80 years ago Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony performed in besieged Leningrad

August 9, 2022 marks the 80th anniversary of the first performance in besieged Leningrad of Dmitri Shostakovich's famous Seventh Symphony. The music sounded in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, loudspeakers thundered through the streets. And this has already become a victory, a victory for the fortitude...After all, it is known that it was by August 1942 that the Wehrmacht troops planned to break and take Leningrad.

Thanks to Anna Akhmatova, the Seventh Symphony received the name "Leningradskaya", and not by chance. This music has absorbed the sounds of bombings, the heart-rending howl of sirens, the rumble of planes carrying death, thoughts tangled from hungry weakness and the beating of the hearts of a million Leningraders, merged with the cold tapping of a metronome. Everyone who listened to this symphony that evening felt it. It would be impossible to write a work about the war without experiencing it for yourself.

The author himself, like many others, experienced the full horror of the suddenly turned upside down life of the country. Shostakovich resisted for a long time the decision of the authorities to evacuate him and his relatives from Leningrad, around which the siege was tightening. At this time, he worked on the Seventh Symphony, completed already in Kuibyshev (Samara) in March 1942, where it premiered and from where the victorious march of the symphony began through the cities of our country and radio stations around the world. A month after the premiere, Shostakovich was awarded the Stalin Prize. But the composer dreamed that his symphony would be performed where his heart remained - in Leningrad.

Many artists shared all the hardships of the siege with the people. The poetess Olga Bergholz wrote poems and read them on the radio, becoming a friend for exhausted Leningraders, a consolation, confirmation that one must hold on. Artists of the Musical Comedy Theater showed the brightest productions of their repertoire. Athletes held a legendary siege football match. And all this so that the people of Leningrad, and most importantly, the opponents who hope to break the spirit of our people, know that the city lives! With their creativity, they also helped themselves, it was the meaning, the incentive not to give up, a step into tomorrow.

In the spring of 1942, a call was announced on the radio for all musicians in the city to come to the orchestra of the Radio Committee to prepare the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony conducted by Karl Eliasberg.

Who knows, if this concert would have taken place if, for example, the conductor of the Eliasberg symphony, who had weakened physically, had not been brought to the first rehearsals on a sled by his wife, pianist Nadezhda Bronnikova.

He weakened physically, but not in spirit, he was able to remain indifferent. So, shortly before the premiere, Eliasberg missed one musician at the rehearsal. When asked what happened to him, he was answered - he died. Eliasberg demanded that he be taken to the place where the musician's body was taken. A strange whim, colleagues thought, but the conductor was taken to a room located not far from the rehearsal studio. "So he's alive!" - the conductor exclaimed when he saw the "body" of the musician. Indeed, the musician turned out to be alive and soon continued to rehearse.

In the hotel "Astoria", not far from the Radio Committee, a hospital was created for the especially emaciated, where the musicians and the conductor could gain some strength. The first rehearsals were short, the musicians who had enough strength to go up to the rehearsal room on the fourth floor played for 20–30 minutes, those who could not get up listened on the street. Because of the bombing and shelling often had to be interrupted.

“To our fight against fascism, to our coming victory over the enemy, to my native city of Leningrad, I dedicate my Seventh Symphony. Dmitri Shostakovich”, says the first page, in the epigraph to the concert program. Its "photograph" - an electronic copy - is available at the Presidential Library. The handwritten scores of the Seventh Symphony with numerous conductor's notes are digitized and also available on the portal. These are the same notebooks that, under artillery fire, along with food and medicine, were delivered by a military pilot to the besieged city.

That legendary concert was prepared not only by musicians, but also the military. Not only those who were called from the front to make up for the lack of musicians. Before the premiere, the commander of the Leningrad Front, Lieutenant-General Leonid Govorov, set a clear task: not a single enemy shell should explode in Leningrad during the performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. And it was done. The symphony sounded without interruption, as in peacetime.

Karl Eliasberg later recalled: “It is not for me to judge the success of that memorable concert. I can only say that we have never played with such enthusiasm. And there is nothing surprising in this: the majestic theme of the Motherland, on which the ominous shadow of the invasion finds, the pathetic requiem in honor of the fallen heroes - all this was close, dear to every orchestra member, everyone who listened to us that evening. And when the crowded hall exploded with applause, it seemed to me that I was again in peaceful Leningrad, that the most cruel of all wars that had ever raged on the planet was already behind us, that the forces of reason, goodness and humanity had won”.