NEWS UCEA UNIVERSITY SYSTEM youtube/watch?v=I7ya0TF2zJg It is the greatest disaster that has ever befallen any great city, and that includes Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the contenders. You had in the winter of 1941 to 1942, when Shostakovich is writing this symphony - although hes been evacuated - something of the order of 1.2 million people died, and the vast majority of them either froze to death or starved to death. ... They very promptly ate every cat, rat [and] dog in the city. They were eating any sort of old leather there was around, old handbags were being sold. So you had, I mean, on the absolute edge, a catastrophe. On the role of music during the siege Music was extremely important. And it was soon realized that music fed the soul in a way that was extremely good for shattered morale, so a real effort was put into music in this dying city. But gradually all that winds down as fewer and fewer musicians are left alive to play - literally. And then the idea, when Shostakovich finally finishes his seventh symphony in February 1942, the idea is born that this great symphony must be played in Leningrad, because he devotes it to the people of Leningrad. The main orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, had been evacuated before the siege began as the Germans were advancing, and all that was left was the [less prestigious] Radiokom Orchestra. And to begin with, there werent nearly enough musicians left to play. They only had 20 [musicians], because theyd lost something like 70 over the winter. So in order to achieve it, they withdrew soldiers who were in military bands and so forth, from the front lines [they] were brought back in, and ... Karl Eliasberg, who is the conductor, managed to force them through rehearsals. But they were never fit enough to play it as a whole until the actual premiere. On the significance of the Leningrad premiere date, August 9, 1942 There was a significance in that Hitler had claimed that Leningrad would fall in August 1942, and indeed people were saying he was going to go for a victory dinner at the Astoria Hotel, the very same place where this conductor Eliasberg and lead members of the orchestra were barely being kept alive. So the fact that there was still this resistance, still this pride that Leningrad as a city had not been broken, at the very time that Hitler said he would finally sweep through it - its utterly moving.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 16:53:30 +0000
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