The Seventh on the Silver Screen

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”;[endnoteRef:1] Time Magazine called it “a sound-track for a psychological documentary film on Russia today.”[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:3] [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. ]

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 about the symphony and the structural narrative within the symphony[endnoteRef:4] – was transformed for propagandistic purposes. [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. ]

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.[endnoteRef: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,[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:7] [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. ]

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, 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.”[endnoteRef:8] [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.]

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 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.”[endnoteRef: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. [9: M. Todd Bennett, One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 208. ]

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 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.[endnoteRef: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 …”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef:12] [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. ]

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.”[endnoteRef: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 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.[endnoteRef: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;[endnoteRef: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. [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. ]

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.”[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef: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 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. [16: Letter, D. Shostakovich to L. Stokowski, undated. GARF, f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132. ] [17: ibid. ]

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.[endnoteRef:18] [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. ]

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,”[endnoteRef: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,” [endnoteRef: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. [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. ]

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.”[endnoteRef: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,[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:23] [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. ]

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.”[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:25] Presumably, VOKS had already promised the composer’s cooperation, despite his similar doubts about the 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.”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef:27]) [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.A]

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.”[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:29] [28: 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.]

And so a script was delivered two months later, and survives in the archives of the Toscanini Legacy.[endnoteRef: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 Toscanini’s first downbeat, “and with it the music of the Shostakovich Seventh, which continues throughout [the] picture as the score for the film.”[endnoteRef: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. [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. ]

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.”[endnoteRef: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, Dmitri Shostakovich.”[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:34] It seems that the participation of the shy composer had not been arranged as promised. [32: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 1.] [33: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 5.] [34: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 5.]

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.”[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:36] As I have discussed elsewhere,[endnoteRef: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. [35: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 6. ] [36: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 6.] [37: Anderson, “Flight of the Seventh,” [MQ].]

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”;[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef: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 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.”[endnoteRef: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. [38: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 10. ] [39: Anderson, “Flight of the Seventh,” [MQ].] [40: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 11. ]

The “Battle of the Conductors” and its pressing question – “Who would conduct [the Seventh]? What orchestra would play it?”[endnoteRef: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 …”[endnoteRef:42] The narrator recounts that Tchaikovsky “helped found Carnegie Hall”;[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:44] [41: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 13. ] [42: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 15. ] [43: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 16. ] [44: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 18.]

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.”[endnoteRef:45] And indeed, as the film recreates the 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.”[endnoteRef:46] We see scenes from a newsreel about a Stokowski performance of the piece at an Army base in the California desert (discussed below). [45: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 19. ] [46: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 20. ]

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.”[endnoteRef: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. [47: OWI, “Shostakovich Seventh” (Screenplay), 22. ]

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,[endnoteRef: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, around the time the Italian Fascists capitulated, proved to be extremely timely, eventually translated into twenty-three languages.[endnoteRef:49] [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. ]

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.[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef: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).) [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. ]

The movie was intended, in the words of Robinson, as “a United [i.e. Allied] Nations picture told from the American viewpoint,”[endnoteRef: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 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.[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef:57] Shostakovich himself would apparently have been played by composer and conductor Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, The Day the Earth Stood Still).[endnoteRef:58] [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. ]

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.”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef:60] [59: Faulkner, Battle Cry, xiii. ] [60: Faulkner, Battle Cry, 19. ]

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.[endnoteRef: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 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.[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef: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?”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef:65] [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. ]

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 men are left of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra!”[endnoteRef: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. [endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef: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 …”[endnoteRef:69] [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. ]

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.”[endnoteRef:70]) It is Faulkner’s later script version that assumes the integrity of the original symphonic score. [70: Faulkner, Battle Cry, 43. ]

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 …”[endnoteRef: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 …”[endnoteRef: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!” [endnoteRef:73]) [71: Faulkner, Battle Cry, 234. ] [72: Faulkner, Battle Cry, 235. ] [73: Faulkner, Battle Cry, 44.]

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;[endnoteRef: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, the other penning his music. (Fighting fires with both hands on a Leningrad roof was not, it seemed, enough.)”[endnoteRef:75] [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. ]

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 …”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef:77] The will to up the ante seems omnipresent, and it made Shostakovich uncomfortable. [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). ]

Regardless, the project as a whole collapsed in August 1943. Hawks’s “reputation as a budget-buster who seldom delivered a film on time”[endnoteRef: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.[endnoteRef: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. [78: Faulkner, Battle Cry, xxxix. ] [79: Faulkner, Battle Cry, xxxvi, 35, 260. ]

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.[endnoteRef: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. [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. ]

The gala affair was ballyhooed in advance in the L.A. Times,[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:82]) The soldiers chanted, “We want Stokowski!” – and then ragged him about his long hair.[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef: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. 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.”[endnoteRef:85] [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. ] [84: Ed Ainsworth, “Soldiers Hear Shostakovich,” L.A. Times, 12 October 1942: A1. ] [85: “Shostakovich’s Seventh,” Life Magazine, 9 November 1942: 99. ]

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?”[endnoteRef:86] The soldiers supposedly roared, “Yes!” – except one wag who said, “No!” [86: “Tank Corps,” 50-51. ]

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”;[endnoteRef: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.”[endnoteRef:88] [87: Robert Ward, “Letter from the Army,” Modern Music vol. 20 no. 3 (1943): 171.] [88: “Shostakovich’s Seventh,” Life, 9 November 1942: 99. ]

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.”[endnoteRef:89] [89: Ward, 171-172. ]

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.”[endnoteRef:90] [90: “The War, No. 2 (Army Edition), 1943.” Op cit. ]

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 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.[endnoteRef: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. [91: Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 156-157.]

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 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.”[endnoteRef: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. [92: OWI, “Seventh Symphony” (Screenplay), 10. ]

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