Leningrad & the Orchestra that Defied Hitler

BELLS CHIME

WATER LAPS

Just over 70 years ago, all of this was threatened with destruction in

the war of annihilation Adolf Hitler was waging against the Soviet Union.

But the defenders of Leningrad would find the strength to resist

in unexpected places, including a concert hall.

We're about to listen to one of the most extraordinary

pieces of orchestral music ever written.

Extraordinary not just because of the music

but because of the circumstances in which it was conceived.

It's the work of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich,

and it was performed here in the Philharmonic Hall in Leningrad,

a city under siege that Hitler had vowed to destroy by bombs

and shells, but principally by starvation.

MUSIC: Symphony No 7 in C Major, Op. 60 'Leningrad': IV Allegro Non Troppo composed by Dmitri Shostakovich

Here's another wrapped corpse being hauled by two men to be buried.

But alongside is the body of a woman, just abandoned.

But while Leningrad starved,

Shostakovich's symphony crossed continents and oceans, uniting

audiences around the world in their struggle against a common enemy.

'This is the BBC Home Service.

'It is fitting that this work should receive its first

'performance in this country on the anniversary of Germany's

'treacherous attack on Russia.'

And, then, against the odds, the symphony returned

to the besieged city, and musicians,

some of them literally brought back from the dead,

defied Hitler by giving the performance of a lifetime.

This is a piece that makes superhuman demands on any orchestra.

But a symphony written for half-starved musicians to play,

it ain't.

The symphony is going to be performed now in the same hall

where was played at the height of the siege.

The conductor is Maxim Shostakovich, the son of the composer.

As a three-year-old, he was evacuated from the besieged city.

And alongside us are a precious handful of siege survivors,

and eyewitnesses to the birth of the symphony

and to that historic performance just over 70 years ago.

MUSIC: Symphony No 7 in C Major, Op. 60 'Leningrad': I Allegretto composed by Dmitri Shostakovich

The Leningrad Symphony is a microcosm of the city in those desperate times,

a monument to its suffering, heroism and survival.

It's a work that shows that when death is on the march and

destruction is all around, art can be a weapon, a shield, a lifeline.

It's not surprisingly that a piece of music that made history should

have come from this place, St Petersburg,

or Leningrad, as it was called in the days of the Soviet Union.

It was built as a showcase of Russian culture,

with museums and concert halls, cathedrals and theatres.

But when war came, these very same landmarks would be used

by German artillery to range their guns and pinpoint targets

in a city that stood for everything that Adolf Hitler hated.

And, yet, somehow, in the midst of all the destruction,

the cultural heart of the city continued to beat.

To understand how that happened,

you have to understand something about the city itself.

Most great cities evolve over centuries,

but St Petersburg was willed into existence in a single generation,

at the behest of one man, Peter the Great,

to make an epic political, economic, and cultural statement.

Resounding statements have issued from this city ever since.

MUSIC: Symphony No 5 in D Minor, Op 47: Allegro Non Troppo composed by Eugene Ormandy

300 years ago, this was a stretch of empty marshland

on the north-western edge of Russia

between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland.

It was here that Peter the Great sketched his symphony of a city

which his successors - Catherine the Great and the tsars

of the Romanov dynasty - orchestrated with colonnaded palaces,

classical statuary, golden-spired churches, and arched bridges.

Peter the Great famously said he wanted his new capital city

to be a window on the West,

flooding benighted Russia with the illumination of Western modernity.

But a window looks both ways.

St Petersburg offered the West a vista on the cultural riches

of mother Russia, from Crime And Punishment, to Swan Lake.

But always alongside the culture were the politics -

politics of a particularly lethal kind.

This was a city of the proletariat as well as the intelligentsia -

an industrial city of docklands and factories, slums and dives,

poverty and unrest, which would ultimately explode into revolution.

Following a succession of defeats on Eastern Front

during the First World War, Tsar Nicholas was deposed in 1917,

and, in the chaos that ensued, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin,

seized power in a coup d'etat.

Civil war, famine,

and the painful birth of the new Soviet system followed,

during which, by some estimates, as many as 15 million perished.

When Lenin died in 1924, Moscow got his embalmed corpse.

This place was left with his name, becoming Leningrad, the same year.

It proved to be a bad bargain.

Lenin's successor was Joseph Stalin.

He mistrusted Leningrad.

Ethnically diverse, culturally self-confident,

and politically independent,

the city was a challenge to his autocratic instincts.

And, so, once Stalin had consolidated his grip on power,

Leningrad got it in the neck.

The back of the neck.

MUSIC: Piano Trio No 2 in E Minor, Op 67: IV Allegretto composed by Dmitri Shostakovich

In 1936, Stalin unleashed his Great Terror.

Violent political repression had been a constant in Russian history,

but in intensity and scale,

there had been nothing to match the mass arrests,

show trials and mass executions of Stalin's terror,

inflicted across the Soviet Union.

In Leningrad, Black Marias would fan out from the secret police

headquarters, the Bolshoi Dom - the Big House - night after night,

to harvest fresh crops of victims.

Tens of thousands were sent to the labour camps of the Gulag.

The rest ended up here.

This small forest 18 miles north of Leningrad is known as

the Levashovo Wasteland.

This is where the bodies

of those shot by the secret police were dumped.

Today, family members mark the memory of loved ones by placing

photographs on the trees that share the ground with their bodies.

Between the autumn of 1936 and the summer of 1938,

around 68,000 Leningraders were murdered in this way,

their names recorded in 13 volumes of the Leningrad martyrology.

Across the Soviet Union, there were, by the most conservative estimates,

1.5 million arrests,

and at least 700,000 executions.

Death on such a scale is almost impossible to comprehend.

But, as Stalin remarked,

"One death? That's a tragedy.

"A million deaths? It's a statistic."

MUSIC: Counterplan composed by Dmitri Shostakovich

During the Great Terror, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich,

like everyone else, walked a tightrope.

A native of Leningrad,

he was a prodigy of the city's celebrated conservatory.

And whilst still a teenager,

he won international fame with his first symphony,

and established his claim to be the leading composer of the Soviet era.

But status brought no immunity

from Stalin's terror.

Far more helpful to Shostakovich

was the song of the Counterplan,

which he'd written for a hit movie in 1932,

and which was said to be one of Stalin's favourites.

In Stalin's Russia, that kind of popularity could save your life.

With its refrain like a fixed grin, the song of the Counterplan

expresses the profound optimism now demanded of Soviet composers.

As Stalin himself said, "Life is getting better, comrades.

"Life is becoming more joyous."

FACTORY WHISTLE BLOWS

The Soviet system was totalitarian.

It concerned itself with everything a citizen did.

From mining coal to writing poetry,

everything was the business of the state.

But when it came to music,

the Cultural Commissars were conflicted.

They sensed that music could be a useful tool,

but could it be trusted to toe the party line?

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin loved Beethoven,

but that very passion troubled him because what if his love

for the Appassionata Sonata were to sap his revolutionary zeal?

MUSIC: Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57: Appassionata composed by Ludwig van Beethoven

"I can't listen to music very often.

"It affects my nerves," Lenin complained.

"It makes one want to say silly things

"and to pat people on their little heads,

"people who can create such beauty living in a filthy hell.

"But one shouldn't pat anyone on their little heads nowadays.

"One should beat them. Beat them mercilessly."

"Not that we want to use that kind of violence against anyone, ideally.

"Ah, but our duty is infernally hard."

Under Stalin, the machinery of totalitarianism had fallen

into the hands of a tyrant.

Now everything was his business.

Like Lenin, Stalin was a music buff,

scribbling terse judgments on the sleeves of his record collection.

Good. Bad. So-so.

And when the secret police delivered long lists of names to his desk,

he annotated them in the same brusque style.

Beat, beat, and beat again.

Shoot them all.

But at a time when the pressure to conform weighed like a mountain

on the artistic life of the Soviet Union,

Shostakovich dared to break free.

Two years after the Song of the Counterplan,

Shostakovich premiered a new opera,

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,

a grisly tale of greed, lust and murder,

with sexually-charged music that combined

extremes of expressionism with radical dissonance.

By choosing a story set in the bad old days of the tsars,

Shostakovich must have felt that he'd done enough to be

politically correct.

But when Stalin finally caught up with the opera

two years after its premiere,

the composer's high-flying career came crashing down to earth.

At a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow

on 26th January 1936, Stalin walked out after the first act.

This is an article that no Soviet composer in the days of Stalin

wanted to read, especially when it was rumoured to be

written by the great record collector himself.

It was published in Pravda two days after Stalin's dramatic walk out,

and its title, "Muddle Instead Of Music",

sets the tone for what follows.

"From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance,

"by a confused stream of sound.

"Snatches of melody, the beginnings of a musical phrase are drowned,

"emerge again and disappear in a grinding and squealing roar."

And it gets worse.

"To follow this music is most difficult.

"To remember it, impossible.

"It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly."

Maxim Shostakovich, who, as a conductor,

would work closely with his father, saw, as a child,

the crushing effects of Stalin's disfavour.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

The following year, 1937, things took an even more sinister turn.

Marshal Tukhachevsky, a friend and supporter of Shostakovich,

fell foul of Stalin's paranoid suspicions.

The composer was ordered to report to

the Bolshoi Dom confession factory,

where he was questioned about a plot to assassinate Stalin,

supposedly hatched at Tukhachevsky's dacha.

When he failed to supply the answers required, his interrogator asked

him to think carefully about it overnight

and to return the next day with something more incriminating.

THUNDER RUMBLES

And then war came to Leningrad

and a new kind of terror gripped the city.

For the Soviet Union, the German invasion on 22nd June, 1941,

was swift and shocking.

Less than two years earlier, the Nazis and the Soviets

had alarmed the world by signing a non-aggression pact,

and, at first, Stalin simply refused to believe that Hitler had broken it.

The scale of the onslaught soon became clear,

with German Panzer divisions storming across an 1,800-mile front,

deep into Soviet territory.

East towards Moscow, south-east into the Ukraine

and north-east through the Baltic States towards Leningrad.

Perched on the north-western edge of Soviet territory,

Leningrad was especially vulnerable to the German advance,

coupled with a blocking move from the Soviet's old enemy, the Finns.

As the Red Army fell back,

the city on its neck of land between the Gulf of Finland

and Lake Ladoga was very soon in danger of being

cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union.

On 8th September, 1941, the encirclement was complete.

Hitler ordered his generals to halt their advance,

to hold their positions and to starve the city to death.

Hitler loathed Leningrad.

When Paris fell in the summer of 1940, he came to gloat,

but the sight of the French capital inspired a grudging respect.

For Leningrad, he had no respect.

To him, it was a city of subhuman "Untermensch" -

Slavs, Bolsheviks, Jews.

Their city could be destroyed, and in the cruellest way imaginable -

deliberate slow starvation.

Rationing had been introduced in Leningrad in July.

To begin with, the ration levels were generous -

workers receiving double the amount given to so-called dependents,

women, children, the elderly.

But once the siege began in earnest, the ration quickly fell

and for dependents, the fall was acute,

from 400 grams a day in July 1941,

to just 125 in November -

less than 20% of the calories needed to survive.

This is what 125 grams of bread would have looked like.

It's pitiful, but this was the daily ration for dependents

during one of the coldest winters even known.

This is good quality bread made from lovely fragrant flour.

During the siege, bread was adulterated with all sorts.

Pine shavings, animal fodder, the sweepings off the bakery floor.

It came out looking and tasting like a lump of damp clay.

Yet, to a city ravaged by hunger,

this was the most precious thing on earth.

The Soviet ration system was based on principles originally

developed in the Gulag, where food was distributed,

not according to need, but according to your capacity for work.

But keeping a family alive did not count as work.

The work of sheer survival fell mostly to mothers.

Getting up at dawn, cold and famished,

summoning the energy to get out and join a bread queue, and then

to stand there for hours in bitter cold, exposed to artillery and bombs,

and all for a meagre ration of adulterated bread.

So what use is a composer to a city under siege?

What kind of work should he do?

Turned down for active service,

Shostakovich dug trenches before being assigned to

fire-watching duties on the roof of the Conservatory.

A perfect photo opportunity that produced an image that would

later come to define the siege.

Firefighter Shostakovich composing, despite the bombs and the shells.

And, like all the best propaganda, it was true.

On 19th July, just a few days after the fall of the Russian city

of Smolensk, he began work on a new composition -

a symphony, his seventh, in four movements.

Composers have often attempted to capture or commemorate

moments of war.

Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture,

but, as musicologist Marina Frolova-Walker explains,

none have done that in the heat of battle.

This is what is so unique about it because when the war started

Shostakovich was the only one

who actually started writing a symphony pretty soon after that.

Usually we say that time needs to pass for thoughts to be

packaged in symphonic form, but Shostakovich managed to do

it at that time and I don't know anyone else who managed to do that.

The most obvious place where that happens,

most famously in the first movement, is what has become called

"The Invasion Theme",

which starts with a side drum, takes over the whole orchestra

and seems almost to kind of destroy everything in its path,

musically speaking.

Look, here it is here, starting with the side drums.

I might give this a go.

And so it goes on.

The same inane little tune repeating and repeating a dozen times,

building and building, pianissimo to fortissimo, for more than 340 bars.

I think what he does is very original

and I know lots of critics say it is not.

You know, they said this is like Ravel's Bolero...

-Because of the repetition?

-..because of the repetition.

And yet, what I think is absolutely unique about this is that war

has never been portrayed in this way, in this grotesque way.

So what Shostakovich seems to say, that any banal, ordinary thing

can become so terrifying and so evil.

Neither Hitler nor Stalin, nor anyone else,

they were not particularly evil geniuses.

They were ordinary people. One was a mediocre painter.

The other one, a mediocre poet, and look what happens.

Shostakovich was able to complete two more movements

of the symphony in Leningrad,

but at the beginning of October,

as the military situation deteriorated, he was airlifted

out of the city with the fourth and final movement incomplete.

For those left behind in the besieged city,

October marked the start of what became known as the

"starvation winter".

It was the coldest anyone could remember.

The first snows fell early that year in mid-October and after that,

temperatures plummeted, reaching record lows of minus 35 centigrade.

The Arctic temperatures froze the waters of Lake Ladoga,

allowing a few supplies to reach the city by truck at great hazard

across the so-called "Ice Road".

But even with this fragile lifeline, hunger soon began to bite.

Cats and dogs quickly disappeared from the streets,

victims of a new kind of siege cuisine in which fresh meat,

whatever its source, became a luxury.

As for the rest, a typical siege menu consisted of rissoles made

of mustard and carpenter's glue

and soup made from boiled leather belts.

Throughout the siege, the city was under threat from artillery

and air raids, but Leningrad was not blitzed to the ground.

For most, death would not be sudden and violent, but slow and agonising.

By November, the first deaths from malnutrition were being reported.

The authorities insisted on the use of the word "dystrophy" -

a euphemism that failed to obscure a terrible truth.

Leningrad was starving.

This is a very compelling, shocking photograph.

On the face of it, it looks like a bent old woman hauling her son...

..but it's perfectly possible that they were husband and wife.

The effect of malnutrition

was horribly, horribly ageing.

Women in particular looked 20 to 30 years older than their real age.

But also...this young man

is not as well fed as he appears.

He's actually swollen with oedema.

It's one of the last stages of starvation.

And also he has the swarthy look

from skin discolouration,

which is one of the symptoms of starvation,

what, with black humour, came to be dubbed "a siege tan".

By December, the first mummies have appeared.

Corpses of loved ones

wrapped in fabric to be taken to

improvised graves.

People couldn't afford to give up wood for proper coffins.

What a tragic, tragic picture.

This is a photograph from Orphanage 38.

Orphanage staff reported dying mothers

using the very last of their strength to carry their babies

and small children to the orphanage to leave them there...

..and then to go home to die.

Life in the besieged city came to be measured out

by the ticks of a metronome.

It was broadcast on Radio Leningrad in the breaks between programmes

and was meant to show that the city still lived.

This was the soundtrack of the siege,

at least until the symphony appeared.

It became a truism of the times that everyone had their own siege.

THEY GREET EACH OTHER

The memories of 91-year-old Olga Kvade remain pin sharp.

Olga, how old were you when the siege began and what were you doing?

Far away from the suffering city,

Shostakovich struggled to complete the Seventh Symphony.

Evacuated to Moscow, he and his family soon had to

flee from there too as the Germans continued their inexorable advance.

Along with thousands of other refugees,

they travelled by train hundreds of miles east.

After a chaotic seven-day journey, during which the score

of the Seventh was nearly lost forever, they ended up in Kuybyshev,

the Soviet Union's provisional wartime capital

on the banks of the Volga river.

It was in this overcrowded city of refugees,

in cramped, noisy accommodation,

that Shostakovich tried to find

a fitting resolution to his epic work...

..a musical victory that he hoped would inspire

the ultimate military victory.

But how do you write out musically victory

when victory is not in sight,

because quite a lot of people thought at this time

the war was lost?

It was such a huge devastating moment, so there wasn't even a chink

of light at the end of the tunnel and the torment is in that finale.

I think the torment of him trying to write this finale,

but also the torment that people are going on on the way, this victory.

Somehow this, again, it coincides.

The compositional process coincides with the war.

People can say you can't read all this into music,

but this is what happens with music, which is programmatic.

So it's telling a story?

Yes, and he has to get through gradually,

literally semitone by semitone, he moves up, another page of music and

then he moves another semitone up and then another page, so it's going

painstakingly slowly, but then, when it finally comes, yeah,

then there's this sense of elation.

He must have been very pleased with himself.

He usually was when he wrote something good.

In Leningrad, the metronome ticked on

but it was beginning to sound like a death rattle

rather than a heartbeat.

The musical life of the city,

a vital boost to morale throughout the summer and autumn, had continued

with concerts and broadcasts, right up until the end of December 1941.

But now, as the new year began, the city's one remaining orchestra,

the Radiokom, based at the Radio House, was near collapse.

A stark memo from the time reads,

"Leader, first violins - dead.

"Bassoon - near death.

"Senior percussionist - dead."

METRONOME TICKS

But it was in the snow-choked courtyards, frozen stairwells

and cramped rooms of the city's communal apartment blocks,

that the daily grind of survival was at its most implacable.

In this painstakingly reconstructed siege room,

you can sense the claustrophobic atmosphere of a domestic nightmare.

It was a world in which mundane objects took on huge significance.

A homemade oil lamp, nicknamed a smoker,

that gave off more fumes than light.

The speaker wired to Radio Leningrad for when the electricity was working.

The child's sledge, the szaky,

now used to haul wood, water and corpses.

An improvised stove fed with scraps of anything that would burn...

..as siege survivor Tamara Korol'Kevich recalls.

During the dead days of December, January and February,

when it was dark for 18 out of 24 hours, any time not spent queuing

for bread or scrounging for wood,

was spent daydreaming about food,

reading and, for some, writing a diary.

One of the most revealing of these siege diaries

was written by Elena Kochina, a scientist, whose observations

have the calm objectivity of her profession.

Just before the Germans closed around the city,

Elena's laboratory was evacuated and she had the chance to leave,

but she delayed because her baby daughter Lena had a slight fever.

It was a fateful decision.

A few days later, Leningrad was cut off.

Elena, the baby and her husband Dima were trapped,

and when the starvation winter came,

the bonds of love within this little family

were strained to breaking point.

Elena kept her baby alive on millet porridge eked out from a small

supply she had managed to stockpile at the very start of the siege.

But one day, she discovers that her husband Dima has been stealing it.

"26th November. Today when I unexpectedly came into the room,

"I found Dima hurriedly chewing the millet.

"'Don't you dare eat it,' I yelled, losing control of myself.

"'Shut up. I can't help myself.'

"His eyes looked at me with despair.

"I shut up and my anger passed.

"I began to pity him.

"I now take the millet with me when I leave the house.

"Dima is angry at me, but he keeps quiet.

"13th December. Lena is sick.

"Dima doesn't help me any more.

"He doesn't even play with Lena.

"He only goes willingly to the bread store for our rations.

"He's probably eating bits of it on the way back home.

"6th January. Lice torment both of us a lot. We sleep together.

"There's only one bed in the room.

"But even through padded coats, it's unpleasant for us

"to feel one another's touch.

"We've never been as remote from one another.

"Each of us struggles silently with our own suffering.

"10th January. Lena has forgotten how to talk.

"She's no longer able to stand or even to sit up.

"Her skin hangs in creases. She sings quietly all the time.

"Evidently, she's begging to eat.

"I kissed her eyes. The eyes of a hungry little wolf.

"'You're doing that on purpose,' Dima said.

"'You're purposely caressing Lena. You want to torment me.'

"12th January. I took Lena to the clinic.

"Waiting for the doctor, I put her on the table.

"'Don't leave that child unattended,' a nurse whispered.

"'We've had cases of children being kidnapped.'

"Kidnapped, she means, for food, by cannibals."

Throughout the starvation winter,

rumours of cannibalism were rife in the city.

In the bread queues, people whispered about gangs who snatched

babies or lured victims to abandoned apartments,

where they were murdered, butchered and their body parts eaten or sold.

After the war, cannibalism became one of the siege's greatest taboos -

a grisly legend officially denied,

but never entirely repressed.

It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet system that researchers

were able to assess the hard evidence documented in the files

of the secret police.

What they discovered were not marauding gangs

of baby-snatching murderers, but, for the most part, desperate

women, new to the city, without resources, work or connections,

sometimes even without ration cards.

Some scavenged flesh from the corpses that lay in the streets.

Others, in the most extreme cases,

murdered one of their own children to feed the rest.

These eye-witness scenes painted during the siege by artist

Mikhail Georgovich capture the frenzy of hunger

that drove some Leningraders to prey on their neighbours.

Nevertheless, in spite of terrible privation,

order in the starving city never broke down.

By early February 1942, in Kuybyshev,

the Seventh Symphony was being

rehearsed by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra which had been

evacuated from Moscow along with foreign embassies

and the political and bureaucratic machinery of the Soviet government.

Shostakovich, himself a refugee,

attended the run-through of the first two movements

and, as he later wrote,

"For half a day I rejoiced over my baby."

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

The conductor Samuil Samosud

evidently felt there was still room for improvement

and he tried to persuade Shostakovich to rewrite the finale

to include chorists and soloists with a text in praise of Stalin.

With characteristic evasiveness,

Shostakovich thanked him for his valuable remarks which,

as he later confided to a friend,

"I take into consideration but not into practice."

The world premiere of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony,

dedicated by the composer to the city of Leningrad,

took place on 5th March, 1942, in the Kuybyshev Opera House.

Iosif Raiskin, a six-year-old evacuee from Leningrad,

was in the audience.

Later that March, the Leningrad Symphony was performed in Moscow.

As Shostakovich took his customary sheepish bow,

one observer commented, "This man is now more powerful than Hitler."

Shostakovich would move to Moscow,

where he'd remain for the rest of the war, but his Seventh Symphony

was about to begin a remarkable odyssey across a war-torn world.

Photographed on 900 pages of microfilm,

the score was put on a secret flight out of Moscow to Tehran,

then overland to Cairo and on to London and a sandbagged building in

Portland Place, which itself was no stranger to the deprivations of war.

'This is the BBC Home Service.

'Many of you will already know that the length of the Shostakovich...'

The arrival of the Leningrad Symphony at the BBC

caused consternation.

They'd heard rumours that it was big, but no-one realised just

how big until the microfilm pages had been turned into a score.

At his first rehearsal at the Maida Vale Studio,

conductor Sir Henry Wood timed the symphony at 78-and-a-half minutes,

which mean that, when broadcast,

it would overrun the sacred chimes of Big Ben at nine o'clock.

As this internal BBC memo reveals, the presentation editor,

a Mr Phillips,

suggested tentatively that the symphony be broken between the third

and fourth movements to accommodate the Nine O'Clock News bulletin.

Well, in the end, wiser deputy heads prevailed

and it was decided that the symphony could indeed go ahead uninterrupted.

And, as for the chimes of Big Ben, well, they'd just have to wait.

'It is fitting that this work should receive its first performance

'in this country on the anniversary of Germany's treacherous

'attack on Russia.

'It was written in the besieged fortress of Leningrad

'and the last movement interprets the faith and aspirations of Russia

'crystallised in its title, Victory.'

On the night,

Sir Henry Wood stormed through the Seventh in just 70 minutes

causing yet more panic at Broadcasting House

when the performance ended four minutes shy of nine o'clock.

But Mr Phillips in Pres vamped valiantly

until the chimes of Big Ben were ready

and the Beeb, in the words of the Director General,

came through "in flying colours".

While the BBC patted itself on the back, the Seventh's journey

continued via South America to New York where star conductors

Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini

fought politely but determinedly for the privilege

of premiering the work.

In the end, Toscanini pulled rank.

As a veteran anti-fascist

and publically sworn enemy of the Italian dictator

Benito Mussolini, he secured the gig for his NBC Symphony Orchestra.

And so, in the same week that the staunchly anti-Soviet

Time magazine ran a cover story on the heroism and creative genius of

fireman Shostakovich, NBC informed its audience that Red Russia

was now America's doughty ally in the battle for freedom

and the proof was the Leningrad Symphony.

-RADIO:

-'The musical work is descriptive not only of the horrors

'of Nazi fascism

'but of the indomitable will of a fighting people

'to crush this monster and win through to final victory and freedom

'for all men.'

Within just a year, the Leningrad Symphony had been performed

nearly 100 times, an unprecedented performance history for a new work.

There was, though, one place where it had yet to be performed.

The city where, of course, it meant most of all.

In besieged Leningrad, spring was on its way at last.

With a population savagely depleted by half a million deaths,

there was at least more food for the survivors

and the ration was increased,

even the trams were running again.

When people heard their bells ringing once more,

they greeted them like old friends, with tears in their eyes.

But though the city was emerging from its frozen immobility,

survivors were sick and exhausted.

Unable to generate enough warmth from their emaciated bodies,

they dressed in thick layers, even in the early spring sunshine.

And though their bodies remained cold,

their emotions were coming out of deep freeze.

Anyone who had come through the starvation winter had

a lot to come to terms with -

the heart-rending losses they had endured,

the unimaginable things they had witnessed and, for some,

the unthinkable things that they had done.

So what had happened to Elena, Dima and baby Lena?

Somehow all three survived through a mixture of sheer luck

and outright theft,

once Dima had perfected a method of stealing loaves of bread

using a sharpened walking stick.

In her diary, Elena allows herself few illusions about what

hunger can do to a person.

"Heroism, self-sacrifice, the heroic feat.

"Only those who are full

"or haven't been hungry long are capable of these.

"As for us, we came to know a hunger that degraded and crushed us,

"that turned us into animals.

"May those who come after us and happen to read these lines

"have mercy upon us."

As the thaw set in, the city authorities dragooned

Leningraders into a clean-up operation.

Teams of women were ordered to remove tons of yellow snow

encrusted with months of accumulated human filth.

And, as the weather improved,

the planting of vegetables became a top priority

and some Leningraders discovered their green fingers.

But it would take more than cabbages

and a clean-up to restore the city's shattered morale.

At some point, a party apparatchik called up the Radio House

and told them to take the bloody metronome off the air.

What the city needed was music and not just recorded music.

As a matter of the highest urgency,

the Radio House was ordered to bring its orchestra back from the dead.

In the whole of Leningrad there was only one conductor now left alive,

Karl Eliasberg.

On 1st March, he was summoned by the Radio House committee

and ordered to resume orchestral performances immediately.

By this stage, only 27 musicians were left,

only 12 of whom were even capable of playing their instruments,

so an appeal was broadcast asking all musicians to report immediately

to the Radio House.

Enticed by the prospects of extra rations, many turned up,

some with little or in fact no musical experience whatsoever.

Once Eliasberg had weeded them out,

he found he was still well short of the numbers required,

so, on a bicycle requisitioned by the Radio Committee, he set out

in search of musicians who, as the expression went,

had fallen down the funnel.

There are many legends surrounding Eliasberg and his extraordinary

quest for musicians in the stricken city of Leningrad.

But none can top the story of the drummer, Jevdet Aidarov.

Eliasberg had been told that Aidarov had died.

He went to the morgue and discovered the body

and he saw that the fingers of this supposed corpse were twitching.

"He's alive!" shouted Eliasberg

and, before long, Aidarov was at the Radio House

being nursed back to health on extra rations.

I'm told that this is the very side drum that Aidarov used

for the Leningrad Symphony when it was finally performed in Leningrad.

Eye-witnesses said that he hammered out the invasion rhythm

in the first movement with such ferocity, with such hatred,

that it wasn't as if this was a musical instrument

but a fascist's helmet.

Bringing half-dead musicians back to life was just the start.

Eliasberg's next miracle was to mould them into a working orchestra.

By necessity, they were a mixed bunch

but they had one thing in common -

all were veterans of the siege with the experiences

and the scars to show for it.

Tuba player Aleksander Shartovski was a front-line soldier

who lost his wife and son during the siege.

Viola player Isaac Jazinevski extinguished incendiaries that

rained down from Luftwaffe bombers.

Flautist Galina Yershova worked in a munitions factory

and performed for soldiers on the front line.

Cellist Andrej Safonov scaled the golden spires of city landmarks

to camouflage them with canvas and grey paint.

And student Jania Matus was asked to pay for the repair of her oboe

with a tasty dead cat.

Viktor Kozlov, a clarinettist who played under the conductor

after the war, and later wrote his biography,

explains how Eliasberg turned these survivors into an orchestra.

The first rehearsal of the reconstituted

Radiokom Orchestra was attended by just 14 musicians.

Some were so weak they couldn't climb the stairs to the

rehearsal room on the first floor, so they remained downstairs

and listened while their stronger colleagues played.

Leningrad had got its orchestra back.

Now what it needed was its symphony.

Aware of the huge propaganda value the symphony had

built during its world tour,

party bosses in Leningrad ordered the Radio Committee to get hold

of a copy of the score and get it into the city as soon as possible.

On 2nd July, after a perilous flight,

an aircraft landed in the city with a load of vital medical supplies

and the score of the Seventh in its hold.

The Leningrad Symphony had come home.

And this is it.

The full conductor's score in four volumes delivered like some

kind of secret weapon to the besieged city.

This is the very score that had been used at the Kuybyshev premiere.

Now, when Eliasberg opened this score for the very first time,

his reaction was simply to say, "This is impossible."

Look at the demands Shostakovich is placing on his orchestra here.

Eliasberg could see there were 115 musicians used for that premiere.

Eight horns, six trumpets, six trombones.

This was a piece that makes superhuman demands on any orchestra.

Shostakovich's Seventh may be many things, but a symphony

written for half-starved musicians to play it sure ain't.

The first performance of the Leningrad Symphony

in Leningrad was announced for 9th August, 1942.

Before the concert began, one last instrument,

not specified by Shostakovich, was added to the score.

A massive Soviet barrage targeting German artillery positions

and designed to ensure that the performance was not interrupted.

And so the stage was set for the Radiokom Orchestra,

conductor Karl Eliasberg, and for Dmitri Shostakovich's Leningrad

Symphony in front of an audience of more than 1,000.

No recording of the concert has survived.

No film, not even a photograph.

Nothing remains of the August 9th performance,

except for the memories of those who were there.

But these are indelible.

APPLAUSE

It took more than a concert to break the siege of Leningrad.

The city had another 531 days of suffering to endure

before the German lines were finally broken on 27th January, 1944.

But after the war was over, it was discovered that

the performance of the Leningrad Symphony that evening in August

did play its part in the victory that followed.

That night, Radio Leningrad had taken the fight directly to the

enemy by broadcasting the concert on loudspeakers across the front line -

a shrewd, psychological blow that found its mark.

No-one knows for certain how many Leningraders died

during the 872 days of the siege.

The most recent estimates put the death toll at half a million soldiers

and anywhere between 800,000 and a million civilians,

making Leningrad the costliest battle

in terms of casualties in modern history.

In the Piskariovskoye Cemetery,

civilians and soldiers are buried in 186 mass graves.

The inscription declares, "No-one is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten."

But immediately after the war,

forgetting was precisely what Stalin demanded.

With Nazi Germany defeated,

Stalin was once again free to pursue his vendetta against Leningrad.

The confession factory at the Bolshoi Dom, which had never stopped

processing even at the height of the siege, went into overdrive.

City bosses, their family, friends and associates were rounded up

on concocted charges, interrogated and despatched to the Gulag,

or the Levashovo wasteland.

For Shostakovich,

the end of the war also meant an unwelcome return of the past.

In 1948, the musical hero of Leningrad fell foul of Stalin

once again.

Condemned as an anti-people formalist, his work was banned.

But Shostakovich couldn't be forgotten -

a music written to defy one form of tyranny

could be used to resist another.

# Dum-dum, pum-pum-pum

# Dum-dum, dum-dum-dum

# Dum-dum, dum-dum-dum

# Dum-dum, dum-dum-dum. #