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THE SHOSTAKOVICH SEVENTH ON THE SILVER SCREEN:

American Propaganda Films and the “Leningrad” Symphony

When Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”), Op. 60 received its first

performance in the United States in the summer of 1942, critics immediately likened it to a film

score, for better or for worse. Olin Downes (in the New York Times) wrote that the sprawling

piece “would do well for a moving picture of a scene of battle and carnage”;1 Time Magazine

called it “a sound-track for a psychological documentary film on Russia today.”2 In a scathing

review, Virgil Thomson declared unenthusiastically, “The symphony seems to need film

accompaniment, something to occupy the mind … and to explain the undue stretching out of all

its sections.”3

In fact, over the next year, there were several attempts to give the Seventh cinematic form

and use the piece as a soundtrack to accompany its own extraordinary tale of wartime hardship

and heroism. Though these contemporary bids came to nothing, they’re of considerable interest,

as they involve some of the biggest names in Hollywood in the period (Howard Hawks, William

Faulkner, Lewis Milestone, and Bernard Herrmann, to name a few). In many ways, the reasons

for the failure of these projects are as interesting and revealing as their success would have been.

More generally, these forgotten projects reveal a great deal about how Shostakovich’s music was

viewed in the United States and how what Christopher Gibbs calls its “double story” – the story

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THE SEVENTH ON THE SILVER SCREEN

about the symphony and the structural narrative within the symphony4 – was transformed for

propagandistic purposes.

Readers of DSCH will need no recap of the oft-sensationalized elements in the piece’s

dramatic history: the composer’s stint as a fireman on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory in

the fall of 1941; the writing of the symphony as the German noose closed in around the city;

Shostakovich’s dramatic escape to Kuibyshev, where the piece was finished in late 1941 and

premiered on 5 March 1942; the historic August 1942 performance of the piece in besieged

Leningrad itself, played by an emaciated and starving orchestra; the reduction of the score onto

microfilm in late spring 1942; the transportation of that microfilm through the Middle East and

across North Africa so that it could be performed in the United States; and, finally, the “Battle of

the Conductors,” which pitted several of the period’s most prominent musical celebrities against

each other in a struggle for the rights to the North American premiere.5 These events have,

through repetition and occasional amplification, become standard adjuncts to the performance of

the piece – and were intimately connected with the hermeneutics of criticism right from the

beginning. The growth of legend around the Seventh was not merely happenstance. As I have

discussed extensively elsewhere,6 the Seventh became an important chit in Soviet-American

relations: Shostakovich’s semi-programmatic symphony was employed to convince a reluctant

American electorate to support the Soviet war effort. As conductor Artur Rodzinsky wrote to

Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov, “A successful performance of the Seventh Symphony

could become the equivalent of at least several transport batches of weapons,” a key element in

“the exchange of spiritual values.”7

The furor around the symphony’s microfilm flight, its arrival in the U.S., and the “Battle

of Conductors” that followed, was not merely loud and empty ballyhoo; it was, in fact,

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instrumental in making the piece materially effective as a propaganda tool. The more extravagant

the legends of the piece’s genesis and the travail involved in its creation and transportation, the

more the piece caught the American public’s imagination, and the weightier would be the

cultural impact of the piece, designated as a worthy marker of friendship and common struggle.

As Soviet musicologist Sofia Khentova pointed out sharply, the British premiere, which occurred

almost a full month before Arturo Toscanini’s North American premiere, took place almost

entirely without the “the element of sensationalism characteristic of American culture.”8

The microfilm transfer and the two American premieres, radio and concert, were

principally arranged by two organizations: On the Soviet side, the piece’s international

performance was encouraged by the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign

Countries (VOKS), tasked with the international dissemination of “soft” propaganda. On the

American side, the arrangements were handled by the Am-Rus Music Corporation, an

independent agency located on West 57th Street in New York City, right above the Russian Tea

Room. Am-Rus handled North American rentals, sales, and publicity for Soviet composers. In

the complicated course of negotiations for the first performance rights of the Seventh, two more

organizations became involved: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and a philanthropic

entity called Russian War Relief, Inc., which, with the blessing of the Soviet embassy, used

Shostakovich’s music to attract sizeable donations for the Russian cause.

While each of these entities had their own motivations for promoting the Seventh

Symphony, they shared the conviction that Shostakovich’s showpiece was the occasion both

directly and indirectly to sway a reluctant American electorate to support their Russian allies. It

is therefore not at all surprising that in 1942, the thoughts of many of those involved turned to

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how the piece might be publicized and mythologized through the most powerful apotheosis

American consumerist narrative could offer: conversion into a film.

In the fall of 1942, while the symphony was being played in cities around North America,

Vladimir Bazykin, the VOKS representative in the Soviet embassy, was urging the Central

Committee’s propaganda arm to involve themselves more deeply in Hollywood. “If a film

appears on the big screen, [tens of millions of] viewers see it.”9 He wrote that Hollywood’s

movies were “one of the most powerful means of our propaganda in the USA.” By then, VOKS

had already become involved in bids to use the “Leningrad” Symphony in a film, both as score

and as subject matter.

Our knowledge about three major credible attempts to turn the Seventh into a cinematic

event comes from three related sources: (1) The papers of agent Eugene Weintraub of the Am-

Rus Music Corporation, kindly donated by his son to the New York Library for the Performing

Arts, contain not only telegrams and letters from the period, but Weintraub’s own report to

VOKS on the journey the Seventh to the United States (“Shostakovich: Seventh Symphony:

Some Facts Relating to the NBC Broadcast July 19, 1942,” undated, but written before October

1942), and useful memoir pieces, written some decades later, in which Weintraub drolly recounts

the hassle and excitement caused by the Seventh in the New World. (2) The VOKS archives,

though notoriously incomplete, still preserve movie-related correspondence between Leopold

Stokowski and Shostakovich. (3) The Toscanini Legacy, also preserved in the New York Library

for the Performing Arts, contains not only correspondence but also a full script for a Seventh

Symphony propaganda film, intended to showcase Toscanini, but eventually scrapped. These

archival sources preserve many of the logistical details relating to attempts to broadcast the story

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of the “Leningrad” Symphony onscreen. These scrapped projects etch a sharp portrait of myth-

making during the Second World War.

The bids to use the Seventh as the basis for a movie began in the summer of 1942, as

preparations were made for the North American premiere. The piece’s dramatic microfilm

journey concluded on June 2, 1942, when it was delivered finally to Am-Rus’s offices in New

York.10 For the next month, the increasingly visible “Battle of Conductors” pitted some of the

country’s most renowned cultural figures – Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, most

prominently – against each other. Both Toscanini and Stokowski were under contract with NBC,

and were therefore engaged in a larger turf dispute over repertoire and resources. The

opportunity to conduct the Shostakovich premiere set them directly at odds, as an infamous

series of passive-aggressive letters fired back and forth between them in late June reveals.

(“Don’t you think, my dear Stokowski,” Toscanini writes, “it would be very interesting for

everybody, and yourself, too, to hear the old Italian conductor (one of the first artists who

strenuously fought against Fascism) to play this work of a young Russian anti-Nazi composer

…”11) Despite Stokowski’s excellent track record with Shostakovich’s music – he had conducted

the American premieres of the First, Third, and Sixth Symphonies, as well as recording the First,

Fifth, and Sixth – Eugene Weintraub at Am-Rus seems to have had a somewhat ill-defined

grudge against him and, moreover, a deep interest in attaching Toscanini to the project.12

Nonetheless, Stokowski and Dmitri Tiomkin, grumbled Weintraub, succeeded in

inveigling an oral commitment from the Embassy for the exclusive rights to use the score for a

proposed film. (“… Am-Rus was presented with an accomplished fact.”13) It seems that,

encouraged by the success of his role in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which paired classical scores

with imagined narratives, Stokowski had conceived of subjecting the “Leningrad” Symphony to

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the same treatment: On June 16th, in the midst of the “Battle of the Conductors,” Stokowski

wrote to Shostakovich, proposing a movie that would be “a visual counterpart” of the symphony,

with biographical elements like “a scene at the beginning showing yourself composing this

symphony under the difficult and disturbing conditions of your life in Leningrad,” as well as

scenes of the Soviet people, who had heroically overcome class-based exploitation.14 He

suggested that Dmitri Tiomkin would produce and Lewis Milestone would direct. It seems likely

that Stokowski, in making these particular suggestions, was attempting to soothe the fears of the

ministerial middle-men at VOKS who’d be reading and assessing the correspondence. He is

careful, for example, to point out that Tiomkin was born in Leningrad and that Milestone came

from Odessa – stressing their Russian origins and the pro-Communist messaging opportunities a

film would provide. In the fall of 1941, Milestone and Tiomkin had collaborated on Our Russian

Front, a documentary cobbled together out of newsreel footage at the behest of Russian War

Relief, Inc., the organization that sponsored and introduced the Seventh Symphony in its North

American premieres;15 Milestone would go on to direct The North Star, a feature about partisans

on the Eastern Front (music by Aaron Copland). His pro-Slavic sympathies were clear.

Shostakovich was uninterested in the project. In an undated response preserved in the

Russian State Archives, he wrote, “this idea is doomed, to an extent, to be a failure. Visual

associations, from my point of view, will not be convincing.”16 It is clear that he specifically was

nervous about the mythologization of his life the film would entail. He mentioned that “writer A.

Kapler is working on a script about the life of a Soviet musician. If this script turns out well, I

would be happy to write music for it, of course, as long as this film does not draw in any way on

my own biography.”17 It seems clear that Shostakovich did not want his circumstances

transformed into legend, both, we might assume, due to his perpetual diffidence and also to an

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acute awareness of the danger that, under Stalin, fame could redound disastrously on him,

especially given an international context. As a result, the project came to nothing. The

correspondence stops there.

It is perhaps not surprising, given that Stokowski took a shot at a “Leningrad” Symphony

movie, that his rival Arturo Toscanini eventually became involved in a similar attempt – though

it was not Toscanini himself who initiated the effort, but the U.S. Office of War Information. At

the beginning of February 1943, they approached both Walter Toscanini (the conductor’s son)

and Samuel Chotzinoff of NBC with a proposal for a twenty-minute newsreel which would

recreate the July 19, 1942 radio premiere of the Seventh, intersplicing scenes of Toscanini

conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra with B-roll showing the struggle for Leningrad, the

route the microfilm took, and its reception in concert halls, homes, offices, and factories all

across America.18

The purpose was twofold: on the one hand, the short film was designed to familiarize the

American public with the struggles of their Soviet allies, to “stress the fact that the United States

and Russia are united by cultural as well as diplomatic ties,”19 as an OWI official explained to

Toscanini’s NBC handler. The script side-stepped the question of Soviet alterity and stressed

Allied unity, using Shostakovich’s symphony as a medium to obliterate political difference and

geographical distance; the narrator, displaying what the script stipulates as “a recognizable mid-

Western accent,” 20 speaks over scenes which, through various visual and rhetorical devices,

equate the Russian front with the American home front. For the domestic audience, the movie

was clearly calculated to dissolve the Soviet “Other” into the imagined American self.

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But secondly, the movie was also designed to be translated and exported from the United

States to the Allied nations to counter Nazi propaganda about American cultural barbarism and

sloth, “to point out to our Russian audiences that America, in addition to everything they’ve

heard and contrary to some statements that are current, is indeed a country that has a day-to-day

interest in serious music.”21 Just as Time Magazine’s celebrated 1942 cover article about

Shostakovich reassured American audiences that the composer was a red-blooded sports fan who

preferred soccer to concert premieres,22 this script emphasized for the foreign viewer that despite

the American fixation on sports, “the performance of fine music … has become a custom that is

typically American.”23

From the beginning, Walter Toscanini was skeptical about the project. In his first letter

after the initial meeting about the project, he suggested instead that Verdi’s “Hymn of the

Nations” might make a better propaganda vehicle for his father, given the composer’s

associations with Italian independence and unification. (“… After all to write ‘Viva Verdi’ on

the walls of houses or to shout ‘Viva Verdi’ at the time that the Austrians were masters of Italy

was enough to spend some years in prison or to be shot.”24) As they mulled over the proposal for

a Shostakovich Seventh newsreel, Toscanini père and fils were primarily concerned that the

shooting of the movie shouldn’t take up too much time in an already exhausting conducting

schedule, and that the Old Man appear only as a conductor, and in no way re-enact scenes. The

scenario editor assigned to the project wrote to reassure the conductor’s son that the filming

would only involve about three hours of Toscanini’s time in the familiar Studio 8-H at NBC –

and furthermore, that “we already have been assured the cooperation of Mr. Shostakovich

himself who will be photographed for this film at his home in Leningrad.”25 Presumably, VOKS

had already promised the composer’s cooperation, despite his similar doubts about the

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fictionalizing of his life the summer before. This reassurance, however, did not quiet the

Maestro’s doubts about the project. On 22 February 1943, Walter Toscanini was still writing

uneasily to the staff at the Office of War Information, “I should like to know that my father will

be photographed not as an actor but only as a conductor. I hope it is understood that my father

will not be required to put any make-up on his face, and that the equipment for lighting will be of

a modern type with cold light because I know from past experience how fatiguing and enervating

it is to work under the old type reflectors.”26 By this stage of his career, Toscanini controlled his

image (and his considerable public mystique) quite fastidiously, and it could be that he felt

mimesis was beneath him – though clearly, the main concern was simply about physical

discomfort. (For one thing, Toscanini had been sick for much of the month of February as these

discussions were going on, and it seems this colored his reaction to the idea of further

exertions.27)

The staff at the Office of War Information rushed to reassure the Toscaninis: “Relative to

the actual participation of Maestro Toscanini,” wrote Irving Kolodin, “we cannot place too much

emphasis on the fact that he would be seen only as a musician, in a musicianly way, and that no

acting burden would be imposed on him.”28 The scenario editor chimed in the next day: “In line

with the documentary nature of the work, no make-up will, or could, be used. In addition, the

latest type of studio lighting will be utilized for the photography.”29

And so a script was delivered two months later, and survives in the archives of the

Toscanini Legacy.30 It is primarily of interest for understanding the formal techniques by which

the OWI screenwriters conveyed the idea that the Russian struggle was also the American

struggle. It appears that a synaesthetic binding of musical form and visual sequencing was

envisioned, though unfortunately, the script is vague on this point. The film was to open with

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Toscanini’s first downbeat, “and with it the music of the Shostakovich Seventh, which continues

throughout [the] picture as the score for the film.”31 Several of the visual sequences take, in

essence, a theme-and-variations form that would presumably work well with the so-called

“invasion theme” of the first movement, though there is no further indication of which sections

of the symphony would have been heard in the course of the film.

A rolling title at the outset declares, “This is the story of a piece of music. How it was

born out of the courage of men – fighting in the streets of one city. How it grew into an

inspiration for the man in the street – the world over.”32 Two related concepts are therefore laid

out immediately: first, the story of the music’s production as itself being a form of heroism,

displaying the toughness and bravery of America’s allies, and second, the erasure of cultural

difference in the face of a common enemy. An initial sequence intersplices footage from the

Soviet newsreel “The Siege of Leningrad” showing the German advance across the Russian

countryside with related newspaper headlines, each prominently displaying the masthead of a

paper from a different American city: The New York Times, The Kansas City Sun, The Baltimore

Sun, The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, The Chicago Tribune. American and Soviet

geographies are intermixed. Another linked linear sequence follows: Now images of radio towers

all over the U.S. alternate with scenes of an American father gesturing to a map, moving pins to

show his son the increasing encirclement of Leningrad – alternating with war footage of the city

itself under assault. (It appears that they planned on mining the documentary One Day at War for

applicable generic shots of detonations and chaos, when The Siege of Leningrad didn’t suffice.)

Of course, the culmination of this sequence showing the spread of intelligence of the attack is the

announcement by the Mid-Western narrator that “as it turns out now – the greatest communique

to come from Leningrad proved to be written on a piano. By one of the fire fighters of the city,

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Dmitri Shostakovich.”33 Despite the assurance to Walter Toscanini that the film-makers had

secured the cooperation of Shostakovich for the movie, the only times the composer appears, the

screenwriters write, vaguely and somewhat plaintively: “STOCK SHOTS: (1) Shostakovich as

fire fighter and air raid warden. … (4) Whatever available material on Shostakovich in defense

work.”34 It seems that the participation of the shy composer had not been arranged as promised.

The connection between communique and music is underscored with a shot of someone

typing a headline fading directly to “hammers of a grand piano striking strings in rapid

movement.”35 Different phases of composition (picking out tunes on the keys, working on a

manuscript, and so on) are then mixed “in mounting tempo of movement and intensity” with

other kinds of war work, other hands “working with stones, shovels, rifles.”36 As I have

discussed elsewhere,37 the conceptual equivalency of this symphony and grittier war work was

central to the propaganda surrounding the piece in its American incarnation. Here, that

equivalence is insisted upon through these juxtapositions.

The narrator now explains how the symphony was reduced to microfilm and sent to the

U.S. This account is revealing as a narrative, not least when its inaccuracies are considered. The

details which are fudged or changed entirely clearly serve two rhetorical purposes: (1) to

simplify that narrative (for example, the microfilm was not simply stuck in a canister addressed

“AMRUS CORPORATION, New York City”;38 it was concealed in a diplomatic pouch and, in

fact, considered lost for the space of a week or so); (2) to dramatize a transportation route that

was, in its own way, logistically routine. (The Shostakovich microfilm simply followed a typical

Lend-Lease supply route backwards, in retrograde.39) In the film’s retelling, an extra step is

added to the itinerary: The microfilm is produced (fictitiously) in Leningrad itself. To escape the

ring of German entrenchment, the microfilm package is thrown into the back of a truck trundling

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out across Lake Ladoga on the so-called “Road of Life,” splashing through water as the ice

dissolves – “one of the last trucks to travel across the melting Spring ice.”40 While the microfilm

route – followed dramatically in this film on both a map marked with a “pencil of light” and

representative scenes of desert transfer – did indeed lead by plane to Tehran, by car to Cairo, by

plane across North Africa, across the Atlantic to Brazil, it did not pass through Leningrad at all.

The microfilm was probably generated in either Moscow or in the seat of the government-in-

exile in Kuibyshev, a detail which obviously dilutes connection of the piece with the beleaguered

city. It also would have underlined the inconvenient fact that Shostakovich himself was no

longer acting as a fire marshal in Leningrad when he finished writing the piece in late December

1942, having escaped with his family to Kuibyshev more than a month earlier.

The “Battle of the Conductors” and its pressing question – “Who would conduct [the

Seventh]? What orchestra would play it?”41 – provides the OWI with an excuse to display the

healthy musical life of the United States to the movie’s foreign audiences. The great concert halls

are rattled off: “In almost every one of our larger cities, there is an orchestra of distinction – each

the favorite of tens of thousands …”42 The narrator recounts that Tchaikovsky “helped found

Carnegie Hall”;43 that as the prairie was being settled, each town would first build its own opera

house; and that those opera houses still constitute “the center of civic life – in the thousands of

small towns where most of us live.”44

The question of who will conduct the American premiere is answered (without reference

to the bitterness of the struggle) in a paean to Toscanini and a deft rhetorical move transcending

all of the local concert halls and opera houses just catalogued: “His orchestra belonged to no one

city alone. Its audience was nation-wide. Every week, ten million Americans listen to Toscanini

and his orchestra of the National Broadcasting Company.”45 And indeed, as the film recreates the

12


circumstances of the first radio performance of the piece in the United States – filmed in the

same studio where that performance took place – the images flick between iconic families

gathered around their radios: “(1) Exterior and Interior of New England farmhouse, with typical

farming family grouped around radio. (2) Street crowd outside loudspeaker of music store in

New York. (3) Driver listening to radio of car going through typical country. (4) Exterior

Chicago tenement and Interior of home, family listening.”46 We see scenes from a newsreel

about a Stokowski performance of the piece at an Army base in the California desert (discussed

below).

With this montage of American scenes, the film’s Mid-Western narrator reaches his

peroration and enounces: “We’d heard about Leningrad. Now, listening to this music, we became

part of it. … Leningrad was no longer a place, far away, on the shores of the Baltic. It was as

close to us as our own home, our own job, our own freedom. This music spoke to us about

ourselves.”47 Geography is erased; cultural difference evaporates; and the piece plays on in

triumph, until after its final notes, the “Entire audience rises to its feet” – the audience in Studio

8-H, that is, and, the writers apparently hoped, the sympathetic audiences in theaters all over the

country.

Convincing as that climax might have been, the newsreel project stalled in the spring of

1943. No further correspondence survives about it. The next fall, the same team at OWI and

NBC arranged to produce a competing script, penned by poet and novelist May Sarton,48

focusing on Toscanini’s Italian ties and structured around Verdi’s repurposed pot-boiler, “The

Hymn of Nations.” This was the subject Walter Toscanini had first suggested back at the

beginning of the whole process, almost a year before. This propaganda project, released in 1944,

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around the time the Italian Fascists capitulated, proved to be extremely timely, eventually

translated into twenty-three languages.49

The apex of Tinseltown myth-making about the Seventh was concocted by director

Howard Hawks, who proposed to include a segment fictionalizing the Soviet premiere of the

“Leningrad” Symphony in a rambling epic about the united efforts of the Allies around the

world, a film to be called Battle Cry. The project was a bizarre concatenation of heterogeneous

properties owned by Hawks’s agent, Charles Feldman, all of which were to be spliced together

into a single, three-hour blockbuster by the enthusiastic hand of William Faulkner.

Both the original treatment and a 1943 revision of Faulkner’s complete script survive.50

The framing story of Battle Cry is a tense tale of American soldiers trapped in the North African

desert, struggling to prepare for the inevitable, relentless onslaught of both Axis infantry and

Faulknerian symbolism. Interspersed with this narration are individual, fictionalized stories about

the British, French, Russian, Greek, and Chinese war efforts, all of which are bound together

musically by the use of an Abraham Lincoln cantata by Earl Robinson, “The Lonely Train.”51

(The use of Lincoln as a unifying concept for a movie about the Second World War did not seem

as odd in 1943 as it doubtless does now. His status as a symbol of the American fight for

freedom would, for example, spawn a whole set of Lincoln-themed pieces right around that time:

Morton Gould’s Lincoln Legend (1942), Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait (1942), and Roy

Harris’s “Gettysburg” Symphony (1944).)

The movie was intended, in the words of Robinson, as “a United [i.e. Allied] Nations

picture told from the American viewpoint,”52 and its thematic emphasis on alliance permeates

every level of the production. In most segments, there is some imagistic reference to the idea of

14


individual citizens making up a greater, unified body: In an almost Christological turn, for

example, Lincoln’s body is symbolically absent from his funeral train because his body is really

Freedom, and Freedom is composed of all Americans who fight for Freedom.53 A refrain

throughout the screenplay (drawn from the cantata) runs, “They were his people, he was their

man; / You couldn’t quite tell where the people left off / And Abraham Lincoln began.”54 When

two or three are gathered together, Abraham Lincoln is there. This image of the unity of many in

one body extends to the individual national episodes: Mother Russia, similarly, is made up of

villages, which are made up of individuals, and so the whole resides in the parts.55 In the English

segment of the movie, we are told, “The Englishman who fights alone … is England, as much as

the Crown and Sceptre.”56 The film’s construction is much the same: Each national segment

would have involved a different cast, contributing to a larger variegated whole. Among the actors

being considered for the piece were Henry Fonda and, perhaps, a young Ronald Reagan.57

Shostakovich himself would apparently have been played by composer and conductor Bernard

Herrmann (Psycho, The Day the Earth Stood Still).58

The story of Shostakovich’s Seventh would have been tucked into the Russian segment,

“Diary of a Red Army Woman.” Faulkner’s lover at the time, Meta Wilde, claimed the writer

had heard about the Seventh from a mutual friend, John Crown, “a brilliant pianist.”59 In fact,

Faulkner seems merely to have inherited the inclusion of the Seventh from an original radio play

property by Violet Atkins and William Bacher.60

The segment is a Soviet love story: Over the strains of the “pastoral theme” from the

Seventh (presumably the second theme of the first movement exposition), peasant women are

working in the fields.61 Semyon, a daredevil pilot, parachutes into the midst of them and seizes

upon one of them, Tania, as his beloved. Tania, too, becomes a fighter pilot, and various stirring

15


episodes of family life follow, in which, for example, she gives birth to their child while at the

joystick, evading German ack-ack fire in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad. In the original

treatment, Tania and Semyon fly off in different directions to death and their destinies, but not

before wobbling their wings in farewell at each other and forming a “V” for victory.62 In

Faulkner’s rewrite, the two pilots part with a final conversation about diversity-in-unity: “We are

Russia, Tania. Not you and I, the individuals, but because in our son we will have become a part

of the long cavalcade of man’s immortality … So we are more than Russia. We are Man.”63

Tania takes these words about their transcendence of national identity to heart. After she hears

that Semyon, her husband, has been killed, she points out that her infant Semyon still lives.

“Semyon. Semyon dead? Here’s Semyon. We are both Semyon, as all three of us are Russia,

mankind. So how can Semyon be dead?”64 She flies off into what proves to be a fatal battle; as

the tracer-fire illuminates her plane, she declares, “We are Man,” and the recurring sound of the

Freedom Train from the cantata rises to end the segment and elide her death.65

The two pilots also witness the world premiere of the Seventh, which, in the movie, takes

place in Leningrad itself in August of 1941, conducted by the composer, not Karl Eliasberg. Of

course, in reality, the Germans had scarcely arrived at the gates of Leningrad by the end of

August 1941, and the Seventh itself was not completed until late December of that year. The

screenplay collapses several events into one: the piece’s world premiere (actually 5 March 1942

in Kuibyshev) and the Leningrad premiere (19 August 1942, a full year later than it is claimed in

the script). In this retelling, the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra (not the Leningrad Radio

Orchestra) delivers the city’s premiere, despite the fact that it has been reduced by war and

starvation. In this version of events, loudspeakers all over the U.S.S.R. announce, “One hundred

musicians are needed … to play the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich! Only fifteen

16


men are left of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra!”66 While the original treatment

acknowledged that all of the musicians playing the piece came from within besieged Leningrad,

Faulkner’s rewrite has the call going out to all Russia. 67 In an interesting integration of musical

form and filmic design, a montage follows in which various citizen defenders leave their posts to

answer the call (a sailor abandons his ship; a doctor finishes bandaging a little girl’s hand,

reaches into his cabinet, and pulls out a trumpet, etc.) – all to the accompaniment, apparently, of

the “invasion” variations.68 The aeronaut couple flies all of these recruits into the city (curiously

invalidating the sense of Leningrad as under blockade): “… seamen from Murmansk and

Sevastopol, soldiers from the front lines, doctors and wounded from the hospitals who could play

instruments, workers in the factories, from Moscow and Stalingrad, Siberia and the Caucasus and

the Crimea …”69

The form of Shostakovich’s so-called “invasion” variations is the perfect vehicle for the

movie’s thematic aims: In a sense, this is a movie about theme and variations, about unity in

variety. Formally, the sequential montage is this movie’s defining structural element, whether

depicting Soviet citizen-musicians or the mourners beside Lincoln’s funeral train; and in fact, the

overall episodic structure of the movie – with episodes touching on each of the Allied forces – is

the same sort of chaconne-like architecture writ large. This makes it more surprising that in the

original treatment, it appears that Shostakovich’s Seventh would have been mined for melodic

material but not generally used in its original form. (For example: “Mingled with [the pounding

of guns] is a kind of formless music, indeterminate yet surging and powerful, with the hint of the

as-yet-unformed beat of the ‘Iron Rats’ movement of the Shostakovich.”70) It is Faulkner’s later

script version that assumes the integrity of the original symphonic score.

17


Tania, the female pilot, stands at the back of the auditorium and watches Shostakovich

conduct the assembled orchestra. “This is a day all Russia will remember,” she says, “a day

when a single piece of Russian music drowned all Hitler’s guns …”71 She muses on the

conditions under which Shostakovich wrote the piece. She says he “wrote it with his hands

singed and blistered by the fires he helped to fight, sleepless as all in that beleaguered city were

sleepless, hungry as all were hungry, yet with one blistered hand still on the pulse of that city

which endured …”72 Both the treatment and the full script imply that Shostakovich stayed in

Leningrad throughout the composition of the piece. (A particularly Faulknerian turn of phrase

from the treatment: “… In this inferno of sound and fury, Dmitri Shostakovich finished his

greatest symphony – music born of suffering, written in fire!” 73)

The factual distortions of the script thus take a predictable form: compression of the

invasion and composition timetable; the collapsing of various premieres into the most dramatic

iteration; pinning the whole composition of the piece within the confines of Leningrad itself, thus

claiming a greater authenticity for the symphony’s expression of directly lived experience; and,

finally, enlarging Shostakovich’s role in Leningrad’s civilian defense. All of these revisions to

the factual record serve to heighten a sense of the symphony’s extrinsic worth and its intrinsic

potential to speak to and about those suffering in war.

Am-Rus agent Eugene Weintraub was in California negotiating the rights for the use of

the symphony in Battle Cry in the summer of 1943, as Faulkner worked on the script;74 he claims

that the script’s expansion of Shostakovich’s life into legend was what scuttled the project. “ …

Though we were avid to get our hands on this Hollywood pot of gold, from Moscow came the

cable that Shostakovich was turning down the project. We were inclined to respect his wisdom

when the film people suggested gilding the lily by filming the composer with one arm in a sling,

18


the other penning his music. (Fighting fires with both hands on a Leningrad roof was not, it

seemed, enough.)”75

The scene Weintraub refers to comes from the treatment, not the later script: As Tania

scribbles in her diary, her writing fades into a “Double exposure of Shostakovich at a piano, the

palm of his left hand bandaged, writing on sheets of music.” Tania proclaims, “It was our music

– and he wrote it for us! He wrote it with hands singed from the fires of Nazi bombs …”76

Though this scene was missing from the revised script, the notion was still underscored by

Tania’s peroration (“… with one blistered hand on the pulse of that city which endured …”).

Regardless, it is clear that the Hollywood dream-machine proposed to nudge the story of the

Seventh another few inches toward fabricated legend. Even Weintraub’s crack disparaging these

Tinseltown fibs bends the truth: As it happened, Shostakovich never had to put out an incendiary

bomb on a Leningrad roof, one-handed or two.77 The will to up the ante seems omnipresent, and

it made Shostakovich uncomfortable.

Regardless, the project as a whole collapsed in August 1943. Hawks’s “reputation as a

budget-buster who seldom delivered a film on time”78 spooked Jack Warner of Warner Brothers,

who foresaw the expense of producing a three-hour epic set in nations across the globe, each

with its own separate cast. The only footage ever shot was a few test-scenes of partisans – either

Chinese or Russian – burning fields in the San Fernando Valley.79 The film was abruptly

dropped, and this strange cocktail of Shostakovich and Faulkner was never served up to the

public. The script, which reads like it could have been written as a United Nations Information

Organization dream project, serves as a reminder that propaganda in the Soviet realist mold was

more ubiquitous than the West wishes to remember.

19


A final anecdote about a filmed performance of the piece completes our round-up of

American attempts to bring the Seventh to the silver screen. In a surviving 1943 newsreel

segment for the armed forces, “Symphony on the Sands,” Stokowski finally got a taste, however

brief, of his dream of splicing the “Leningrad” Symphony with scenes from wartime Leningrad.80

On October 10, 1942, Stokowski performed a truncated version of the Seventh out in the

Californian desert for an audience of 20,000 tank soldiers about to ship out to North Africa. The

concert quickly became fodder for newsreels and arts articles. As we have several different

accounts of the event, it provides an excellent final glimpse of the way propagandistic myth-

making operated in wartime.

The gala affair was ballyhooed in advance in the L.A. Times,81 covered by photo essays in

Life and Time, as well as being featured in the armed forces’ newsreels. Celebrities were on

hand: Madame Ivy Litvanov – the Soviet Ambassador’s wife – told the soldiers about her son,

Misha, who was in the Russian Aviation Corps; Edward G. Robinson came out and did some

gangster shtick (“Here I am, muscling in on this concert racket. How bout it? Highbrow music. I

wanna tell youse mugs, from now on you’re gonna buy your symphonies from me, or I’m going

to sicc my mob on ya.”82) The soldiers chanted, “We want Stokowski!” – and then ragged him

about his long hair.83 The newsreel shows a desert-full of soldiers applauding the whole

enterprise ecstatically. The L.A. Times, which ran a rapturous front-page story about the concert,

gushed that in Los Angeles, the symphony “was a success. Here it was an epic. … It was

universal war music, the language of a warrior over-leaping race and language and boundaries.”84

Life Magazine observed: “By now it is almost unpatriotic not to like Dmitri Shostakovich’s

Seventh Symphony. … This work has become a symbol of the Russians’ heroic resistance.

20


People who temper their praise of the Seventh or express dislike of it are looked on as musical

fifth columnists who are running down our brave Russian allies.”85

And yet, in both the Life and Time articles, there are fissures in the propagandistic

embrace that are completely concealed in the newsreel coverage. The writer for Time narrates

these particularly sharply: Toward the end of the symphonic excerpts, the audience got restive

and “shuffled and groaned impatiently.” Stokowski stopped playing, turned to the vast audience,

and scolded them. “Men, there is a little more of this symphony to play. I do not know whether

you want to hear it and it does not matter to us, but I notice that there is some talking over there

… Do you want us to play the rest of it or not?”86 The soldiers supposedly roared, “Yes!” –

except one wag who said, “No!”

We can’t know exactly what caused this distraction – the discursive length of the piece,

even in a curtailed version; the noise of cameramen and electrical technicians; the considerable

length of the concert, which also included jazz, torch songs, Sousa, cameos by actresses, and

Hoagy Carmichael looking forward to the day when there’d be “Khaki in Nagasaki”; the

anticipation for “Fifi D’Orsay, scheduled as the sex attraction later on the same program”;87 or

simply the discomfort of 20,000 young men forced to remain standing while attempting to

appreciate symphonic subtlety. It is clear, however, that the event did not go as smoothly as

would have been seemly for propagandistic purposes. The L.A. Times carefully omitted all

mention of the interruption in their lengthy write-up. Life, in its coverage, attempted to sideline

the episode by restricting it to a photo caption, almost affirming in its tone: “Halfway through,

[Stokowski] turned, said he heard too much noise (nobody else did). Did the soldiers want more?

‘Yes!’ they roared. Music went on.”88

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When the event was reproduced for newsreels, the interruption was elided entirely and B-

roll of thunderous applause was spliced in at key moments. “Symphony on the Sands,” the

surviving army newsreel, replicates the final, thunderous moments of the performance – the

triumphant return of the piece’s first theme – accompanied by a montage of stirring images taken

from the Soviet documentary The Siege of Leningrad, ending powerfully on a shot of a German

bomber in flames, the swastika devoured in the conflagration. It’s a stirring and convincing

remix of the moment, somewhat at odds with, for example, composer Robert Ward’s assessment

that “the men became restless and talked, the conductor grew indignant, but perfunctorily

finished his part of the program and a bad time was had by all.”89

The myth-making ran deeper than the omission of a restive disturbance during the

performance, however. Edward G. Robinson introduced the Seventh this way: “Now, this music

was written by a soldier – a Russian soldier – one who fought in one of the greatest battles of this

war, the Siege of Leningrad. That battle is still going on – and Dmitri Shostakovich is still in

it.”90

There is almost nothing accurate in his description. Previously, Shostakovich’s role as a

fireman had been artificially enlarged; his escape from Leningrad had been muted or concealed.

Now, pressed by the need to engender a sense of commonalty and international camaraderie,

Robinson and his script-writers made Shostakovich a soldier and placed him on duty in a theater

of war he hadn’t visited for a year.

The organizers of the concert knew exactly what they were doing. Ivy Litvinov, present

at that podium, knew perfectly well that Shostakovich had been evacuated to Kuibyshev long

before: he lived in the apartment directly beneath her daughter and daughter-in-law (the wife of

22


her son in the Soviet Air Force). The latter, Flora Litvinova, is in fact our main source of

information about Shostakovich during this period. She had even attended the party the

composer and his wife threw in Kuibyshev the night the score was finished.91 There could be no

question that Robinson’s introduction was deliberately a fabric of propagandistic fibs. No one

intervened to rein in the script, however.

The myth devoured the man entirely.

There are several recurring themes in these attempts to capture the Seventh on film in the

year after its premiere. First, it’s clear that the myth-making made Shostakovich uncomfortable,

and that his disinclination to be forced into the spotlight played some role in halting two large-

scale projects involving the piece – though Hawks’ and Faulkner’s Battle Cry was perhaps

already doomed by its sheer scope and complexity. Second, screenwriters struggled to make use

of the piece’s own internal narrative architecture in their scripts. They found the “invasion”

episode particularly fertile, not simply because of its inherent drama, but because it formally

evinced the themes of variation-in-unity so important in Allied propaganda.

Third and finally, we see that distortions of fact about the symphony’s genesis followed

several well-traveled routes: Shostakovich’s own efforts in the war and his peril during the

composition of the piece were enlarged upon. His posting as a roof-top fire-fighter became

heroic. His flight from the besieged city was erased. The time-line of the piece’s composition

and first performance was altered to dramatize the circumstances, allowing it to be first

performed amidst the bomb-blasts of Leningrad itself, or driven out of the city over Lake Ladoga

via the perilously melting Road of Life. Lastly, the screenplays trumpeted the universality of the

piece, downplaying a specificity of context and circumstance that had actually been important for

23


those listeners in besieged Leningrad. It was now equally important that an international

audience could see their own image in the “Leningrad” Symphony.

Speaking of the Seventh Symphony’s microfilm cannister, the OWI screenplay declared,

“Here was history, neatly packaged for shipment.”92 These films attempted to package that

history and to sell it to an American public desperate to understand the struggle they were

engaged in – and perhaps even more, desperate to understand their own allies.

24

1 Olin Downes, “Shostakovich 7th Has U.S. Premiere,” New York Times, 20 July 1942: 16. 2 Briton Hadden and Henry Robinson Luce, “Shostakovich & the Guns,” Time 40, n. 3 (20 July 1942): 54. 3 “Imperfect Workmanship,” New York Herald-Tribune, 15 October 1942: 8. He doubled down on this accusation a few days later, writing that much of the piece’s two-part counterpoint “just sort of runs on as if some cinematic narrative were in progress that needed neutral accompaniment,” and that the symphony as a whole is “as limited in spiritual scope as a film like The Great Ziegfeld or Gone with the Wind.” See “Shostakovich’s Seventh,” reprinted in Virgil Thomson, Music Chronicles: 1940-1954, ed. Tim Page. New York: Library of America, 2014), 109-100. 4 Christopher Gibbs, “‘The Phenomenon of the Seventh’: A Documentary Essay on Shostakovich’s ‘War Symphony,” in Shostakovich and His World, ed. Laurel Fay. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 60-61. 5 See M. T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad (Candlewick Press, 2015). 6 M. T. Anderson, “The Flight of the Seventh,” Musical Quarterly [pg. to come]. 7 Grigori Shneerson, “Obrashchennaya k Chelovechestvo,” [“Addressing Mankind”], Sovetskaya Muzika 5 (1975): 113. 8 Sofia Khentova, D. D. Shostakovich v godï Velikoy otechestvennoy voynï [“Shostakovich in the Years of the Great Patriotic War”] (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1979), 126; 130-131.9 M. Todd Bennett, One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 208. 10 Anderson, “Flight of the Seventh,” [MQ]. 11 Letter, Arturo Toscanini to Leopold Stokowski, 23 June 1942. Toscanini Legacy, New York Library for the Performing Arts, Archival Collection JPB 90-1, fol. L97.L.12 Eugene Weintraub, “Shostakovich: Seventh Symphony: Some Facts Relating to the NBC Broadcast July 19, 1942,” 11. Eugene Weintraub Papers, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division, JPB 12-02, folder 2.9. 13 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 11. 14 Letter, L. Stokowski to D. Shostakovich, 16 June 1942. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132. 15 Movie review: “Our Russian Front,” New York Times, 12 February 1942. 16 Letter, D. Shostakovich to L. Stokowski, undated. GARF, f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132. 17 ibid. 18 The letters which chart the discussions of this project are all part of the Toscanini Legacy collection, fol. L102.A. They include, most prominently: Walter Toscanini to Samuel Chotzinoff (NBC), 2 February 1943; Joseph Krumgold (OWI, Bureau of Motion Pictures) to Walter Toscanini, 5 February 1943; Joseph Krumgold to Samuel Chotzinoff, 12 February 1943; Walter Toscanini to Irving Kolodin (OWI), 22 February 1943; Irving Kolodin to Walter Toscanini, 25 February 1943; Joseph Krumgold to Walter Toscanini, 26 February 1943. 19 Letter, Joseph Krumgold to Samuel Chotzinoff, 12 February 1943. Toscanini Legacy, fol. L102.A: 1. 20 U.S. Office of War Information screenplay, “The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” April 16th, 1943, Toscanini Legacy, fol. L105.D: 1. 21 Letter, Joseph Krumgold to Samuel Chotzinoff, 12 February 1943, 2. Toscanini Legacy, fol. L102.A.22 Briton Hadden and Henry Robinson Luce, “Shostakovich and the Guns,” Time 40, n. 3 (20 July 1942): 55. 23 “The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony” (screenplay), 17. 24 Letter, W. Toscanini to Samuel Chotzinoff (NBC), 2 February 1943. Toscanini Legacy, folder L.102.A. 25 Letter, Irving Kolodin (OWI) to Walter Toscanini, 5 February 1943. Toscanini Legacy, folder L.102.A.26 Letter, W. Toscanini to Irving Kolodin (OWI), 22 February 1943. Toscanini Legacy, folder L.102.A. 27 Letter, W. Toscanini to Irving Kolodin (OWI), 22 February 1943. Toscanini Legacy, folder L.102.A28 Letter, I. Kolodin to W. Toscanini, 25 February 1943. Toscanini Legacy, folder L.102.A. 29 Letter, Joseph Krumgold (OWI) to W. Toscanini, 26 February 1943. Toscanini Legacy, folder L.102.A.30 U.S. Office of War Information, “The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony” (Screenplay), 16 April 1943, 10. Toscanini Legacy, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, JPB 90-1, folder L105.D.31 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 1. 32 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 1.33 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 5.34 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 5.35 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 6. 36 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 6.37 Anderson, “Flight of the Seventh,” [MQ].38 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 10. 39 Anderson, “Flight of the Seventh,” [MQ].40 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 11. 41 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 13. 42 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 15.

43 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 16. 44 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 18.45 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 19. 46 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 20. 47 OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 22. 48 The scripts for this Verdi project (“Hymn of the Nations”) are preserved in the Toscanini Legacy collection, folders L105.A and B. 49 Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 88-89; cf. Harvey Sachs, Toscanini (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1978), 283. 50 William Faulkner, Battle Cry: A Screenplay, ed. Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamlin, Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, vol. 4 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1985). This edition includes both the expanded story treatment (3-184) and the second temporary screenplay (185-408). 51 The score of this cantata, which goes by various monikers throughout the Hollywood treatments, was eventually published as A Cantata: The Lonesome Train (New York: Sun Music Company, 1945); an LP performance by Burl Ives was released by Decca in 1944. 52 Faulkner, Battle Cry, xix. 53 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 309.54 e.g. Faulkner, Battle Cry, 306. 55 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 227. 56 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 320.57 Faulkner, Battle Cry, xx. Though the treatment and the script tag Fonda, he wouldn’t have been available, having enlisted in 1942 (3 n). The similar use of young Reagan’s name is more likely a coincidence – in the cast list for the “Desert Episode” (187), his character’s age is listed as 50.58 Eugene Weintraub, “Battle of the Conductors,” Music Journal 34, no. 3 (March 1976): 16. 59 Faulkner, Battle Cry, xiii. 60 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 19. 61 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 217, 219. 62 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 54. 63 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 243. 64 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 247. 65 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 247. 66 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 235-236. 67 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 45; cf. 235. 68 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 235. The script refers to Shostakovich’s variations as the “Iron Rats” theme, a phrase culled from some recension of Alexei Tolstoy’s original preview of the piece, which had first been disseminated in English by the VOKS Bulletin. A likely source would be Nicolas Slonimsky, “Dmitri Dmitrievitch Shostakovich,” Musical Quarterly 28, no. 4 (October 1942), pg. 435. 69 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 239. 70 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 43. 71 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 234. 72 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 235. 73 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 44.74 “United Nations Music for U.S.: … Click of Soviet Songs Points Way,” Billboard Magazine, 28 August 1943, 15.75 Weintraub, “Battle of the Conductors,” 16. 76 Faulkner, Battle Cry, 44. 77 Elsewhere, Weintraub refers to the famous rooftop photo-shoot as taking place “on top of a burning building in Leningrad” (“Some Additional Notes About the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” Weintraub Collection, fol. 2.9: 3). This enhancement of the photo set’s drama may have informed Weintraub’s belief that the composer had participated not simply in watching for incendiaries, but in extinguishing them. Even the most expansive account of Shostakovich’s rooftop service denies that he ever had to extinguish any bombs (E. A. Lind, Sed’maya [“Seventh”] (St. Petersburg: Gumanistika, 2005), 15). 78 Faulkner, Battle Cry, xxxix. 79 Faulkner, Battle Cry, xxxvi, 35, 260. 80 “Symphony on the Sands,” from “The War, No. 2 (Army Edition), 1943.” ARC Identifier 36166 / Local Identifier 111-SM-2A. Online at: http://research.archives.gov/description/36166 . Retrieved 2/19/13. 81 “Famed War Symphony to Be Given,” Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1942, C4; and, on the same day, “A Musical Event of Prime Importance,” A4. 82 “Symphony on the Sands” (newsreel), op cit. 83 “Tank Corps,” Time, 26 October, 1942: 50.

http://research.archives.gov/description/36166%20.%20Retrieved%202/19/13

84 Ed Ainsworth, “Soldiers Hear Shostakovich,” L.A. Times, 12 October 1942: A1. 85 “Shostakovich’s Seventh,” Life Magazine, 9 November 1942: 99. 86 “Tank Corps,” 50-51. 87 Robert Ward, “Letter from the Army,” Modern Music vol. 20 no. 3 (1943): 171.88 “Shostakovich’s Seventh,” Life, 9 November 1942: 99. 89 Ward, 171-172. 90 “The War, No. 2 (Army Edition), 1943.” Op cit. 91 Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 156-157.92 OWI, “Seventh Symphony” (Screenplay), 10.

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