The performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony on August 9th 1942 in the Grand Philharmonic hall was a definitive turning point for Leningraders during the years of the terrible siege. After close to a million citizens had perished during the terrible winter, the city’s remaining musicians lifted their instruments to play one of history’s most legendary concerts and prove that, in the words of one of the performers, ‘our city had come back to life after death.’

‘Life goes on…’

Dmitri Shostakovich, born in St. Petersburg in 1906, was a prodigious, young local talent and penned his first symphony aged just 20. During the 1930s he composed possibly his most accomplished opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, which was then denounced as being ‘formalist’ just two years later in 1936. 

Despite the crushing set-back Shostakovich spectacularly re-entered Leningrad’s cultural life in the first month of the blockade of Leningrad in 1941 when he announced on the Leningrad radio that he had just finished the first two movements of his new seventh symphony.

This piece, dedicated to his home city, would prove that ‘life goes on’ and serve as an inspiration to his fellow citizens. Despite his own insistence that he stay in Leningrad and work as a fireman, Shostakovich was moved to Samara with his family just two months later and he completed the rest of the score there during the winter.

The Leningrad Radio Orchestra

Inside the city as the harsh winter dragged on, the city’s philharmonic orchestra was flown out to safety, while Shostakovich’s masterpiece was finished and performed in other free Russian cities with their help.

In the spring of 1942 it was decided that a performance of the work should take place in the city of its birth. The first problem was of course to form an orchestra. The symphony called for 80 musicians. Even though by this time the remaining musicians of the Leningrad radio orchestra had shrunk to just 15 barely living musicians, and most of them were too weak to play for more than 10 minutes, never mind the whole seventy that the work required.

Soldiers who could play were brought in to make up the numbers alongside local amateur musicians and students, as posters went up across the city, seeking out talented musicians willing to help the cause. When the orchestra of eighty was finally gathered together though, the first rehearsal lasted just 15 minutes as the orchestra were too cold and weak to play and half of them began to collapse from hunger and exhaustion.

Led by the determined conductor Karl Eliasberg, the troupe of starving players were eventually able to stretch their rehearsals longer and longer, despite the fact that many would still simply collapse half way through the three hour sessions or worse. During the four months of rehearsals at least three members of the orchestra died, and countless others lost loved ones to the terrible famine. At times even the conductor had to be brought to rehearsals on a sledge as he was too weak to walk as he too was living on a slightly above average ration of 200grams of bread a day.

‘A storm bursting with music’

The triumphant performance was scheduled for August 09 1942, which was also the day that Hitler had predicted that Leningrad would have fallen and he’d be celebrating in the famous Astoria hotel. The famished citizens of the city were reportedly so hungry for music and inspiration that they would trade their precious bread rations for tickets to the concert - this was an event that could overcome death and would make history.

The night before the concert the Red Army bombarded the German lines with an extraordinary amount of artillery to ensure that the concert would not be interrupted by bombing. Speakers were set up across the streets of the city (one such speaker can still be seen on the corner of Nevsky pr. and Malaya Sadovaya ul.) and along the front line trenches so that every citizen and solider, Soviet or German, would be able to hear the concert.

The musicians (despite the fact that it was August) wore layer upon layer of clothing to fight off the chill caused by starvation, although the top layer was invariably a formal jacket or blouse, which in the words of the poet Olga Berggolts ‘hung as if the body were a coat hanger’.

The conductor Eliasberg scoured the city for potatoes (an impossibly rare commodity) to starch his collar and the audience likewise arrived as impeccably dressed as they possibly could be. The musicians played and the audience sat rapt in awe of such beauty and defiance in the middle of a ravaged city.

As one diarist recalled ‘the people of the great frontline city were listening to the Shostakovich symphony with closed eyes. It seemed that the cloudless sky had suddenly become a storm bursting with music…’

Once the long and emotionally charged concert had finished the hall was filled with silence. Then suddenly the weak yet delighted audience began clapping loudly, with all the strength they had left and tears streaming down their faces, while a young girl went to present the conductor with flowers. Even to this day, blockade survivors still remember this moment as one of the most powerful communal mass out-pourings of both grief and hope during the whole war period.

Eliasberg fainted with exhaustion soon after the long standing ovation and most of the musicians were violently sick after they were treated to large amounts of meat and sugar at a special banquet that was organised for them by the authorities.

Gone but not forgotten

In the years after the war most of those who took part in the concert fell from view. Karl Eliasberg was pushed out as the city’s lead conductor by Mravinsky (who had left during the siege) and spent most of his life hopelessly waiting to be called upon to conduct again.

Shostakovich likewise fell out of favour when he was again denounced in 1947. In the west his work became less popular as many people began to view it largely as a piece of Soviet propaganda with minimal artistic merit. In recent years however the debate has been re-opened, with many scholars suggesting that hidden in the vast work were coded anti-Stalinist motifs, making the piece both anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian.

Karl Eliasberg also was given back the respect and veneration he deserved when Yuri Termikanov, the current leader of the St. Petersburg philharmonic, lead a campaign to resurrect his memory. With help from city authorities he had the conductor's ashes moved from their poorly tended corner of the Piskayorsky cemetery (where you can still hear the symphony being played over loudspeakers all day long) and reinterred along side the graves of such famous Russian cultural giants as Dostoevsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in the necropolis at Alexander Nevsky monastery.