Leningrad: Siege and Symphony

Description

Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was first played in the city of its birth on 9 August, 1942. There has never been a first performance to match it. Pray God, there never will be again. Almost a year earlier, the Germans had begun their blockade of the city. Already many thousands had died of their wounds, the cold, and most of all, starvation. The assembled musicians - scrounged from frontline units and military bands, for only twenty of the orchestra's 100 players had survived - were so hungry, many feared they'd be too weak to play the score right through. In these, the darkest days of the Second World War, the music and the defiance it inspired provided a rare beacon of light for the watching world. Setting the composition of Shostakovich's most famous work against the tragic canvas of the siege itself and the years of repression and terror that preceded it, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is a magisterial and moving account of one of the most tragic periods in history.

Brian Moynahan's last biography was the bestselling Jungle Soldier. His other books include the award-winning Russian Century, Comrades, The British Century, Forgotten Soldiers and the much-praised William Tyndale: If God Spare My Life. As a foreign correspondent, he covered jungle fighting in the Far and Middle East and Africa, and was latterly the European Editor of the Sunday Times.

A Spectator Book of the Year * Spectator * Like a movie camera, [Moynahan] zooms in and out on the besieged civilians, the bitterly cold troops on the city's edge and the simultaneous efforts of Shostakovich to set these experiences to music from the relative safety of evacuation... This multi-perspective approach makes for a gripping story... Moynahan's Leningrad: Siege and Symphony vividly brings to life a hero city that refused to die. * The New York Times Book Review * A passionate and moving book...nothing short of masterly. * Wall Street Journal * A narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring * Minneapolis Star Tribune * Moynahan...is a vivid writer, and his account bulges with the reminiscences and contemporaneous accounts of participants; the accumulation of individual experience sears his narrative while sometimes threatening to overwhelm it. He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival...Moynahan's descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting. * Washington Post * As Moynahan reveals, the real story of the symphony's genesis and its triumph was more complex and more tragic than is generally understood...Combining a full description of the birth of the Seventh Symphony with a rich and horrifying account of the hell that was Leningrad under siege, this selection brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment * Booklist * Brian Moynahan interweaves three gripping stories in this compelling kaleidoscope of war-ravaged Leningrad: Hilter's 900-day siege, Stalin's purges that decimated the city's professional and cultural leaders and Dmitri Shostakovich's desperate struggle to write his haunting Seventh Symphony. Its performance by half-starved musicians between bouts of German shelling attests to the triumph of the human spirit amidst the greatest upheaval of the twentieth century. * Angela Stent, author of The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century and professor at Georgetown University * Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is a remarkable achievement. Brian Moynahan holds the reader in suspense while teaching an important chapter in the history of the Second World War. His magnificent tale portrays the terror within and without Leningrad during its heroic defiance of the Nazi conquerors and subtle resistance to its Stalinist masters. Like Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, this is a triumph * Charles Glass, author of Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation and The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II * A stupendous story, driven by a furious narrative yet biblical in its thematic confrontations of beauty and evil. It's vivid in three dimensions: The Red Army's battles with Hitler's war machine; the ordeals of the Russian people terrorized by the malevolent maniac in the Kremlin; and throughout the faint but swelling counterpoint of hope as the great Dmitri Shostakovich struggles to write the score of his Seventh Symphony to express the soul of his martyred city . . . This is history to cherish. * Sir Harold Evans, Editor at Large at Reuters, author of The American Century, and publisher of The Russian Century * Beautifully written and profoundly moving, Leningrad is a stunning, haunting book that has stayed with me long after I turned the last page. * James Holland, Dam Busters * 'A bold attempt to set the composition of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony within the extraordinary context of its times' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday. * Mail on Sunday * 'A really gripping read ... the narrative is fantastic, very skilfully done ... I couldn't put it down. It's like reading a novel' Professor Erik Levi, Music Matters BBC Radio 3. * BBC Radio 3 * 'The scale of Leningrad's suffering and the lasting impact of [Shostakovich's] inspirational music are brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book ... Unique, a powerful and redemptive piece of work' Curtis Hutchinson, Military History Monthly. * Military History Monthly * 'The extraordinary tale of the symphony and the city that inspired it, an engrossing, finely researched new book' Petroc Trelawny, Catholic Herald. * Catholic Herald * 'Tolstoyan ... Moynahan's account is by far the fullest and most compelling I've read ... it's certainly hard to read his gripping, skilfully woven account without emotion' Stephen Walsh, Spectator. * Spectator *