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By 22 June 1942, Leningrad had been under siege for nine months. The entire city – two and a half million citizens – were trapped by Nazi troops. The great Russian cultural capital was starving to death. Dmitri Shostakovich and his family were there from the beginning. The composer tried to sign up to fight, but was turned away because of his poor eyesight. Instead, he helped with the fire service and wrote an anthem of the city’s suffering.

The first three movements of his new symphony were composed in Leningrad. The pages are thick with anger and outrage, but the symphony also parodies the Nazi invasion: there’s caustic bite, brutal wit. Some of it sounds outright brainless – the idiocy and banality of war battered home with relentless rhythms. The symphony was heralded by the authorities as a hymn of anti-Nazi resistance, but it’s quite possible Shostakovich also intended it as a rage against the enemy within. As he told a friend: “National Socialism is not the only form of fascism; this music is about all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit."

Shostakovitch and his family eventually evacuated in October 1941 and took refuge in Kuibyshev, a city to the east of Moscow now known as Samara. That’s where the premiere of the Seventh Symphony took place in March 1942. But five months later, an extraordinary performance was given in Leningrad itself, by a group of musicians who were as emaciated as their audience. Huge amplifiers were positioned outside the concert hall and turned up to maximum volume so that German forces surrounding the city might hear the defiance of the music.

Those Leningrad loudspeakers weren’t technically the first broadcast of the symphony. After the premiere in Kuibyshev, the score was photographed on 900 pages of microfilm, flown in a tin to Tehran and then driven to Cairo. From there it was carried to London, where Henry Wood conducted it immediately, fully aware that this was something much, much more significant than simply the latest symphony by a major Soviet composer. The concert was broadcast live on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, and because Shostakovitch's symphony was so epic in scale, an unprecedented decision was taken to drop the chimes of Big Ben at 9pm.

A symphony so powerful it could stop time.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 3’s Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This archive recording features the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Symphony Orchestra with conductor Semyon Bychkov.

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