symphonies were “a peculiar writing in code,” which “often reflected images and emotions alien to Soviet realistic art,” such as “tenseness, neuroticism, escape into a region of abnormal, repulsive, and pathological phenomena.”

He later told a friend, “I read like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a string!”

He later told a friend, “I read like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a string!”

Shostakovich wrote several works on Jewish themes, which he consigned “to the desk drawer.”

He also, in his silent fury, wrote a piece called Anti-Formalist Vaudeville, a crass parody of the historic Zhdanov decree.

He was dragged out of a meeting of the Presidium and executed; he died, perhaps fittingly...with a towel shoved in his mouth to stifle any screams for mercy.

Poet Anna Akhmatova looked forward to the reckoning that was to come: “Now those who have been arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye—the Russia that sent people to the camps, and the Russia that was sent to the camps.”

Shostakovich worked hard for the rehabilitation and release of his friends, family, and colleagues.

Still, occasionally, his works were censured or suppressed.

Was he brave or was he a coward? Or, as the sensationalist tagline of a Shostakovich biography asks: “Loyal Stalinist or Scornful Dissident?”

On the other hand, as he got older and sicker (he had spent his life smoking cheap Soviet cigarettes), he did not put up much of a fight when he was asked to sign defamatory articles written for him by Party hacks.

The power of his compositional voice was undiminished up until the time of his death. His work was played and respected around the globe—and not simply on the planet’s surface.

Its last movement is haunted by the urgent peal of bells he had written into his “Suite for Two Pianos” when he was fifteen, more than fifty years earlier.

Then he had been mourning the death of his father; now, softly, spectrally, he tolls the bells for himself.

His music was at once clear and clever; obvious and obscure; public and private; sorrowful, but full of a fierce joy in living; marked with codes and messages, but famous for its direct and earnest communication.

Contemporary composer Sofia Gubaidulina has written, “I believe that Shostakovich’s music reaches such a wide audience because he was able to transform the pain that he so keenly experienced into something exalted and full of light, which transcends all worldly suffering....We listened to Shostakovich’s new works in a kind of exaltation.”

Above the dead stands a statue of Mother Russia raising her garlanded arms in mourning. Trees whisper in the breeze. Loudspeakers play soft music. It is not Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, but rather music of decorous Baroque sorrow: Purcell, Albinoni, Bach.

Above the dead stands a statue of Mother Russia raising her garlanded arms in mourning. Trees whisper in the breeze. Loudspeakers play soft music. It is not Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, but rather music of decorous Baroque sorrow: Purcell, Albinoni, Bach.

Each mound, filled with hundreds of the war dead, is marked with the year they were interred.

History is not simply the great tumults and tragedies but the accumulation of tiny moments and gestures.