Book review: The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich

 ‘Leningrad: Siege and Symphony,’

by Brian Moynahan

By Peter Finn

The Siege of Leningrad, the pitiless epic of the Nazis’ 900-day encirclement of the Soviet Union’s second city, is a story that has drawn many chroniclers — each with a special kind of bravery to attempt a fresh recounting. Brian Moynahan’s entry point is the performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the starving and brutalized city on Aug. 9, 1942, Day 335 of the siege and “perhaps the most magnificent, and certainly the most moving, moment ever to be found in music.”

In “Leningrad: Siege and Symphony,” Moynahan weaves back and forth among descriptions of the battlefield around Leningrad, the horror visited upon the starving city, and the galvanizing and piercing work of music Shostakovich wrote to honor his home town (now called St. Petersburg). The first two movements were written before Shostakovich and his immediate family were evacuated in October 1941 to a city on the Volga, and the complete score was flown back in nine months later, the pilot skimming Lake Ladoga to avoid detection by German fighters.

The symphony had been performed in Moscow, London and New York before it returned to Leningrad, where it was played by a makeshift orchestra of emaciated musicians for an audience whose “stick-insect limbs” were hidden beneath their prewar finery. “The Seventh might have been performed better in some places but never has it been performed the way we played,” said an orchestra leader. The radio broadcast was carried by propaganda loudspeaker to the front lines and heard by Russian and German troops alike. The music proclaimed that the city Hitler had planned to level instead endured.

The piece came to embody Soviet valor and sanctify the wartime anti-Nazi alliance. “The allies wanted, badly, to believe in the Russians, in their survival, and in their decency,” Moynahan writes. “Leningrad still lived, and fought, and, in drowning out the mechanical squeal and clang of the enemy’s tank tracks in a creative storm of music, it seemed to the anxious watchers to confirm Russia’s resilience and humanity.”

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