A Living Artifact: Symphony for the City of the Dead by MT Anderson
“‘Even if they cut off both my hands and I have to hold the pen in my teeth, I shall still go on writing music.’”
Delighted and Surprised
The genre has always turned me off, due to past experiences of them being too dry, dusty, and reading more like a textbook rather than a compelling account of someone’s life. I couldn’t help but glance over the 400 pages ahead of me with a mounting sense of apprehension that it would be yet another lecture I’d have to endure for hours. At best, I thought, I would learn a thing or two about classical music and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
I was delighted to find out how utterly wrong I was.
MT Anderson traces the life and career of Dmitri Shostakovich together with the era of the Soviet Union and the Second World War with astonishing and gripping detail. Though it’s a biography, Anderson paints these historical figures who once lived and walked the earth so brightly it reads like historical fiction. I often found myself deeply enthralled between the pages before being pulled back to the surface with this striking realization; that these people are not merely characters, and the “story” not a conjured plot. Everything Anderson writes, complete with quotations, maps, and photographs, is all true.
A Riveting Tale
It’s difficult to turn the biography from dry, textbook material to a riveting story, but Anderson does it with mastery. “The streets were filled with a deadening mist. It smelled of ham and butter.” He paints a picture wrought with emotion and detail, taking us past the facts and statistics and into the lives of the Russians who lived and died through Stalin’s Great Terror and Leningrad’s (St. Petersburg’s) siege. Researchable facts are interspersed with much deeper information, and even some conjectures, to bring these people off the page and into flesh and bone.
“[Gavriil Popov’s]symphony was not performed again during [his] lifetime... years later, when [he] felt it was safe to compose again, they wrote big splashy tunes and garish finales. They both drank a lot.”
Brilliant.
The Story’s Soundtrack
I was not far into the book before I realized that the only right way to experience it was to listen to Shostakovich’s symphonies as I read. Anderson gives particular emphasis to Shostakovich’s work, and the biography doubles as a guide to his symphonies, particularly of his Fifth, composed in“mute fear” during Stalin’s Great Terror, and of course, the ‘title track,’ the famous Seventh, also known as the Leningrad Symphony. I was shocked to find tears falling from my face as I listened to the Seventh, the music bearing witness to the Anderson’s text of the struggle and suffering wrought upon Shostakovich, his friends and family, Leningrad, and the Russian people. As I read to the Seventh’s swelling and ebbing music sweeping over the orchestra, I was transported to its premiere on August 9, 1942—the very date Hitler had boasted he would be celebrating his victory over a fallen Leningrad. Leningrad, and the rest of Russia, suffered through the bitter winter, starvation, and the penduluming between the two evils of Stalin and Hitler, and survived.
“‘One cannot speak of an impression made by the symphony,’ wrote a composer in the audience. ‘It was not an impression, but a staggering experience. This was felt not only by the listeners but also by the performers who read the music sheets as if they were reading a living chronicle about themselves... Years later, a German soldier told Eliasberg, ‘...We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and death—the will to stay human.’”
The Power of Art & History
Anderson constantly weaves together the relationship between art and history and how they shaped one another; he repeatedly reinforces that art is powerful and that stories are powerful. They are shaping, even dangerous. Stalin certainly recognized them as such, yet musicians like Dmitri Shostakovich, and poets like Anna Akhmatova understood this risk and continued to tell stories through their art. Russian citizens, weakened and impoverished, still put in all their strength to bury and sandbag the statues erected in their cities. These people’s defiance and courage sent these masterpieces into our hands.
“‘[T]he authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent and expiate my sin,’” Anderson quotes one of Shostakovich’s interviews. “‘But I refused. I was young then, and had my physical strength. Instead of repenting, I composed my Fourth Symphony.’”
Anderson knows this and constantly highlights the power art has and its influence on even the most formidable regimes by telling this story. He uses the living artifact of Shostakovich’s symphonies to bridge him to us readers, generations later. I realized with a sobering awe that it was these bitter battles that enabled works like Shostakovich’s Seventh, which I could so carelessly and casually search up by hitting a button on my phone, to reach my ears eighty years later. This book imbues Shostakovich’s works with awe and respect for what it took for us to enjoy them now. It pays homage to what remains as the composer’s living memory of the horrors encountered in his lifetime.
“‘Music is life, after all. What is life without music? This was the music that proved our city hadcome back to life after death.’”
Tying Up Loose Ends
Even if they played a minor role, Anderson also takes great care and respect for each character. He recognizes the personhood of each—even monsters like Stalin—and takes the time to inform the reader of their fates. He never leaves us hanging about what happened to the people surrounding Shostakovich’s life. For every thread he introduces, he ends with a knot.
Symphony for the City of the Dead mirrors the Leningrad Symphony itself: Somber, at times horrific, yet moving, and full of triumph. If it were a person, it would be someone who, despite tattered clothes and bloodied hands that scraped and clawed their way to life, would sit down defiantly at a piano, and with the gentlest of touches, begin to play.
