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spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
I wrote about this when talking about Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, but the Siege of Leningrad is one of my favourite examples of the indomitable human spirit. Or something poetic like that. Anyway, here's my favourite part from this book:
On 9 August 1942 the besieged city put on a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. [...] The symbolic importance of this concert was enormous. Composer Dmitry Shostakovich had stayed in Leningrad and begun work on his Seventh Symphony during the first month of the blockade. Later, Stalin insisted that he be evacuated, but Shostakovich dedicated the finished symphony to his native city. In March 1942 the musical score was flown into besieged Leningrad by special military plane.
Trombonist Viktor Orlovsky is one of the two surviving musicians who performed at the Leningrad premiere of the Seventh Symphony on 9 August 1942. ‘Being an artist during the siege was both an overwhelming and heartbreaking experience,’ Orlovsky recalls. ‘The halls were always packed, which I thought was extraordinary.’ The Radio Committee Orchestra held its first rehearsal on 30 March 1942. It lasted a mere twenty minutes, with Eliasberg so feeble that he had to be driven in on a sledge. The orchestra had been re-formed with one powerful idea in mind—to give a sense of dignity and worth to starving Leningraders living without electricity or heat. The Germans had boasted that they would capture the city on 9 August and hold a victory celebration at Leningrad’s Astoria Hotel. The date for the Seventh Symphony’s premiere was thus deliberately chosen. [...] Orlovsky vividly remembers the atmosphere of the concert: ‘People were all dressed up and some had even had their hair done. It felt like a victory. At the end, our conductor, Eliasberg, received one bouquet of flowers from a teenage girl. She turned to the orchestra and said simply, “My family did this because life has to go on as normal—whatever happens around us.”’
It was this unconquerable spirit which saved Leningrad. Many years after the war Karl Eliasberg was approached by a group of German tourists, who said that they had come to the city especially to see him. They had been in the besieging army outside the city, so close that they were able to intercept Leningrad’s radio signals, and hear the broadcast of Shostakovich’s Seventh. Now these veterans said: ‘It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realisation began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. But something else started to happen. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and death—the will to stay human.’
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