Memory Score
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“I want to talk about it, and talk about it for hours on end! Talk about this coming back to life now, in spring”
The memory of the siege year of 1942 is not preserved only in the documents. Personal possessions also bear witness to the events of the war time. One of such possessions goes back to the pre-war period, and it is a concert tail coat of Vassily Ivanovich Yudin, who took part in the first performance of the Seventh symphony on 9 August 1942 in the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall. This object is preserved in the collection of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, and will be on exhibit as a part of the Memory Score project.
V.I. Yudin was a trombone player, and his name is mentioned in the concert bill of that legendary concert, alongside some other names of the musicians from the Big symphony orchestra of the Leningrad Radio Committee. This document is a proof of the courage and strenuous work done by the musicians.
The tail coat of black silk was carefully preserved in the musician’s family. The coat has a special value for historians and musicologists. The concert tail coat survived, regardless of the vicissitudes of the war and post-war years, and was accepted in the museum collection as a “testimony” of the epoch-making event – the siege premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony. It was just as valuable for the musician in 1942 – as a reminder of the pre-war life, and music had the capacity to bring the musicians, as well as their audience, back into those years, if only just for some brief moment. The Museum of the History of St. Petersburg also preserves V.I. Yudin’s instrument, which will be shown in the exhibition as well.
Karl Il’ych Eliasberg remembered that “by March 1942 in the condition of the siege the Radio Committee orchestra had lost about 50% of its musicians. The revival of the orchestra was an important task. Boris Ivanovich Zagursky, Head of the Arts Committee, discussed this issue with Eliasberg in spring of 1942. Eliasberg was the only professional conductor who stayed in the besieged city. They both saw only one way to reassemble the orchestra – to ask the Political Directorate of the Leningrad Front and the City Communist Party Committee for assistance. The musicians were chosen by Eliasberg personally. He searched for them in Leningrad, as well as in the acting army.
Nikolay Mikhailovich Dulsky, one of the performers of the Seventh symphony, remembered that he was in the front-lines in anti-aircraft artillery regiment # 351: “The military commanders delayed my dispatch to Leningrad. Then Karl Il’ych comes on the bike past the ammunition depots, which are under fire some 15 kilometers away, to hurry up the officers to send me to the orchestra. There he finds out that I was re-directed to the distributing battalion situated on the other side of the city. Without giving it a second thought Karl Il’ych crosses the city under bombing again, and saying he would go and complain about the delay to A.A. Zhdanov, achieves his purpose”.
The first concert of the 1942 season took place on 5 April 1942 in the Pushkin Theatre. The orchestra played Glinka, Glazunov, Chaikovsky. Every concert was of consequence, and was craved by the audience. Music in the besieged city gave people hope. The diary records of the citizens can serve as testimony. G. Babinskaya wrote on 27 June 1942: “Those who have not spent the winter here, who have not suffered all hardships, will never understand the joy of the Leningrader watching our city to revive. I want to talk about it, and talk for hours on end! To talk about this return back to life now, in spring… There are queues to the box offices of the cinema and the Musical Comedy theatre. Before the show starts there are those unlucky ones without a ticket crowding at the entrance… The Philharmonic Hall is giving concerts … The beautiful city is majestic, austere, composed…”
The orchestra of the Leningrad Radio Committee gave concerts in the Philharmonic Hall starting from 1 May 1942. The Russian classics was played most often. In June 1942 the news spread that the Eliasberg orchestra was rehearsing the new Shostakovich symphony, started in 1941 in Leningrad. The premiere of the Seventh was eagerly awaited, it was talked about. As V. Inber put it, “maybe, it will break this silence”.
The concert on 9 August was to be filmed for the news reel. Not all musicians had concert coats to perform in. Most likely, V.I. Yudin was one of the few. Film director Efim Yulievich Uchitel remembers: “The door swung open, and the hall was flooded with front-line fighters, workmen, writers…. The lights were bright. The orchestra appeared on the stage. They did not look very presentable for filming. They were dressed in various manners: some were wearing civilian clothes, others were dressed in military shirts, yet others – in the navy uniform”. They started to play, and the silence of the besieged city was filled with music, declaring that Leningrad was alive, and fighting, and waiting for peace to come.
Irina Karpenko, Science Secretary of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, PhD in History