Symphony No. 7 (Shostakovich)

At first dedicated to Lenin, it was eventually submitted in honor of the besieged city of Leningrad, where it was first played under dire circumstances on August 9, 1942, nearly a year into the siege by German forces.

The Leningrad soon became popular in both the Soviet Union and the West as a symbol of resistance to fascism and totalitarianism, thanks in part to the composer's microfilming of the score in Samara and its clandestine delivery, via Tehran and Cairo, to New York, where Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in a broadcast performance on July 19, 1942, and Time magazine placed Shostakovich on its cover.

Shostakovich at first gave them titles[6][7]—"War", "Reminiscence", "Home Expanses", and "Victory"—but he soon withdrew these and left the movements with their tempo markings alone.

[9] This is followed by a slower section played by flutes and strings, which segues into a 22-measure ostinato march that Shostakovich anticipated would be compared to Ravel's Boléro.

[16] In the book, he is also reported to have said that in dedicating the symphony to Leningrad, he had in mind not the city under German siege, but "that Stalin destroyed and Hitler merely finished off.

[18] Soviet music critic Lev Lebedinsky, a friend of the composer's for many years, confirmed after the dawn of glasnost ("openness") under Mikhail Gorbachev that Shostakovich had conceived the Seventh Symphony before Hitler invaded Russia: The famous theme in the first movement Shostakovich had first as the Stalin theme (which close friends of the composer knew).

[21]While Shostakovich could speak like this only in a very narrow circle of friends, it did not stop him from hinting to the Soviet Press about a hidden agenda for the Seventh Symphony.

"[23] The Nazi attack and consequent relaxing of Soviet censorship gave Shostakovich the hope of writing the work for a mass audience.

Shostakovich's plan was for a single-movement symphony, including a chorus and a requiem-like passage for a vocal soloist, with a text taken from the Psalms of David.

The idea of individual suffering became interwoven in Shostakovich's mind with the Lord God's vengeance for the taking of innocent blood (Verse 12, New King James Version).

[25] Musicologist Ludmila Mikheyeva (who is also Ivan Sollertinsky's daughter-in-law) maintains that Shostakovich played the theme and its variations for his students before the war with Germany began.

For its latter half, Shostakovich quotes Graf Danilo's entrance song, "Da geh' ich zu Maxim," from Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow.

[28] Arthur Lourié called the theme a "trite, intentionally silly motif," adding, "This tune can be whistled by any Soviet man on the street. ...

[30][not specific enough to verify] Two weeks before he planned to complete the symphony-requiem, Shostakovich played what he had finished to date for Sollertinsky, who was being evacuated with the Leningrad Philharmonic.

While playing the music, Shostakovich realized that what he had written was not a complete work in itself but actually the beginning of something much larger, since the tensions brought up in the symphony-requiem had not been resolved.

Adopting a matter-of-fact tone, he attempted to assure his fellow Leningraders that for him it was business as usual: An hour ago I finished the score of two movements of a large symphonic composition.

The Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, conducted by Samuil Samosud, gave a rousing performance that was broadcast across the Soviet Union and later in the West as well.

[32] As for the city itself, Leningrad surrounded by the Nazis had become a living hell, with eyewitness reports of people who had died of cold and starvation lying in doorways in stairwells.

[38] The Soviet commander of the Leningrad front, General Govorov, ordered a bombardment of German artillery positions in advance to ensure their silence during the performance of the symphony; a special operation, code-named "Squall," was executed for precisely this purpose.

believe that, as he had done in the Fifth, Shostakovich gave his audience a chance to express thoughts and suffering that, in the context of the Great Purges, had remained hidden and accumulated over many years.

Virgil Thomson wrote that, "It seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not very musical and the distracted," adding that if Shostakovich continued writing in this manner, it might "eventually disqualify him for consideration as a serious composer.

"[50] Disdainful remarks about the symphony being nothing more than a bombastic accompaniment for a bad war movie were voiced immediately after the London and New York premieres.

The American public-relations machine had joined the Soviet propaganda arm in portraying the Seventh as a symbol of cooperation and spiritual unity of both peoples in their fight against the Nazis.

[56] Nevertheless, as early as 1943 Soviet critics claimed the "exultation" of the Seventh's finale was unconvincing, pointing out that the part of the symphony they found most effective—the march in the opening movement—represented not the defending Red Army but the Nazi invaders.

[58] When Testimony was published in the West in 1979, Shostakovich's overall anti-Stalinist tone and specific comments about the anti-totalitarian content hidden in the Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh Symphonies were held suspect initially.

that Béla Bartók quoted the march theme of the first movement in the "Intermezzo interrotto" of his Concerto for Orchestra in response to the Hungarian composer's frustration about the positive reception of the piece.

The resemblance has been variously interpreted by later commentators as an accusation of tastelessness, as a commentary on the symphony's over-popularity in Bartók's eyes, and as an acknowledgement of the position of the artist in a totalitarian society.

"[62] In the Ken Russell film Billion Dollar Brain (1967), music from the Leningrad Symphony accompanies the failed military invasion of the then Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic by Texas millionaire Midwinter (a pivotal scene reflecting the Battle of the Neva from Aleksandr Nevsky).

The same sample had been used by the German hip hop artist Peter Fox in his song "Alles neu" in 2008, and by Plan B in "Ill Manors" in 2012.

The composer's widow Irina acted as script consultant to the project and its musical advisors included Rudolf Barshai and Boris Tishchenko.