Symphony for the City of the Dead

Symphony for the City of the Dead is a historical non-fiction book published in 2015 by the American author M.T. Anderson. Though the book is targeted at young adult readers, it tells the exceedingly grim story of the three-year Siege of Leningrad during World War II, and how Leningrad resident Dmitri Shostakovich channeled all that suffering into a symphony that helped rally the Soviet troops. The book depicts both the widespread suffering caused by the German army on the Eastern Front, but also the brutal repression of living in Stalinist Russia.

The author first goes into some detail about Shostakovich's life prior to World War II and the German siege of Leningrad. Prior to the 1930s, Shostakovich embarked on a promising career amid an artistic ecosystem in Russia that was relatively free and open to experimentalism, at least compared to what would come next. But by 1936, it became clear to him that composers and other artists would need to tread carefully in order to not offend the Soviet Union's General Secretary Josef Stalin and his harshest ideological allies. For example, that year Stalin attended the opera and saw a live performance of Shostakovich's early opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Shostakovich was in attendance at the performance and shuddered every time Stalin seemed to express displeasure on his face at a brass hit he found too loud or some other apparently objectionable musical flourish. After it became known that Stalin disliked Lady Macbeth, critics who had previously praised the opera were forced to recant their reviews, writing that they "failed to detect the shortcomings of Lady Macbeth as pointed out by Pravda." (Pravda was the official newspaper of the Communist Party).

In many ways, Shostakovich was made an example of in order to dissuade other artists, like the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, from producing art that might offend Stalin's whims. The composer's income fell by 75 percent and his much-anticipated Fourth Sympathy would never even be heard for another 25 years. When it finally debuted, it sounded “as if the composer, having been brutalized, now turns and enacts this savagery upon the audience,” according to Anderson. But desperate for income, Shostakovich changed his approach when he wrote and released his Fifth Symphony, which was much more musically "conservative" than much of his previous work. The regime did not find it objectionable, and it became a major hit.



In 1941, war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union. Shostakovich was living in Leningrad at the time, which on September 8, 1941, came under siege by Nazi Germany. In an addition to near-constant artillery bombardment against the city, all supply routes of food and utilities were cut off to the city. Although the Russians eventually established a meager supply route to help keep the city from deteriorating entirely, thousands starved while numerous others resorted to shocking acts of cannibalism. The final death toll of the siege amounted to over a million Soviet citizens, at least 800,000 of whom were civilians.

It was amid this horror that Shostakovich is said to have composed numerous movements of his 7th Symphony, also known as the "Leningrad Symphony." Some historians suggest, however, that Shostakovich began composing it prior to the German invasion, which would mean that the music's evocations of terror and pain may have initially been a response to living under the Stalinist regime; that Shostakovich merely cited Hitler and European fascism as his "inspiration" after the fact. Whatever the case, the symphony was a source of catharsis and beauty for the residents of Leningrad and the Soviet Union as a whole. The symphony was even performed in Leningrad itself by starving musicians. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union worked hard to promote the symphony in the United States, in the hopes of strengthening that wartime alliance. Thus is the complicated nature of a symphony which was arguably initially written as an attack on Stalin, then later used by Stalinist Russia as a propaganda tool.

As Anderson notes, Shostakovich actually managed to relocate farther East before the very worst sufferings that took place during the siege. But the author writes at great length about the horrors experienced by those who had little choice to stay in the city. At first, he writes, only pets were eaten. It wasn't long, however, until small, sickly children were eaten. Police stations even had crates full of small items of clothing that were sorted by the district where the eaten children's remains were found.



Such is the power of Anderson's book: It captures gruesome brutality alongside the transcendent beauty of Shostakovich's music.