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1941
1942
             
The year was 1942… Hitler's plans of making easy work of Russia were hopelessly falling through as the war dragged on and on… Thrown back from Moscow, the German divisions were now thrusting towards the Volga, the Caspian and the Black Seas. In the north, Leningrad was fully encircled by the Germans. Europe's most beautiful city was dying from Nazi bombings and its people were dying in their thousands having nothing to eat and no fuel to burn… And still, the Leningraders carried on, their spirits bolstered by the powerful force of the arts…
On January 16, the Leningrad-based singer Zoya Lodiy made the following entry in her diary: "Death is everywhere. There is no water, no bread, no nothing. We spend six to eight hours each day standing in line to get 120 grams of bread. The temperature is minus 35 degrees Celsius. There is no electricity. We are freezing to death. And still, my conservatory students keep coming almost every day. Against all odds, we try to keep working which is not easy, because all the kids are thinking about is bread. Starvation starts taking its toll on the people's minds…"
Despite all that nightmare, the city's Musical Comedy Theater was still at work playing to predominantly military audiences. The people were sitting in the freezing hall without taking off their uniforms and sheepskin coats watching emaciated actors in deep-cut gowns and tuxedos singing and dancing on the stage. Each concert was a challenge flying in the face of the hated enemy!…
Singer Klavdiya Shulzhenko who gained nationwide popularity long before the war, was performing in the city hospitals, military plants and even entertaining soldiers right on the battlefront. She gave a whopping 500 concerts in a single year and was among the first performing musicians to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the medal For the Defense of Leningrad…
Composer Dmitry Shostakovich started writing a new symphony at the very beginning of the war. Because he was writing it in the besieged city, he called his new work The Leningrad Symphony. They only managed to take the composer out of the city at the very end of 1941. In January of next year, in Kuibyshev, now Samara, which then served as temporary home to members of the Bolshoi company, conductor Samuil Samosud started rehearsing the new symphony which premiered on March 5. The concert was broadcast by all Soviet radio stations as if it were a major official statement.
"This one is a landmark symphony," Shostakovich wrote. "It's about our struggle with the perfidious enemy, a poem about our upcoming victory."
The famous writer Aleksei Tolstoy wrote, after hearing the symphony, that "this music comes from the very consciousness, the very soul of the Russian people. Written in a besieged city, it attains the level of a major art form understandable to every nation. It tells the truth about a man at a time of unheard-of-before trials and tribulations…"
The Seventh Symphony was played in Moscow on March 29, and on July 9 they played it in Novosibirsk. Ten days later, Arturo Toscanini gave the American premiere over the radio conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. 20 million people listened in and The Washington Post published the following open letter to Shostakovich:
"Millions of people heard Your symphony, Your musical narrative written in blood. The Red Army is fighting against the most terrible war machine the world had ever known. People everywhere are closely following the progress of this great battle. And we are also listening how you, Dmitry Shostakovich, are telling the whole world about the great, proud and invincible people who are fighting and suffering in the name of freedom and the human spirit…"
In July the score was taken on a special flight to Leningrad, the city this larger-than-life composition was dedicated to. Karl Eliasberg conducted the city's only remaining orchestra. To beef up the orchestra, where the musicians were as emaciated as their conductor, a number of their colleagues from military bands were called in right from the battle front. On August 9 Shostakovich's amazing new work premiered in the brightly-lit white-columned hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The music was working miracles: the dystrophic musicians who could hardly move their feet, were playing finger-twisting runs telling a musical story of their native city and of themselves, unbroken and confident of an early victory.
Composer Sergei Prokofyev was in the Caucasus working hard on several new compositions, including the War and Peace opera based on Leo Tolstoy's historical epic of the same name, and the Seventh Sonata for piano. Prokofyev entrusted the first performance of his new sonata to the young and yet unknown pianist Svyatoslav Richter who learned the very difficult score in just four days and offered a brilliant performance in Moscow.
Sergei Prokofyev was then approached by the famed film director Sergei Eizenstein to write music for his new historical movie about the 16th century Russian czar Ivan the Terrible. The movie was long on patriotism and with a good reason, because its main theme of Russian unification and liberation from foreign invaders was very consonant with the ongoing war.
Years later, conductor Abram Stasevic used the soundtrack to put together an oratorio which was very successfully played all around the world.
The company of Leningrad's Opera and Ballet Theater, moved to Perm in the Ural Mountains, where they would some day organize a musical theater and a dance school, were now busy rehearsing Aram Khachaturian's new ballet, Gayane. The composer was already there putting the finishing touches to the score.
The premiere came on December 9 and was played to a predominantly uniformed audience of people preparing to leave for the battlefront. Scout Vera Stafeyeva was there and this is how she expressed her impressions of Khachaturian's new work:
"This sunny music is so invigorating… It inspires confidence that people of such creative genius can never be defeated…"
Across the Atlantic, Sergei Rakhmaninoff, who had been living in the United States since he left Russia in 1918, was extremely pained by the tragedy his country was going through. Making another generous contribution to the Red Army Assistance Fund in March 1942, he wrote:
"From a Russian, here is a meager contribution to his people's selfless struggle with the enemy. I want to believe, I do believe that victory will be ours!"
In March the Moscow Conservatory resumed its classes which were broken off in the fall of the previous year when the German armies were closing in on the city.
In autumn the Moscow Philharmonic restarted its regular concerts and many famous lead singers and instrumentalists were now getting back to the city.
Two factories outside Moscow, which had switched to the production of flame throwers, were now back to their pre-war specialization - gramophone records. The Pyatnitsky Choir recorded a new song about partisans by composer Vladimir Zakharov… On one of those records one could hear Klavdiya Shulzhenko's joyfully vibrant voice. On another one, Leonid Utyosov was singing a lyrical story of an officer who chances onto a small town dance floor. The war is still raging on somewhere far away, but here the band is playing waltz music which is so painfully reminiscent of the carefree and happy pre-war years…
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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