The Russian language distinguishes between two forms of cannibalism: there is a verb meaning “eat a corpse” and another verb meaning “eat a human being”. During the siege of Leningrad by the Nazi armies, there were cases of both types of anthropophagy, with 872 days, the longest in history.
In the first and most brutal year of the siege, there were 2,015 arrests for eating corpses or people, according to the report of MT Anderson’s Sinfonía para la ciudad de los muertos (Es Pop Ediciones). The declassification of the files of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) in 2002 made it possible to quantify and elaborate on a horror hitherto only whispered. A woman shared her son’s body with her colleagues; a grandmother was caught who was about to cook her granddaughter alive; A young man went to buy boots in the apartment of a perfectly healthy-looking man in the midst of a dystrophic army, and was drenched when he saw a ghastly cellar through the half-open door. ..
But in this bomb-ravaged, frozen, and starving city, the collective spirit has triumphed by far over monstrous individualism. Therefore, the Leningrads resisted against all odds.
human heat
Relatives and friends gathered in the rooms of the houses that were almost blown away by the cold to raise the temperature and share the tasks, most important of which was to get to the miserable bread rations; communal laundries, bathrooms and nurseries were created; The Public Library became a meeting point and expanded its funds by buying books from desperate people (money was not worth much, but it was one thing) and patrols collecting volumes in buildings made of phosphate; The Musical Comedy Theater and the Leningrad radio continued their activities amid live broadcast interruptions of malnourished performers and announcers…
Anderson opens up compelling ground: the Bolshevik revolution, the Stalinist terror, and the Russian front of World War II. And on this historical canvas in relief, and we’ll call it composure, it follows the vital ups and downs of composer Dmitri Shostakóvich (1906-1975). With emphasis on his 7th Symphony, also known as Leningrad. It never crosses his mind to rant about Shostakovich, an evil subject whose figure has been manipulated by the Soviet and capitalist blocs.
The son of a wealthy family from Saint Petersburg (later Petrograd, then Leningrad, and again Saint Petersburg from 1991), Shostakovich doesn’t seem to have enjoyed the 1917 revolution, when he played the piano in a movie theater called La Retina Radiante.
With Stalin’s growing accumulation of power after Lenin’s death, until he completely took hold of him, Shostakovich (and who didn’t, there were millions of victims) saw the wolf’s ears: the people around him fell like flies, even being purged by Stalinist paranoia at the highest military level. . An international celebrity herself and once a favorite of the Soviet regime, she was hanged in 1936 for the opera Lady Macbeth from the Mtsenk region.
The Wehrmacht launched an offensive on Leningrad on 22 June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa to invade Russia. The city was besieged, and nutritionist Ernst Ziegelmeyer scientifically calculated that the population would soon starve. So it wasn’t worth wasting the war effort. Incessant shelling was heard on the fringes.
The musician began writing his 7th Symphony in July 1941 in besieged Leningrad. The work in progress acquired a mythological sheen after its author announced it through the microphone of Radio House, an installation that resembles Emmental cheese because of its shells. He had already formed two movements. It was September 17, and Shostakovich said, “Why am I telling you all this? I say so that the people of Leningrad who listen to me know that life goes on in our city.
Shostakovich, his wife and the couple’s two children were evacuated to Moscow by plane on 1 October. Thus, they survived the terrible winter of 1941-1942 in Leningrad. That the rest of the family is suffering. They continued to evacuate east to Kuibishev by train from Moscow, which seemed to fall into German hands. There the composer finished the fourth and final part of Symphony No. 7 in December.
The news spread, and conductors from all over the Western world raced to broadcast it. A Shostakovich symphony written in these conditions! The work was premiered on March 5, 1942 by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra in Kuibishev. Another chapter of the Leningrad adventure had begun.
Russia demanded that its allies, especially the USA, intervene in the eastern flank. Sending troops and giving all kinds of help. The first never happened, but the second did, and he played a minor role there, but still played a role, Symphony No. Recognizing that the Bolshevik enemy was now a friend to Germany was a propaganda lubricant for the American people.
The score (2,750 pages) was microfilmed. Microfilm flew from Moscow to Tehran; from there he went by land to Iraq; He followed an unknown route to Cairo; flew again to Casablanca or Accra (Ghana); He continued his air travel to Recife (Brazil) and arrived in Washington DC after a stopover in Florida. It was handed over to the US Department on May 30, 1942, which in turn handed it over to the Soviet embassy.
trembling hero
For the first time, Time magazine dedicated its cover to a composer who was none other than Shostakovich. His legs must have trembled when he learned that he was presented as a good boy from a bourgeois family. On July 19, the NBC Radio Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini performed the 7th Symphony. The concert was broadcast live and heard in millions of American homes. Hollywood made several attempts to bring the adventure to the screen. The fact is that private donations to Russia skyrocketed, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Government sent weapons, medicine and food to comrade communist.
Only 15 musicians attended the call of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra to perform the 7th Symphony. The rest were either dead or did not have the strength to emerge. The first rehearsal was held on March 30, 1942. Director Karl Eliasberg was taken to pole sled sessions because he couldn’t stand up. One day a trumpeter said he couldn’t blow, and another day a violinist fainted. With the reinforcement of military musicians and the benefits of melting (the city was turned into an orchard), the piece could be performed publicly on August 9th. The Great Philharmonic Hall is full. Eliasberg’s coat was huge.
Anderson constructs a refrain with the idea that the first part of Symphony No. 7, which was unanimously interpreted at the time as a brutal figure of Nazi progress, also fits with the brutal Stalinism that the composer was very familiar with.