The American broadcast premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini on July 19, 1942. This was followed by the American concert premiere played at Tanglewood by the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra, a student ensemble, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky on August 16.
Shostakovich's music had been well known in the United States since the local premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in 1928. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was celebrated and criticized upon its American premiere in 1935; the fallout from its censure by Soviet authorities in 1936 was reported on across the country. The fortunes of his Symphony No. 5 and resulting political rehabilitation were also extensively covered in the press.
The Symphony No. 7 was completed on December 27, 1941, followed by the first American news reports about it in January 1942. Its origins in the siege of Leningrad, during which Shostakovich briefly worked in a local firefighting brigade, generated levels of public interest and press coverage considered unusually high for a modern musical composition. Leopold Stokowski and Toscanini, co-music directors of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, competed for the first broadcast rights to the symphony, which were ultimately won by the latter. Koussevitzky was granted the right to conduct the first performance in concert.
Prolonged standing ovations met the premieres of the symphony, which went on to become exceptionally popular with American audiences during World War II, and was briefly considered as the basis for a Hollywood film. Critics, including Olin Downes and Nicholas Nabokov, were divided. Béla Bartók, who had listened to its premiere, disliked it to the point that he satirized it in his Concerto for Orchestra. The symphony also had its defenders, including Koussevitzky and Carl Sandburg, who celebrated the symphony in a nationally syndicated open letter.
Background
Shostakovich's reception in the United States, 1928–1941 The music of Dmitri Shostakovich was familiar to audiences in the United States by 1942. In 1928, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski played the American premiere of his Symphony No. 1 to great success. Over the next decade, Shostakovich's music was widely performed and discussed in the United States.
Artur Rodziński conducted the American premiere of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1935. He called it "one of the most important contributions to music brought out in the past 25 years." The Associated Press reported that after the same forces performed it at the Metropolitan Opera later that year, the audience "cheered and shouted and applauded beyond anything seen lately". An article published in Musical America and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said that not since Alban Berg's Wozzeck had a "modern opera been so much talked about."
The composer's 1936 censure by Soviet authorities was reported on across the country; including by the Associated Press, Time, The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, Deseret News, Oregon Statesman, and in nationally syndicated columns by Bruce Catton and Chester Harvey Rowell. The world and American premieres of his Symphony No. 5, as well as his subsequent political rehabilitation, also received national media attention.
On December 7, 1941, a performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1 played by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rodziński for a live CBS national radio broadcast was interrupted by a breaking news announcement of the Empire of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
Origins of the Symphony No. 7
On the evening of June 22, 1941, Shostakovich and his friend Isaak Glikman had intended to see a double-header soccer match in Leningrad, then have dinner. As they commuted to the stadium, they heard Vyacheslav Molotov's radio announcement that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Shostakovich immediately went to volunteer with the Red Army and the recently formed People's Militia, but was rejected by both. In July, he was accepted into a regiment of volunteers from the Leningrad Conservatory that erected defenses along the perimeter of the city. That same month, he was requisitioned into a brigade of local firefighters tasked with protecting the Conservatory's roof against incendiary bombs. Although he was photographed on July 29 in a firefighting uniform, he never did any work in the brigade. Near the war's end, he learned that Conservatory officials had surreptitiously prevented him from doing work that could cause him physical harm. On October 1, Shostakovich and his family were evacuated first to Moscow, then on October 15 to Kuybyshev.
On July 19, Shostakovich started composing his Symphony No. 7. He completed the symphony on December 27 and spent the following hours making corrections, amending the orchestration, as well as adding dynamics, phrasing, and expressive markings. At a party later that day, he announced to his guests that the symphony was finished and played a piano reduction of the symphony. At a subsequent performance at his home, he played the symphony again, this time in a piano four-hands arrangement with Lev Oborin. Among his guests were harpist Vera Dulova and conductor Alexander Melik-Pashayev, the latter of whom hoped to premiere the symphony. In the middle of the performance, the conductor Samuil Samosud, who lived one floor down, called Shostakovich's apartment to say he had been hearing the music through his ceiling and asked if he could come upstairs. Upon doing so, he was immediately captivated by the music, and said he would begin rehearsals as soon as possible with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, which had also been evacuated to Kuybyshev.
Shostakovich did not object to the interpretation by his friends and colleagues that his newest symphony was about the war. Film director Alexei Kapler, who was among the first people to hear Shostakovich play the symphony, recalled:
There was a piano, a few chairs, a bed. Bare walls. He played sitting on the edge of his chair; thin, his shoulders sticking out, in suspenders, with a tuft of hair popping out of his head. He looked remarkably like a teacher's pet, a high school student sitting in the front row of his class. Outside the snow was falling... the war was rumbling on—terrible and great... the thunder of catastrophe was heard here, the wind of victory flew here...
On March 5, 1942, the Symphony No. 7 was premiered in Kuybyshev by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra conducted by Samosud; an occasion of unrivaled political and professional importance for Shostakovich. The performance was broadcast across the Soviet Union. According to Laurel Fay, the symphony became a potent national symbol of "just cause and steely resolve in the war against fascism" and an "instantaneous cultural icon unprecedented for a serious symphonic work" virtually overnight. Victor Seroff, whose biography of Shostakovich was published in 1943, said that Russians considered him a national hero equivalent to Charles Lindbergh in the United States.
The Seventh in America Press coverage The first American press report of the Symphony No. 7 emerged from the Romanul American on January 3, 1942, a Romanian-language newspaper, which stated that Shostakovich had recently composed a symphony "dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad"; on January 24, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mentioned it in an article about the siege. On February 6, the Embassy of the Soviet Union in the United States issued a press release confirming that the symphony was completed and was being premiered imminently. This was followed by more extensive reports on February 7, which included Shostakovich's remarks that the symphony was "devoted to the events of 1941—war." On March 2, the Associated Press reported on one of the three dress rehearsals for the symphony's premiere that had occurred at noon the day before.
The New York Times published an extensive article on Shostakovich and his Symphony No. 7 on April 5. Ralph Parker, the newspaper's Moscow correspondent, had interviewed the composer shortly after the symphony's completion, and attended the rehearsals for the premiere:
[Shostakovich's] Seventh Symphony opens a new phase in the young Soviet composer's development ... It was the heroic stature that the ordinary man gained in Leningrad, where between August 18 and September 13 last year, the first three parts of the symphony were written that the composer glorifies. There is no doubt that the suffering and heroism of the Soviet people as well as their indomitable spirit and unbounding confidence in ultimate victory has evoked a response in the composer's heart. It is a work conceived, as the composer tells, under the influence of events when Leningrad's workers manned barricades ... and soldiers fought ... and it is completely free of resignation and immensely compelling ... Like all who have seen Leningrad under siege, he has unlimited admiration for the common man's steadfastness and heroic potentialities.
The Seventh Symphony was variously nicknamed by the American press as the "War", "Blitz", "Stalingrad", and "The Symphony of Our Times". Most of the reporting explored the programmatic aspects of the music, as well as the background of its creation. A story disseminated by the Wide World News Service referred to the work as "Shostakovich's Seventh and most important symphony—ninety minutes of music composed literally under the fire of German guns." A column in the Paterson Morning Call ended with an invocation pleading for Shostakovich's continued safety, "so that he may have an opportunity to complete his message to the musical world."
Shostakovich was also frequently compared to Ludwig van Beethoven, including by the Miami Herald, which added that his music was "well loved in America" and that his music would "live through the ages".
The event that catapulted Shostakovich to a level of international fame unmatched by any other 20th-century composer occurred the week before the American premiere when he was the cover story of the July 20 issue of Time. His likeness appeared on it in a firefighter's uniform against a background of a city on fire painted by Boris Artzybasheff. The image was captioned: "Fireman Shostakovich—Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad he heard the chords of victory." Artzybasheff's illustration was based on a photo of Shostakovich in a firefighter's uniform that had previously been published in Time on February 16; it also later appeared in the August 3 issue of Life. The story, as with others in Time during that period, did not have a byline; the chief music writer for the magazine at the time of publication was Winthrop Sargeant. It related the biography of Shostakovich, the creation of his Symphony No. 7 amidst the ongoing war, the score's shipment to the United States, and the resulting "battle royale" between the country's most prominent conductors for the rights to the "glory of conducting the [American] premiere". The article also noted that "not since the first Manhattan performance of Parsifal [in 1903] had there been such a buzz of American anticipation over a piece of music."
Olin Downes, music critic of The New York Times, was among the few who offered a more measured assessment of Shostakovich and the forthcoming American premiere of his new symphony. He called the comparisons to Beethoven "premature" and "disproportionate", criticized what he considered was the tendency to bombast and derivativeness in Shostakovich, and attributed his contemporary fame to "confused and desperate" wartime priorities. Nevertheless, Downes ranked him along with Jean Sibelius as a composer capable of composing a "sustained, serene, grandly proportioned slow movement", and called him a "young man, of striking achievements" who was "already a leading figure in modern music."