TY - JOUR
AU - Anderson, M, T
AB - “Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony is a prisoner of its own history and the resultant clichés,” said a recent recording review, citing the “triumph of propaganda, competition, intrigue, and daredevil plots. Laden with extramusical meaning, this enjoyably crude humdinger of a symphony made Shostakovich an instant international cultural icon all over the world.”1 At this point, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Op. 60, is indeed heavily freighted with extrinsic meaning and myth. There is no stage of its composition or initial diffusion that lacks a dramatic storyline: the writing of the first three movements in besieged Leningrad in the lulls between air raids; the composer’s stints watching for incendiary bombs on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory; his chaotic refugee journey first to Moscow, then, as that city seemed threatened by German encroachment, farther east to Kuibyshev; the dicey questions of ideological intentionality, the possibility that the symphony encoded fury at Stalin as well as Hitler; and, of course, the powerful performance of the piece back in besieged Leningrad, where an orchestra of soot-blackened emaciates stirred the hearts of all who heard.2 A story that has particularly appealed to audiences in the United States since the first American performances of the piece in the summer of 1942 was that of the microfilm miniaturization of the score and its transportation through the Middle East and Africa to the United States. The microfilm reel was supposedly “spirited out, Mata Hari style, via Tehran,”3 then, variously, according to the source, taken by naval ship or by plane to New York City. Once it was delivered, conductors clamored to be the first to perform it, engaged in a “Battle Royal”4 for the “jus primae noctis.”5 This, certainly, is the story of “competition, intrigue, and daredevil plots” that the reviewer alludes to above. The mystique of this route, combining scenes of Leningrad’s sunless midwinter suffering with a fragrant whiff of fetishized Orientalist hot spots, has transformed the itinerary itself into heroic myth. A not atypical liner note about the piece enthuses: “The race for the Western world’s first performance of this heroic work was made the more urgent and exotic … by the microfilm copies of the work taking a circuitously exciting, James Bond route out of Russia to the West, via locations such as Tehran, Cairo, Casablanca and (oddly) Brazil.”6 Despite the saleable fervor of such descriptions, the logistical specifics of this route have never previously been investigated. Christopher H. Gibbs’s narrative of the American premieres, for example, focuses on the newspaper reportage and public reception.7 Though circuitous, the itinerary was not as odd or eccentric as it might seem—and was grounded not so much in international intrigue as in diplomatic logistics and institutional incompetence. By laying bare the formation of this particular legend about the piece, we come to see that the flight of the Seventh to the West is perhaps exciting less because of the Tintin-esque jaunt through the Middle East, and more because the route itself suggests the imbrication of this music from the very beginning in a complicated economy of diplomatic gestures, ideology, and (in fact) solid military matèriel. Using several archival sources that have not previously been mined by Shostakovich scholarship—including the papers of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) and the correspondence of Eugene Weintraub, agent for the Am-Rus Music Corporation—this essay will clarify the narrative of the delivery and premiere performances of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the United States. In particular, it will touch upon (1) the administrative and bureaucratic source of the so-called Battle of the Conductors over who would receive the rights to the Western premiere; (2) the attendant arrangements for the transportation and reproduction of the score; and (3) the effect of the symphony on American attitudes toward Russia—particularly in light of the fact that members of Stalin’s propaganda team clearly intended to use the piece to raise American awareness of the efforts of the Soviet peoples in the fight against the common enemy. In each case, I hope to trace not only the logistical realities but also observe how those details circulated until the story was transformed into the stuff of heroic legend. Ultimately, this will lead us to ask how Shostakovich’s symphony might be understood without these narrative accretions—and whether it should be at all. Early Negotiations for the Symphony The so-called Battle Royal for the American premiere of the “Leningrad” Symphony pitted a collection of the period’s most high-profile conductors against one another: Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky, Artur Rodzinski, and Arturo Toscanini. Oddly, this bitter contest was entirely inadvertent, though it did serve to further publicize the symphony in the United States by offering media outlets an engaging narrative of contention. Accounts of the symphony’s reception have occasionally garbled the facts of this “battle,” attributing to the victor, Toscanini, a much more active role than he actually played. For example, from Terry Klefstad’s excellent paper on the reception of the piece: “Toscanini had the power of NBC behind him, and had secured the performance rights before the symphony was even completed.”8 Toscanini was actually the last contestant to throw his hat into the ring. Clarifying what lay behind these negotiations will not only correct these few minor errors but, more important, shed a great deal of light on the mechanisms of Soviet-American rapprochement and cultural exchange in the war years. It is true that negotiations for the American premiere of the Seventh Symphony preceded the existence of the piece itself. In January 1941, half a year before Shostakovich began writing the piece, Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, approached the Am-Rus Music Corporation in New York with a request to secure first performance rights.9 The Am-Rus Music Corporation was a privately owned music sales and rental agency that worked specifically with Soviet institutions to introduce new Russian scores to American musicians. Eugene Weintraub, director of Am-Rus’s rental library, who undertook the bulk of the negotiations for Shostakovich’s Seventh, remembered the firm warmly in a reminiscence from 1976: “Am-Rus opened shop in May 1940 as Soviet music representatives here in one room above the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street—almost next door to Carnegie Hall. Before and since Am-Rus there has never been so popular, so warmly inviting a music store. One came in for conversations on matters musical, to meet friends, or to while away the time waiting for the next rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. Sometimes we even sold a piece of music.”10 Am-Rus, which employed only three people at the time,11 operated by taking a percentage of rental royalties and sending the rest to the Soviet international publishing arm, Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga, which disbursed the money (or didn't) via Muzfond to the composer in question. Martha Pearse of Am-Rus explained in 1943 to the readers of Life, “Such rentals are handled through Am-Rus here by virtue of our contract with Shostakovich’s publishers in the USSR, and while Shostakovich of course shares in the proceeds of all such transactions through whatever arrangements he has with his publishers, he has no direct knowledge of or participation in them.”12 In the case of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, for example, Weintraub recalled that the American agency got half of the $10,000 take from CBS for first performance rights.13 Am-Rus employee Eugene Weintraub (1904–92)14 was born just outside of Kiev.15 His family emigrated to the United States in 1906, when he was two, and he was naturalized as a US citizen shortly thereafter.16 A Juilliard graduate, in the 1930s, he made two lengthy visits to the Soviet Union, during which he met various musical figures—including Grigori Shneerson, a useful future contact,17 and a young Tikhon Khrennikov, future General Secretary of the Soviet Composer’s Union, at that point “in love with song and with life.”18 He did not, however, meet Shostakovich himself. Weintraub’s papers, now in the archives of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, preserve the key documents in the negotiations for the Shostakovich Seventh, as well as correspondence with Weintraub’s composer clients in the 1950s and 1960s, once he had left Am-Rus (which by then had been absorbed into Leeds Music Publishing)19 and set himself up as an independent musical agent.20 Perhaps most usefully, the cache also contains several of his own narrative descriptions of the furor surrounding the Seventh Symphony. The lengthiest of these, “Shostakovich: Seventh Symphony: Some Facts Relating to the NBC Broadcast July 19, 1942,” was written sometime before October 1942, and so includes Weintraub’s immediate impressions of the episode. Though the addressees’ names have been torn off, it was clearly written for the benefit of Weintraub’s Soviet contacts at VOKS; another, briefer narrative account, preserved both by Weintraub and in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, seems to date from the beginning of 1943: “Some Notes on the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony.” In addition, Weintraub published a short anecdotal account much later in the Music Journal in 1976; his papers also include several unpublished, more nostalgic accounts of the events, also written decades later, and several fragmentary sets of tart responses to Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (1979), of which Weintraub was sent a prepublication copy, prompting him to correct inaccuracies regarding the transfer. Except in a very few instances, Weintraub’s accounts of these events remained consistent throughout his life, varying only in tone as irritation with logistics gave way to a retrospective glow; his narratives mesh neatly with other surviving correspondence (fig. 1). Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Eugene Weintraub of Am-Rus Music Corporation inspects the microfilm of the “Leningrad” Symphony. Photo by Eric Schaal. Getty Images. Used with permission. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Eugene Weintraub of Am-Rus Music Corporation inspects the microfilm of the “Leningrad” Symphony. Photo by Eric Schaal. Getty Images. Used with permission. In his earliest narrative memo, Weintraub recorded that, at Koussevitzky’s request, on January 15, 1941, “Am-Rus Music Corporation cabled Mezhdunarodnaja Kniga to reserve the premiere of the Seventh Symphony in America for him. The information received was that the Symphony was incomplete. Upon the insistence of Dr. Koussevitzky, Am-Rus gave him an oral commitment for the premiere of the work.”21 This made sense: Koussevitzky had been a passionate advocate of Shostakovich’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Despite rumors that Shostakovich wrote portions of the symphony before the German invasion,22 we do not need to read too much into the fact that Koussevitzky was interested in the piece before the symphony we know as the “Leningrad” was (putatively) even conceived. For one thing, Shostakovich himself had been seeding rumors for years, apparently misleading, that he was working on a “Lenin” symphony, which would have been his seventh.23 The Leningrad Philharmonic had also scheduled a Seventh Symphony (untitled) in the announcement of their 1941–42 season, presumably in expectation of an unwritten work.24 Koussevitzky, in his telegram, referred to it as the “future” symphony of Shostakovich.25 Yet before the symphony was completed, there was already another bidder. At some point, Artur Rodzinski, the then conductor of the Cleveland Symphony, secured a verbal assurance from the Soviet ambassador Konstantin Oumansky that Rodzinski would land the premiere of the Seventh when it was ready “because of his former services in behalf of Shostakovich’s music.”26 If Rodzinski made his request late in Oumansky’s ambassadorship (which ended on November 5, 1941), he may have been the first American conductor to vie for the piece with some knowledge of the work’s specific wartime links, which Shostakovich had announced to the world in late September. (A similar request by Eugene Ormandy to Oumansky on September 16, 1941, appears not to have gone anywhere.)27 There were, therefore, two claimants for the right of first American performance by the time the score was completed in December 1941: Rodzinski (via the Soviet Embassy) and Koussevitzky (via Am-Rus and the publisher, Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga). The symphony received its Russian premiere on March 5, 1942, in Kuibyshev, with a follow-up performance in Moscow on March 29. Reports of the first Russian performances of the piece began to appear in American papers, most of them wildly laudatory.28 In fact, a third conductor had thrown his hat into the ring at around the time Shostakovich finished the score—though it appears that his request was not taken up by official channels until a few months later. In December 1941, Leopold Stokowski, who had recently signed on as a conductor of the NBC Radio Orchestra, heard about the symphony and requested that the National Broadcasting Corporation secure the rights for its first American performance.29 He later wrote in a letter to Toscanini, “Last December I requested NBC to obtain broadcasting rights for Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. When I was in Russia, I had friendly relations with the department of the Government which is concerned with music, and culture generally. It was my suggestion that NBC make an agreement directly with this department, which they finally succeeded in doing.”30 In March 1942, NBC asked their Moscow agent, Robert Magidoff, to make the arrangements. This clearly seemed like an excellent idea to VOKS, which immediately assented without, apparently, checking to make sure that the rights were clear. As a result, by the end of winter 1942, three separate bodies—embassy, publisher, and VOKS—had promised the right of first performance in the Western Hemisphere to three separate conductors. This interorganizational snafu was the genesis of the Battle Royal between the conductors months later—which, ironically, none of the three original contenders won. VOKS was a governmental organization designed to promote Soviet values through cultural exchange, but without visible connection to more politically aggressive bodies such as the Comintern. It was supposed to work more subtly, “capable of influencing circles otherwise inaccessible for indoctrination,” as its London representative explained.31 VOKS staff acted as hosts and guides to foreign artists and intellectuals visiting Russia. They recorded impressions of their guests for the benefit of the secret police. Outside the borders of the USSR, VOKS was represented by part-time plenipotentiaries connected to the Soviet embassies, where they worked to facilitate Russian cultural visibility, as well as keeping track of Russian cultural figures abroad. It was operatives from VOKS, for example, who both watched and wooed Prokofiev during his years of exile—and who later provided him with speech scripts for foreign appearances.32 On March 25, 1942, Robert Magidoff of NBC sent a telegram to NBC’s New York offices celebrating the securing of the Seventh Symphony rights: “permission first performance shostakovich seventh granted through courtesy society for cultural relations with foreign countries.”33 According to this telegram, VOKS was apprising its American representative at the Soviet Embassy, Vladimir Bazykin, of the arrangement. NBC had “no financial obligations” for the rights. Finally, “voks requested mention that first performance [was made] through [voks's] courtesy furthering cultural ties ussr usa.” This final sentence can be read in two ways, and probably should be. Most obviously, the rights were being granted to NBC so that it might use the symphony to strengthen an American awareness of the two nations’ fledgling alliance. This was not unreasonable. American opinion about aid to the Soviet Union was still deeply divided in the wake of both the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact and Russian territorial incursions in the period of the Winter War. (We might remember, for example, that Toscanini, a couple of seasons before his celebrated pro-Soviet Shostakovich premiere, had conducted a pro-Finnish, anti-Soviet Sibelius concert.)34 A few days after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, an American Gallup poll asked the public whether they were in favor of extending Lend-Lease, the US program of material support to the anti-Axis powers, to Russia. The answer was clear: the poll revealed that “only 35 percent of those questioned endorsed aid to the Soviet Union on the same basis as aid to Britain, while 54 percent opposed it and 11 percent expressed no opinion.”35 Even a year later, as Russia demanded assistance against the German juggernaut, an Office of War Information poll in the United States revealed that roughly a third of the public were willing to make a separate peace with Hitler, condemning the Soviets to fight on alone.36 In “furthering cultural ties ussr usa,” the Russians hoped to secure two very material requests: the increase of Lend-Lease aid—or at least the complete fulfillment of the aid schedule that had been promised by Roosevelt in the fall of 1941—and the opening of a “Second Front” in Europe to take pressure off the Soviet Union to the east. As the Americans considered the latter strategically (in the form of Operation Sledgehammer, which was still being discussed when the symphony was dispatched to the United States), both the public and many government actors continued to waver in their support of Lend-Lease aid.37 Though Roosevelt was unambiguous in wanting Russian aid to be a first priority “regardless of the effect of these shipments on any part of our war program,”38 various intragovernmental frictions complicated that aid. Military specialists resented civilian mandating of the allocation of equipment and matériel. The sudden American entry into the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor had strained production and shipping capacity in a way that Roosevelt had not envisioned in the fall of 1941, when the First Lend-Lease Protocol for the Soviet Union had been drawn up. Furthermore, some American military strategists still questioned whether the Russians could in fact hold out against the Germans; they were concerned that equipment shipped to Russia would be turned over to the Nazis in the event of Stalin’s collapse and a “weak peace.” The resistance was not merely from the military. Heading into the Lend-Lease collaboration, Roosevelt explained to Ambassador Oumansky that all of these efforts confronted “prejudice or hostility to Russia and the unpopularity of Russia among large groups in this country who exercise great political power in Congress.”39 Furthermore, as Roosevelt told Vyacheslav Molotov the day the Shostakovich microfilm arrived at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Russia’s twin diplomatic aims were at odds: American exertion in the requested European Second Front would diminish US capacity for Lend-Lease aid.40 Finally, and most important for understanding the diplomatic role of the Seventh, there were various questions about reciprocity of exchange. While Roosevelt and many of his advisers felt unreservedly the strategic need to contribute to Russian resistance, they found it difficult to justify to a capitalist electorate the asymmetry of the arrangement: the delivery of physical goods to Russia without overt repayment. Though the Lend-Lease program had been launched as an arrangement in which the Russian beneficiaries would pay the United States back, interest-free, after the cessation of hostilities (as the term “Lend-Lease” suggests), in early 1942 Roosevelt had quietly removed this stipulation.41 Russia was under no requirement to repay aid. Even more controversial within the administration, Roosevelt had waived the demand, observed universally among the other Lend-Lease recipients, that the receiving country should supply a thorough, transparent accounting of military need and the application of Lend-Lease goods. The Russians were obstinately opaque, which infuriated American officials—including William H. Standley, US ambassador to the Soviet Union—who felt that there was too little reciprocity in the relationship. He bellowed at Roosevelt, “Stop acting like a Santa Claus, Chief! And let’s get something from Stalin in return.”42 The cultural question of reciprocity strained American-Soviet Lend-Lease relations at every level. Americans who dealt routinely with the Russians complained that there was absolutely no show of gratitude either publicly (in Soviet newsreels) or privately.43 Ambassador Steinhardt warned the State Department that the Russians “do not and cannot be induced to respond to customary amenities, that it is not possible to create ‘international good will’ with them.”44 As US presidential hopeful Wendell Willkie reported to the American public, discussions with the Russians were characterized by “a quality of intransigence. Those fellows were uncompromising.”45 The friction arising from cultural differences in the display of gratitude extended down from the top of the administrative ladder, where an American official observed sourly, “[The Soviets] simply walked in, all of them sober-faced, never cracked a smile, smart as they could be. They said, ‘Here is what we want.’ And they’d just sit there. There wasn’t much negotiation to it.”46 Meanwhile, in the lower ranks, American pilots and engineers complained that they flew half-way round the globe and delivered planes at desert contact points only to have the Russians refuse to receive them until the hulls had been scrubbed free of sand and shined again.47 It did not help that the NKVD eventually made it a criminal offense to praise American technology (voskhvalenie amerikanskoi tekhniki), even further discouraging shows of Soviet enthusiasm for Lend-Lease donations.48 The US Assistant Secretary of State wrote that dealing with Soviet delegates was like “dealing with an old-fashioned slot-machine… . One could sometimes expedite the process by shaking the machine, but it was useless to talk to it.”49 The lack of visible gratitude drove home the asymmetrical nature of Lend-Lease aid, and thus dampened enthusiasm for the program. Immaterial cultural considerations had become a factor in strategic and material dispositions. The Russians, for their part, could not understand the American emphasis on the exchange value of visible gratitude. As one Soviet official grumbled, “We’ve lost millions of people, and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us Spam.”50 As another said starkly, after the war: “God knows we paid them back in full—in Russian lives.”51 Russian pride still asserted itself. “Tell the Americans, if you like, that we need all the products they can send,” Stalin said privately to Wendell Willkie. “But I would suggest that you understate the case rather than give anyone the impression that you are encouraging Americans to assume a patronizing attitude toward us.”52 By May of 1942, America had fallen behind in its Lend-Lease obligations, due to the general strain on American resources in the first months of the war. Furthermore, the first Lend-Lease Protocol period was about to end on June 30, 1942, and a new aid schedule would have to be arranged.53 The Russians were at once desperate for assistance, anxious that assistance might fall off, and bewildered, sometimes furious, that rituals of ostentatious gratitude were demanded of them in a situation of such extremity. The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony presented, therefore, a perfect article of strategic exchange in a diplomatic economy where goods were, by and large, flowing only in one direction. For the American officials and journalists who were eager to convince a general public and a bureaucratic elite of the moral, as well as the strategic, importance of assisting the Russians, the Seventh offered a sign of reciprocity. It offered proof of gratitude, as well as kinship. For the Soviets, it could function as a chit in exchange, but at the same time it was a chit imprinted with strength and defiance, and was not, therefore, detrimental to Soviet dignity. As Rodzinski wrote to Ambassador 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.”54 To a modern sensibility, the decision to deploy a symphony as propaganda would seem to have a curiously limited reach; it seems very unlikely that a seventy-minute contemporary orchestral work could be, as the US Office of War Information called the Shostakovich Seventh in a newsreel script, “An Inspiration For The Man In The Street—The World Over.”55 We should recall, however, the very different role “classical” music played in the cultural life of the United States at the time, recognized (among other things) as an aspirational marker of the American middle class. In surveys taken just before the outbreak of war, more than half of the American public declared themselves classical music listeners.56 During the war, the NBC Symphony broadcasts routinely reached an estimated audience of ten million, or roughly 8 percent of the American population.57 In two separate polls on the musical tastes of American soldiers, the Research Branch of the Army discovered that classical music was second in popularity only to jazz/swing, beating out both “modern popular music” and what we would now call country and western; among soldiers over thirty years of age, classical music was ranked most popular.58 Classical music was praised for its morale-building and perceived ennobling qualities, especially in the face of accusations by Nazi propagandists that the United States was “a barbaric country without culture or taste.”59 For this reason, it did not seem quite as far-fetched that Shostakovich’s Seventh might be, in Nicolas Slonimsky’s words, “a symphony to kill Hitler”60—or at least to affect Allied morale tangibly. We should note in passing that there is no literal evidence for Solomon Volkov’s implied narrative that this particular cultural exchange was generated or prompted by Stalin himself, though it is entirely compatible with the Party’s use of the arts in the period.61 On the contrary, it seems, in the Magidoff telegram of March 25, that VOKS was eager to be publicized as instrumental in the transfer, rather than passing credit off to Stalin. The phrase “MENTION THAT FIRST PERFORMANCE THROUGH [VOKS's] COURTESY FURTHERING CULTURAL TIES USSR USA,” suggests this second emphasis, as well as the valence discussed above. It was institutionally important for VOKS to prove its efficacy abroad to ensure the security of its members at home. At the time, VOKS and the new Sovinformbiuro were vying for influence, both somewhat redundantly pursuing the same duties. It was unclear which organization would prevail. VOKS had further reason for worry: much of their administration had just been liquidated during the Purges—a ghastly fact that is unfortunately not surprising, given that VOKS was an institution originally chaired by Trotsky’s sister and engaged in constant contact with foreigners.62 Since the late 1930s, the NKVD had been peering particularly closely at VOKS’s work; the organization’s mail, especially when it originated in foreign countries, was regularly opened.63 The employees of VOKS were at once being pressed for more visible results and yet were almost certainly working in an atmosphere of duress, restriction, and anxiety. It is perhaps understandable, then, that the VOKS records for this period are highly fragmentary, and that what remains reveals a certain timidity of approach. (A report remains in the VOKS archive criticizing their American representatives for exactly these two faults: “There is only accidental, fragmentary, incomplete information” available, and what is there, the report complains, appears to display nothing but a record of ineffectuality.)64 VOKS director Vladimir Kemenov had in 1940 admitted in a report that “in comparison with foreign propaganda, Soviet propaganda abroad has an almost unorganized, haphazard character, it is atomized, with no plan or connection to foreign policy”65—and admitted that VOKS was partially culpable due to underfunding and lack of flexibility on the part of its ambassadorial operatives. The governing bodies that received these reports clearly were watching to assess the organization’s efforts. VOKS therefore had strong motivations to make sure their instrumentality in the Shostakovich deal was publicized overtly. And indeed, at the NBC premiere, VOKS was credited on-air for their involvement.66 When the Am-Rus Music Corporation in New York got wind of VOKS’s separate agreement with Magidoff and NBC, they fired off a furious telegram to VOKS temporary headquarters in Kuibyshev, informing VOKS that there was already a preexisting agreement with Koussevitzky. “our legal commitment requires your cooperation stop please confirm.”67 By this point, three interested parties had been promised the same right of first American performance: Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra (via Ambassador Oumansky), Koussevitzky and the BSO (via Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga and Am-Rus), and Stokowski at NBC (via VOKS). All of these parties had a certain claim to legitimacy. Note that Arturo Toscanini was not yet even a participant in the squabble; in a snit, he had in fact temporarily withdrawn from his conducting position at NBC.68 On March 30, 1942, VOKS headquarters dispatched a letter to Vladimir Bazykin, their operative at the Russian Embassy in Washington, in which they explained that the microfilm was being sent to the United States. They asked the embassy “to make prints from the negative for all conductors who were offered the right of first performance,” but singled out one conductor, Stokowski, for special attention, presumably because he was the candidate who had applied through them.69 Rodzinski was the first to be tossed out of the running. Ambassador Oumansky, his sponsor, had been recalled in November 1941 and replaced by Maxim Litvinov, and this must have weakened Rodzinski’s claim considerably, despite Rodzinski’s attempts to win over the new ambassador.70 According to Weintraub’s later account, when Rodzinski was informed during a phone call that his bid was not being considered, he was furious. He hollered, “To hell with Soviet music—I do not care to have anything more to do with it. … [The Soviets] cannot be trusted.” He slammed down the phone.71 Ambassador Litvinov had special pull with VOKS. He had previously been People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, and as such, had exercised indirect control over the organization. He wrote a letter scolding them for having confused the rights situation by moving forward without consulting Am-Rus, Shostakovich’s American agent. VOKS responded, with some legalistic nicety, that NBC had been given only the rights to the radio premiere.72 At Am-Rus, Weintraub was increasingly confronting hostility from the entangled orchestras at the very moment he had hoped to generate enthusiasm and facilitate a healthy business in paid performance rentals. It appears that at one point he had even discussed with Schirmer’s the possibility of staging a “Shostakovich Week,” celebrated by orchestras all over the Americas, in which the composer’s earlier works would be performed to prepare audiences for a grand serial unveiling of the Seventh by several different orchestras.73 Ideally, this Shostakovich festival would be tied to June 22, 1942—the one-year anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.74 These plans were presumably scuttled by the uncertain timing of the score’s delivery and the legalistic furor that had already arisen over the various conflicting agreements. In Weintraub’s report to VOKS he emphasized the damage done to the reputation of Russian institutions by the flap; he was probably equally disgruntled by the loss of revenue caused by incompetence beyond his control. It did not help that many of these negotiations took place as the score was being shipped to America and that no one knew when it would arrive, or indeed, where it had gone. In the US Department of State and the Soviet Embassy, there was considerable consternation: the microfilm had left Kuibyshev, but after that, had apparently disappeared entirely. The Microfilm Transfer The microfilm of the score and parts was supposed to be shipped on April 9 or thereabouts to the United States on a Pan Am plane that was carrying the American ambassador, William H. Standley. (At this stage in the war, Pan Am was still serving many quasi-military functions while the US war machine geared up.) Through some error, the microfilm never made it to the hands of the Pan Am pilot.75 In mid-May, A. A. Gromyko, Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, approached the US State Department and asked about the microfilm package. “The Soviet Embassy was extremely anxious to receive this music and would appreciate it if the Department would institute inquiries in order to find out where it is.”76 Loy Henderson of the Division of European Affairs made inquiries of Pan Am. The pilot explained that “he had no knowledge whatsoever of any package having been given to him or to any member of the crew of the plane for delivery in the United States. The pilot added that he was sure that he would have known it if any package had been delivered to the plane.”77 Once again, this was a case of poor communication, rather than daredevil intrigue. As it turned out, someone had, not unreasonably, handed over the box of microfilm to be sealed into a diplomatic pouch that was being delivered from Kuibyshev to the US State Department.78 It is the route of this pouch that Weintraub later sketched out for his chorus of interested reporters. As a scrapped 1943 Office of War Information newsreel script stated, the score was flown by plane to Tehran, then driven “by car across Iran, Irak [sic], Trans-Jordan, Palestine and the Suez Canal to Cairo Egypt,” where it was put on a plane again and flown across the “West African Coast to Brazil, and Northward to New York”79 (fig. 2). There are elements of that route which are uncertain, but the litany of legs of the journey—by plane to Tehran, by car to Cairo, by air again to Brazil, and from there to the United States—was stable in the first year of reports and only began to collect variations in later retellings.80 This is the itinerary that Weintraub himself confirmed, and it is almost certainly his report that was passed on to American newspapers and widely replicated. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide A US Air Transport Command plane carried the microfilm of the Seventh Symphony from Payne Field, near Cairo, across the Atlantic to Brazil, and from there to the United States. From M. T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead. Used with permission. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide A US Air Transport Command plane carried the microfilm of the Seventh Symphony from Payne Field, near Cairo, across the Atlantic to Brazil, and from there to the United States. From M. T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead. Used with permission. The route the pouch took is not as odd or “exotic” as it might seem. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a different route from Russia to the United States in 1942 that (1) would have been more secure, given the global military situation; and (2) that could not, in any case, have been equally exoticized in the American public imagination. Given that a route through Western Europe was obviously impossible, and that transport planes required frequent stops for refueling, there were few options. An eastern route via the Trans-Siberian Express and a flight out of Vladivostok across the Pacific was diplomatically and strategically problematic because of the presence of the Japanese.81 The northern route above the Arctic Circle, leaving from Murmansk or Archangel, was becoming prohibitively dangerous, both in the sky and on the sea, due to bad weather and German interference.82 In June, the month the microfilm finally arrived in America, for example, twenty-two out of thirty-three merchantmen traveling that route in a single Allied Lend-Lease convoy were destroyed in one prolonged attack.83 Allied reluctance to use this northern route for delivery, which Stalin preferred for aid shipments, had become a major diplomatic issue in the late spring and early summer of 1942.84 The route through the Middle East—the so-called Persian Corridor—was therefore becoming more common at just the time the Shostakovich microfilm was shipped. The British and the Soviets had already foreseen that Iran would be strategically vital as a passage for resupply. Finding that the major transport routes through Iran (most importantly the Iranian State Railway) were under the aegis of German firms, the Russians and British had promptly invaded the country in August of 1941 and had deposed the Shah. They installed his son in his place and arranged to divide Iran into Russian and British spheres of influence, each taking control of transportation logistics as needed. We might note that the same Orientalist marginalization that allowed Americans to exoticize Iran in the route retellings allowed the British and Russians to ignore the country’s sovereign status and reduce it, with tragic, long-lasting results, to the status of a “corridor.” Tehran was the center of Russian activity in the country, an entrepôt where they received foreign Lend-Lease goods and shipped them back across the Russian border. Most of these goods—food, equipment, matèriel—were shipped by sea from the United States via the South Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope, unloaded at ports on the Persian Gulf, and delivered to Tehran via truck convoy or rickety train. The Air Transport Command, however, was experimenting with a different route: sending planes from the United States down to Brazil (usually refueling at Natal), across the South Atlantic with a stop in the Antilles, across Africa to Cairo, then from Cairo to Tehran.85 Lend-Lease goods flowed toward Russia along precisely the route the Shostakovich microfilm traveled in retrograde. In the Weintraub-disseminated itinerary, the microfilm arrived by plane in Tehran and was taken on the next stage of its journey (to Cairo) by car. This is a telling detail. The shift from air to surface likely reflects (1) the general bottleneck in Iranian transport at this moment; and (2) a jurisdictional shift, given that the package was leaving Soviet-controlled territory and entering British-controlled territory. It is entirely possible, even likely, that third-party couriers were hired for this part of the journey. Months after the Shostakovich score transport, an official at the Soviet Embassy in Tehran wrote a letter to VOKS complaining about various bureaucratic complications; it may contain traces of the microfilm’s passage through the Middle East. VOKS had contacts in Iran, and at this time was looking to increase its influence among the cultural elite there, most likely due to simmering Iranian anger about Soviet control, particularly as the Soviets were extracting foodstuffs from the Iranian countryside. VOKS established propaganda centers in the major cities, arranging for an exhibition on the history of the USSR.86 VOKS was also in charge of distributing scores for Shostakovich’s Seventh in the Middle East. On November 15, 1942, Daniel Komissarov, press secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Tehran, wrote to VOKS, complaining, “Despite all promises, I still have not received Shestakovich’s [sic] symphonies, from first to last. They are requested by the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra. Please send us two copies; I will forward them one and keep the other in my collection just in case.”87 The phrase “from first to last” is unclear—if he really means multiple symphonies, for example, it could not include the withdrawn Fourth Symphony, and probably would not include the Second and Third. It does appear, however, that Komissarov was not necessarily musically knowledgeable, so this is likely an error. In the same letter, Komissarov refers to courier shipments of packets to both the United States and Great Britain. As he tries to sort out the finances needed to stage the Tehran exposition on Russian Revolutionary history, Komissarov mentions a set of unspecified items that were shipped back in May 1942 by a third party (on VOKS’s account) to America, England, and the Far East, via Tehran—the time frame in which the Shostakovich microfilms, in their diplomatic packets, would have passed through his hands. VOKS administration believed they had already sent the embassy money to cover the costs of those third-party shipments; in fact, they apparently had not. Komissarov gripes, with some mathematical confusion, You enquired about 52,000 rials sent to us to cover the cost of transporting cargoes to America, England, and the Far East. We did not receive this sum. Since May we have been wired 1,500 rials, 6,500 rials and 45,000 rials, i.e. 51,500 [sic]. We have not been billed yet for the transportation of the cargoes, so we can spend this money to organize the exposition. However, we may be billed for the transportation of the cargoes at any moment, and we may find ourselves in an awkward situation. I request that you transfer the 40,000 rials which you allocated to organize the 25th Anniversary of USSR Exposition.88 If we avert our eyes from the accounting nightmare that is clearly building to a head, we may ask: Were these VOKS cargoes the diplomatic packets that contained the microfilms of the Seventh? It is entirely possible—the date matches—although hardly certain. More information may eventually come to light in Soviet archives. Whether this particular document refers to the microfilm payloads, however, it does prove that a non-governmental, third-party courier could indeed have been hired to carry the packets by car (as per the Weintraub itinerary) across the zone of British jurisdiction to Egypt. Cairo was a logical next contact point, as it was the hub of British control in the area, currently active as general HQ for the ongoing fight against Rommel to the west. There was also a strong American shipping presence, as the city was an Air Transport Command node. If there were two diplomatic pouches traveling together (one destined for the UK, one for the United States), they may have parted ways here, or they might have traveled one final leg of the voyage together, to Casablanca.89 The typical route for a US Air Transport Command shipment from Cairo would have been farther to the southwest than Casablanca: Accra was the usual jumping-off point from Western Africa.90 In any event, Weintraub probably could have added a stop in the South Atlantic to his list of exotic relay points, as well as the stop in Brazil. Program annotator Michael Steinberg reported that the microfilm touched down in Recife,91 a transit point named with such specificity that it is likely to be accurate. Ibura Field in Recife would later become a substantial American naval base and also hosted a strong Army presence. In May of 1942, it was a makeshift airstrip served by several Quonset huts.92 If Recife, technically a US Navy base, was cited verbally in early discussions about the route,93 this may explain some confusion among later Shostakovich commentators about whether the score was transported by ship. Soviet biographer Sofia Khentova, perhaps jumping to conclusions based on a reference to an American naval base, wrote: “On June 23, 1942, a battleship brought the microfilm with the score to the USA.”94 The date as well as the method of conveyance is incorrect.95 Indeed, her account is full of dubious anomalies.96 Solomon Volkov presumably picked up this error from Khentova and replicated it in the foreword to Testimony.97 Weintraub, given galleys of Volkov’s book for comment, blustered, “Wrong: Bad research. A phantom ship.”98 Nonetheless, the error has persisted,99 and appears regularly in accounts of the microfilm’s voyages, mythologically useful in that it injects a Tintin-like variety in transportation and an elemental plurality (air, land, and sea) to the journey. From Recife (if it did indeed land there and not nearby Natal), the package was flown north to the United States. Typically, the plane would have first set down on American soil for refueling in Miami. The next record of the journey, however, is the State Department memo already cited, which records its discovery in the diplomatic pouch at the end of May. The symphony, sent in exchange for Lend-Lease goods, had traveled westward along the very route many of those goods were taking eastward. Publicity would capitalize on the apparent eccentricity of that route, though given the exigencies of wartime shipment, there are few routes a package could have taken that would not have seemed circuitous and exotic.100 The pouch was received in Washington on May 30, 1942, at which point it was opened and the microfilm was discovered. Loy Henderson of the Division of European Affairs was notified.101 He turned the microfilm box over to the Soviet Embassy, presumably to VOKS representative Vladimir Bazykin. An Am-Rus employee picked up the box on June 2 to transport it to New York. According to Weintraub, the Am-Rus representative promptly almost lost the box in a canteen, leaving it on a lunch tray while going to the bathroom. He secured it just before it was thrown away by the busboy, its ten-thousand-mile journey almost ending ignominiously in the orts.102 This last part of the story would have made a good addendum to the other legends of the score’s near escapes: wrapped in a blanket and tossed in a toilet as Shostakovich fled Moscow;103 almost shipped to Siberia with some missing luggage;104 wafted away by the wind on a Leningrad airfield;105 clutched on Anna Akhmatova’s lap as she was airlifted out of Leningrad;106 and so on. Weintraub only told the story years later, and at that point, it didn’t get much circulation. He added, “To have released such a story, however true, would have been, I think, an overdose of excitement for the people. Already I had taken pains to kill such stories—all nonsense—to the effect that Shostakovich had written parts of the Seventh long ago, that Am-Rus [was] the culprit responsible for all the fuss, had been in possession of the orchestral material for over a year.”107 Weintraub was obviously aware that the narrative of the symphony, apart from the substance of the symphony, was swiftly becoming its own aesthetic object, an adjunct to the score itself. He was clearly at pains to shape that story. In this case, he held back a good anecdote, most likely to protect Am-Rus’s professional reputation. Once the microfilm arrived in New York, a whole new set of logistical hurdles arose. American and Soviet microfilm reels were different widths, so a special feeder had to be jury-rigged.108 Then it was discovered that the microfilm was underexposed; the Soviet scribes who had copied out the parts had left them full of errors, and war scarcity meant that good photographic paper was impossible to come by;109 and the paper that was available was slick, glared under the stage lights, and would not take the musicians’ pencil marks.110 Nonetheless, Am-Rus managed to work around the clock and produce scores for the contending conductors within a week and parts by July 9.111 Weintraub wrote, presumably to VOKS, about the minutiae of reproduction in the testy report already cited (“Shostakovich: Seventh Symphony: Some Facts Relating to the NBC Broadcast July 19, 1942”), compiled, according to internal evidence, in early fall 1942. Though much of the latter part of the memorandum applauds the effectiveness of the symphony in winning over American listeners, elsewhere in the document Weintraub criticizes VOKS for clumsy work at every stage of the venture, from the rights conflict to the lack of care taken with the scribal preparation of the parts. He warns VOKS that the sloppiness of the scores will “mitigate against the interests of Soviet music because it creates the impression of unreliability in material sent here from the USSR.”112 He includes samples of photographic paper and transparencies and makes a suggestion for the replication process in future instances, “the so-called Van Dyke process.”113 Notably, Weintraub complains that the microfilm transfer—the focus of so much attention and wartime excitement—was an unnecessary irritation and should never be pursued again. “Although this is a colorful way of transmitting score and parts of large musical works; it may even serve as a means of saving shipping space; it nevertheless is very impractical.”114 At the same time, it is clear that the exhausting efforts taken to bring the symphony to the American public were not simply wasted effort—they became an integral part of the Seventh Symphony as a product. The effort involved became one of its selling points (in appropriately capitalist terms), and part of the key to how the symphony was consumed. As Sofia Khentova pointed out, the British did not seem to require the dramatic report of the route. She attributes the ruckus over the microfilm to “the element of sensationalism, characteristic of American culture.”115 At the same time, it speaks to an American need: the need of a country that was just finding its feet in the war to be reassured that its efforts were worth it. It is difficult to calculate the exchange value or the subtle and perplexing use value of a symphony, even when the diaphanous fabric of music is concretized on a roll of microfilm. But there was a towering need by both the Americans and the Soviets for a gesture that would create a sense of symmetrical reciprocity. Everyone had an interest in the symphony’s exchange value being as great as possible—including the conductors involved, the institutions involved (VOKS, NBC), and the American middlemen engaged in broadcasting the story of the symphony, Am-Rus Music Corp. and its trailing pack of hungry reporters. As the symphony passed through the skies from Communist East to capitalist West, it gathered, like St. Elmo’s Fire, the numinous glow of a fetishized commodity. Its circumstances and a public need added to whatever intangible base value it might have had, a new, powerful sheen—the enhanced labor value of its production, shipment, and reproduction. The greater the composer’s travails and the symphony’s travels appeared to be, the greater the perceived value of the Seventh as a commodity, the more able it was to appear as an appropriate exchange for the material, physical goods that traveled the same route in the opposite direction. In a sense, the American public needed it to be a spectacularly embattled and labor-intensive gift. Resolution of the “Battle Royal” for the Premiere As these efforts went on behind the scenes, VOKS sought to maximize the cultural impact of the symphony by preparing the American public for the piece. The VOKS Bulletin featured lavish comment on the composer in their first issue of the spring and, in the second issue, included an article under Shostakovich’s name, in which he fulminated about the destruction of Tchaikovsky’s home by Nazi vandals.116 The VOKS Bulletins were not circulated widely but were used to provide digestible quotes both for the media and for diplomatic discourse. Shostakovich’s movement-by-movement account of the Seventh in VOKS Bulletin 1, no. 2 (“My Seventh Symphony”) was widely quoted and continues to be used in program notes to this day.117 The real public relations coup was the publication of Time magazine’s cover story about the composer, “Shostakovich and the Guns.”118 The article was remarkable for its accuracy—even the moves to assuage the doubts of an American audience about a Soviet composer (the reassurance that at the time of the Revolution, the Shostakoviches had been “bourgeois”; the emphasis on the composer’s love of hearty sports over symphonic premieres) were based quite firmly on verifiable fact. The mythologizing impulse could mainly be seen in the stunning cover painting, which depicted Shostakovich in his Fire Brigade helmet, standing before the burning towers of Leningrad, strains of inspired music floating above his head. There is an element of propagandistic hyperbole, here—there is some doubt as to whether Shostakovich was ever actually standing at his firefighting post while the city burned119—but the Time image itself largely just inherited its hyperbole from the original Russian photo from which the image was adapted120 (fig. 3). The Time cover gained the composer and his symphony nationwide fame. Weintraub wrote, “People who had no interest in music, people who still stutter over Tchaikovsky’s name could pronounce the name of Shostakovich.”121 The symphony had entered the pop-cultural conversation. At around this time, Am-Rus was even approached by a burlesque dancer who offered to perform a Bolero-style striptease to the “invasion” theme. As Weintraub remarked, “What a movement that would have been.”122 Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Shostakovich dressed for his fireman duties, on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory. The photo was distributed widely in the American press. From M. T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead. Used with permission of the National Archives and Shostakovich Association (Paris & DSCH Publishers [Moscow]). Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Shostakovich dressed for his fireman duties, on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory. The photo was distributed widely in the American press. From M. T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead. Used with permission of the National Archives and Shostakovich Association (Paris & DSCH Publishers [Moscow]). As Am-Rus struggled to reproduce the score and reconstitute the parts, Eugene Weintraub was also trying to settle, once and for all, the contractual dispute surrounding the American launch of the piece. According to Weintraub, he attempted to negotiate a marriage between the claimants, proposing that Koussevitzky conduct the premiere for NBC. NBC refused the offer because Koussevitzky did not have a contract with them.123 Weintraub decided, therefore, that he was going to have to take advantage of VOKS’s legalistic dodge. He explained to Koussevitzky that while NBC had the rights to the first radio broadcast, Koussevitzky’s August 14 performance of the piece at Tanglewood would be “the first concert performance for the Western hemisphere.”124 This did not entirely solve the problem, however. When Koussevitzky publicly announced the agreement, “NBC at once countered by unflooding [sic] a barrage of publicity and ballyhoo which caused a veritable siege of Am-Rus’ office by newspapermen, conductors, photographers, press-agents, etc.”125 At this point, Weintraub was getting worried that NBC would assign the piece to one of their lesser-known “staff conductors”126 and that “the first performance might suffer.” Though Stokowski, who did have a contract with NBC, had apparently prompted NBC’s interest in the first place and was clearly putting himself forward, flying east from Hollywood to stake his claim, Weintraub seems to have had some antipathy toward him.127 Peculiarly, he felt that Stokowski’s approach to Russian composers was superficial and opportunistic.128 This is unaccountable, given Stokowski’s clear advocacy of Russian composers: he had conducted the American premieres of major works by Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Medtner, and Myaskovsky.129 And as Stokowski argued quite credibly, “About 10 years ago, when I was in Russia and Shostakovich was comparatively unknown, it was I who perceived his great gifts, believed in him, and against much opposition was the first to play his music in the United States. At that time I became friends with Shostakovich, and since then we have been in correspondence. I have a most tremendous love and enthusiasm for his music.”130 Stokowski had in fact given the US premieres of Shostakovich’s First, Third, and Sixth symphonies. He had recorded the First, Fifth, and Sixth. Nonetheless, Weintraub complained to VOKS that Stokowski’s “disinclination to cooperate with organizations such as Russian War Relief, American-Russian Institute, etc., in their endeavors of behalf of the USSR is a matter of common knowledge.”131 (Russian War Relief, Inc. [RWR] would become one of the sponsors of the Seventh’s premiere.) Complaining of Stokowski’s perceived opportunism, Weintraub turned to a conductor who had expressly turned down an earlier Shostakovich premiere “because of [his] scanty interest in it”: Arturo Toscanini.132 At this point, both Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, longtime rivals, had been contracted by NBC for the coming season, each to conduct twelve concert broadcasts.133 Given this choice, Weintraub infinitely preferred Toscanini. As Weintraub later admitted, he had strong sentimental and nostalgic associations with the great Italian conductor. As a young and penniless orchestral student at Juilliard, Weintraub had often sneaked into Toscanini’s Philharmonic concerts for free after spending an afternoon crouched unseen in the Carnegie Hall bathrooms.134 He had learned a great deal of repertoire by watching the Maestro work. Now, Weintraub’s almost worshipful attitude toward Toscanini would bear fruit. He decided to take matters into his own hands and circumvent the NBC bureaucracy entirely. It was Weintraub, therefore, who approached Toscanini and begged him to take a look at the score. “The more we thought of this Symphony born in war, the more we thought of the man who had defied both Hitler and Mussolini from the beginning. This was the man who should be given the honor of conducting the premiere of the ‘Seventh Symphony.’ And this man was the world’s great orchestra leader, Arturo Toscanini.”135 On June 14, 1942, Weintraub and another Am-Rus representative, David Grunes, took the newly copied score to Toscanini personally. They sat by his side while he read through it in its entirety, taking several hours to consume the piece.136 Weintraub, in narrating this session years later, clearly moves into the role of raconteur: “Toscanini indicated his interest in seeing the score and we sat with him for many hours while he looked through every page. Sometimes he would look up at us in surprise. We never said a word, but kept staring at this beautiful old man doing his work. After some time he looked at us, touched his hand with his heart, and uttered the words we so hoped he would—yes, he would conduct this symphony!”137 This typescript description of the event, part of an unpublished memoir about the symphony’s course, sentimentally burnishes the operational facts. Weintraub’s earlier report on the events, submitted to his Russian associates, was less florid: “We took it upon ourselves to visit Arturo Toscanini and to persuade him to consider giving the premiere broadcast. He studied the score for several days and then pronounced it an ‘inspired work’ and agreed to conduct it.”138 Toscanini’s own account in a letter to Stokowski is similar: “In effect, two men of the Am-Russ [sic] Music Corporation brought to me the film and some days later the first copy of the score … As you can imagine, I eagerly looked into it for a few days … At once I was deeply taken by its beauty and its anti-fascist meanings, and, I have to confess to you, by the greatest desire to perform it.”139 Both of these accounts from the period suggest that Toscanini took some time with the score before responding definitively. This does not necessarily mean that the tense afternoon of sitting at his side while he pored over the vast piece did not occur, but the disparity between the two Weintraub accounts—the dramatic detail that Toscanini simply agreed on the spot—likely demonstrates the mythologizing trend in discussions of the work. It is actually remarkable that only a couple of variant details creep into Weintraub’s rehashing of the story as the decades pass. To be fair, at certain points in later years, Weintraub did quash further romanticizations of this initial meeting of conductor and score. In 1966, B. H. Haggin of The New Republic, who had been present at the NBC premiere,140 wrote to Weintraub, asking for confirmation of a story “about Toscanini’s unrolling the roll of enlargements of the microfilms of Shostakovich’s Seventh on the floor of the living room and cutting off each page as he finished reading it, then assembling the pages in a pile which he handed to you, and then sitting down at the piano and playing the score from memory as you followed the pages.”141 Weintraub responded snappily, “Not one word of it is true—a fabrication from top to bottom.”142 This shows, however, that the story had continued to grow more marked in its details in the intervening years, even without Weintraub’s assistance. Weintraub quickly sent off a telegram to Shostakovich: “toscanini highly enthusiastic your score seventh symphony we gave him desires your consent first american radio performance and recording urge you cable consent immediately.”143 This should have ended the matter. Stokowski, however, had continued agitating for rights to the secured NBC performance. On June 16, he wrote directly to Shostakovich with a proposal that they collaborate on a Fantasia-style film version of the symphony, a suggestion to which Shostakovich reacted with his typical anxiety and diffidence.144 It appears that the clash of egos between Toscanini and Stokowski came to a head the next day, on June 17. Bruno Zirato, who had earlier acted as the Italian-speaking liaison between Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic, apparently approached the Maestro, and, perhaps in his new role as an agent at Columbia Concerts Corporation, accused Weintraub of double-dealing, complaining that Am-Rus had promised the score to Stokowski previously and that it had been offered to Toscanini under false pretenses.145 Walter Toscanini, the conductor’s son, rushed to the Am-Rus offices to demand an explanation and to strategize. Weintraub, hearing of this new wrinkle, was anxious to make sure that Toscanini secured the radio premiere. He suggested that Walter cable Shostakovich himself, hoping that a speedy response from the composer would shut down discussion.146 Walter did so, writing that his father “CONSIDERS [the Seventh] A GREAT WORK AND IS READY AND MOST ANXIOUS TO CONDUCT YOUR WORK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE BY RADIO WITH NATIONAL BROADCASTING SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA.”147 He specified that Shostakovich should respond to him directly at the Toscanini home in Riverdale-on-Hudson, rather than via NBC, effectively circumventing the administrative staff there. Meanwhile, Weintraub, according to a mortified letter he wrote to Toscanini, got no sleep the night of June17, agonizing over the position he had been put in. He indicated how appalled he was by Stokowski’s machinations. “As a writer who is interested in human beings (especially musical ones),” he told Toscanini, “I have written down information which I will publish some day. When that day comes, the musical world will know how dishonest and childish all our conductors have been in their stupid desire to steal glory at the expense of Shostakovich… . I never thought it possible that our so-called ‘artists’ could sink to such low depths of falsity.” He continued, “But I shall tell the public also about a truly great man who remained aloof from all this—a man who stayed in his home in the country pasting together the music sheets of the Shostakovich music. I will tell how this man was concerned with only one principal—not for vain glory—not for his pictures in the papers—but only for the music of Shostakovich.”148 Walter Toscanini and Eugene Weintraub need not have worried. Shostakovich was apparently unaware of the precise nature of the drama going on overseas. A congratulatory cable crossed paths with Walter’s request on June 18, sent by VOKS via Bazykin and the Russian Embassy. Weintraub preserved it among his papers. It reads: kindly convey following message from shostakovich to toscanini stop dear friend eysm [sic] happy to know youll conduct my seventh symphony stop eyem confident that with your consommate inherent talent and superlative skill youll convey to public of democratic america concepts which eyeve endeavored embody this work stop.//unfortunately circumstances are such that eyem unable to come to america hear your brilliant rendition stop eye send you sincerest greetings and best wishes your good health and happiness dmitry shostakovich.149 Still, over the next week, the battle continued to play itself out in letters between Toscanini and Stokowski, who, as co-conductors of the NBC Symphony, were still uneasily sizing each other up and staking out repertoire.150 On June 22, Stokowski wrote to Toscanini, pointing out that he had requested rights to the score back in December 1941. The next day Toscanini responded in a famously condescending letter: “Don’t you think, my dear Stokowski, 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?”151 On June 24, Stokowski replied, with either confusion or bizarre bullheadedness, “I am glad you are willing for me to make the first radio broadcast.”152 (He appears to have believed that Toscanini was stepping aside and agreeing to a later concert performance of the piece.) On June 25, Toscanini set him straight again: “Try to understand me, my dear Stokowski… . Happily, you are much younger than me, and Shostakovich will not stop writing new symphonies. You will certainly have all the opportunities you like to perform them. Be sure you will never find me in your way again.”153 As one of Stokowski’s friends wrote, “Stokowski made sure. Immediately he severed his association with NBC.”154 This is inaccurate: Stokowski and Toscanini continued to be yoked furiously together at NBC until a later explosion over Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto convinced NBC executives to fire Stokowski with Toscanini’s blessing.155 Regardless, in the middle of this fracas, a second telegram arrived from Shostakovich, addressed, as requested, directly to Walter Toscanini at Riverdale on Hudson. “kindly convey your faather [sic] maestro toscannini [sic] my gratitude his wish perform my symphony amrus has my authorization negotiate performances seventh symphony usa.”156 This was what Weintraub had been waiting for. The composer’s telegram secured Toscanini’s priority. “While not altogether a clear directive for us to announce Shostakovich’s acceptance, we waved the composer’s cable in the air to proclaim that he had chosen Toscanini to conduct his symphony. Nobody could quarrel with that, and once again Am-Rus’s cramped quarters became a hotbed for sensation-seeking newspaper and magazine journalists.”157 In this mildly underhanded manner, Weintraub and Toscanini’s son managed finally to block Stokowski out of the running. As Oliver Daniels noted dryly: “Toscanini biographers usually state that it was NBC that wanted [Toscanini] to give the work its American premiere. The duplicity was entirely the Maestro’s.”158 Or, it seems, the Maestro’s son with the staunch assistance of Am-Rus. When Sofia Khentova asked Shostakovich about his hapless role in this transaction, the composer responded “in the manner of Gogol’s characters, fiddling with his glasses and hair… . ‘You know, things happened, things happened.’”159 Vladimir Bazykin reported to VOKS, “Impresarios, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ of different conductors went to Am-Rus trying to convince them to give the rights to ‘their’ conductor, and others warned them against the ‘dangerous mistake’ of giving this right to that other one [chuzhoy], relating various ‘discrediting’ facts about him.”160 All of this professional jockeying became part of the lore. “Surprising as it may sound,” Weintraub claimed later, “neither the American agency [Am-Rus] nor the Russians lifted one finger to publicize the Seventh or Eighth symphonies.”161 As he explained, “We had no publicity staff, I could not be called a publicity man, we cooked up no schemes and our devilish publicity brain was not awake, even for a moment, conjuring up plans to pursue with this hot baby of a Seventh Symphony.” This is slightly disingenuous. As he himself reports elsewhere, reporters swarmed to the offices of Am-Rus when they caught wind of the tussle among the various conductors, and he himself was clearly the person who fielded questions about both the microfilm journey and the “Battle Royal.”162 “While we are not the type to ‘create’ news that was untrue,” Weintraub admitted elsewhere, “we managed to supply them with news that was factual and which they rushed into print.”163 This seems an accurate account of his veracity: after all, his narrative claims are supported by an armature of telegrams, memos, and letters. Nonetheless, he clearly enjoyed disseminating the details. Given that Am-Rus was usually the source of information to the press, the first generation of reports tends to be unified in details about, for example, the microfilm route. It is only after a few decades of Soviet-American echo chamber that Toscanini, for example, enters the fray earlier, or that a “phantom ship” carries the microfilm to the West. Weintraub worked actively to propagate stories about the piece, even while he occasionally struggled to control the spin. Weintraub was not always happy with the directions the story took. He and critic Olin Downes of the New York Times, for example, apparently worked together to squash a letter to the Times from an unnamed conductor about how Stokowski should conduct the premiere, not Toscanini, “a musical peasant who knows nothing about Russian music.”164 In the midst of his report to VOKS he complained about the treatment of Koussevitzky: “The press has been most unkind to him and made capital of the distinction between the premiere radio performance and first concert performance. Kindly note the enclosed article that appeared in Time Magazine.”165 He presumably attached the cover story on Shostakovich, in which the Time art directors had puckishly chosen to confront a photo of a suave Toscanini with a photo of Koussevitzky looking as shocked and pop-eyed as a Stooge who’d just been goosed (fig. 4).166 Clearly, Weintraub was not simply galled at the trivializing insult of a great conductor—he was worried that Am-Rus’s professional relationship with Koussevitzky would suffer because of the debacle, which he, throughout his report, clearly blames on VOKS’s institutional clumsiness. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Toscanini and Koussevitzky, from “Shostakovich and the Guns,” Time, 20 July 1942. The pictures were placed side by side with the caption “Thanks to his good connections …” (under Toscanini) “he was nosed out” (under Koussevitzky). Photo of Koussevitzky by Otto Hagel. Collection Center for Creative Photography. © 1998 Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation. Photo of Toscanini by Pictures Inc. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Toscanini and Koussevitzky, from “Shostakovich and the Guns,” Time, 20 July 1942. The pictures were placed side by side with the caption “Thanks to his good connections …” (under Toscanini) “he was nosed out” (under Koussevitzky). Photo of Koussevitzky by Otto Hagel. Collection Center for Creative Photography. © 1998 Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation. Photo of Toscanini by Pictures Inc. The conductor having been confirmed, the premiere then ran into another hurdle: NBC’s staff musicians were scattered all over the country and had to be recalled to rehearse the work.167 Whereas, according to Weintraub, Samuil Samosud had enjoyed forty rehearsals before the symphony’s premiere in Kuibyshev, Toscanini only had four, starting on July 14.168 Harassed by all of these logistical complications, the head of NBC’s music department bitterly told The New Yorker, “I wouldn’t care if I never heard another word about Shostakovich’s Seventh. It has been one vast headache.”169 Nonetheless, at least according to Weintraub, the orchestral players themselves were enthralled by the piece: “The most thrilling experience of my musical career!” “Could actually feel myself in beleaguered Leningrad”170 “When Toscanini gets through with the ‘Seventh’ we feel it is not long enough.”171 At this point, another organization got involved with the American premieres: a group called RWR, which would have a very material effect on the impact of the symphony. RWR was founded in the days immediately after the launch of Operation Barbarossa; it was originally formed to procure and deliver medical supplies to the USSR, since the American Red Cross could not. (The American Red Cross had made a covenant with their donors at the beginning of 1941 that they would not allot any moneys toward aid for the Russians, Japanese, or Germans. It took several months after Russia shifted its allegiances for the Red Cross to reflect the new alignment.)172 Founded with the blessings of the Red Cross, the governmental Office of War Relief, and Soviet ambassador Constantine Oumansky, RWR quickly expanded to provide non-military, humanitarian aid of all kinds—medication, food, clothing, blankets, and so on, everything from X-ray equipment to seeds to socks.173 This organization, too, involved VOKS. Due to internal Red Cross stipulations, RWR, as an American company, could not donate their aid directly to the Russian Red Cross and Red Crescent. They had to do so through a Soviet third party. As a result, goods collected in the United States by RWR were warehoused in Russia by VOKS. VOKS, and not RWR, made the official donation to the Russian Red Cross/Crescent.174 Throughout 1942, Shostakovich’s music had been heavily featured in RWR’s fundraisers. In March 1942, for example, Koussevitzky conducted Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony at a gala benefit for the organization in Washington, DC. Other gatherings were more exclusive: In May, a select Boston audience gathered at a Beacon Hill fundraiser to hear Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet.175 On the afternoon after the broadcast of Toscanini’s performance of the Seventh, RWR sponsored an all-Shostakovich chamber program at a private residence in Beverly Hills. Present were silver screen luminaries such as Groucho Marx. (We happen to know he was there because it was noted by the FBI, who recorded his attendance when later compiling a file to demonstrate that Marx was a Marxist.)176 Both the Toscanini radio premiere and the Koussevitzky concert premiere of the “Leningrad” Symphony involved RWR. Edward C. Carter, the organization’s chairman, introduced the Seventh to millions of radio listeners during the historic Toscanini broadcast, reminding them of the heroic role Russia was taking on repelling Axis invasion.177 Carter read out a telegram from Shostakovich in which the composer supposedly expressed the wish that the symphony’s American premiere “will be for the benefit of RWR, which is doing so many fine things for my people.”178 Carter even indulged in a brief bit of fantasy, imagining that perhaps an RWR bandage, “made in America, may have been used to bind up the burned finger of a fire watcher on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory—a fire watcher named Dmitri Shostakovich. But whether Shostakovich himself ever used an American bandage or not, thousands of his fellow countrymen have. Our debt of gratitude to them for their role in this world struggle against Nazism is very great.”179 He followed the performance that day with another appeal on air: “Let me say this: If you feel an extra measure of gratitude this afternoon, having heard Shostakovich speak to you with his music, you can express that gratitude in terms of contributions to RWR, whose national offices are at 11 East 35th Street, New York City.” His quite practical suggestion for the way symphonic sentiment could be transmuted into material aid was buttressed by the revelation that the orchestral players had, every one of them, pledged a portion of their income to US war bonds, and a plea for listeners to do the same. Both in the abstract and in very tangible ways, listeners were instructed on how to assimilate the symphony’s victories into aid. These appeals became part of the way Americans originally understood Shostakovich’s piece. The studio audience that finally heard the Toscanini premiere on August 9, 1942, were palpably moved and stirred. Downes noted that they greeted the symphony with “shattering applause.”180Time reported that “after 73 minutes of nonstop conducting, Arturo Toscanini looked as if he had just come through the siege of Leningrad. The audience jumped up and cheered, as if it had just heard news of a Nazi defeat.”181 At the same time, in homes, offices, and factories across the country, a huge audience—the US Office of War Information estimated it at twenty million listeners—tuned in to hear the symphony.182 Koussevitzky’s August 14 “concert premiere” of the work at Tanglewood was officially an RWR fundraiser, attended by Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov and his wife, Ivy, both of whom were frequently guests of honor at RWR events. Carter spoke for Koussevitzky before the performance: “At a time when Russia is crucified for the rest of the world, from her scorched plains comes a masterpiece of music… . The Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich brings us a message of faith and the victory of the spirit of man over death.”183 RWR continued to promote the Seventh Symphony across the country (and garner attention by doing so) throughout the fall and winter. RWR was thus integrally involved in the publicizing of Shostakovich’s symphony, and profited thereby. In San Francisco, their benefit with Stokowski conducting the piece drew an audience of almost ten thousand.184 The Shostakovich fundraisers and radio broadcasts allowed RWR to put their name and mission in front of the American public—and the income from these concerts allowed them to contribute quite materially to the well-being of the beleaguered Soviet people. In 1942, the organization raised almost ten million dollars for war relief, and, by the next summer, had further contributed about seven million dollars in goods, all laundered through VOKS.185 They collaborated with all of the major players in the “battle of the conductors”: Toscanini, Koussevitzky, and Stokowski. Shostakovich himself heard Toscanini’s legendary performance only much later, on record, and supposedly was not fond of the interpretation, despite a pro forma gratulatory cable to the contrary. Volkov, accurately or not,186 quotes Shostakovich as saying, “It made me very angry. Everything is wrong. The spirit and the character and the tempos. It’s a lousy, sloppy hack job.”187 Anti-Toscanini talk by Shostakovich is not confined to the pages of Volkov’s dubious portrait,188 and indeed in hindsight, Toscanini’s historic performance has been superseded by any number of readings that have displayed much more nuance, more architectural direction, and a more sympathetic melos. (Among them, ironically, is Stokowski’s urgent account of the piece, also with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, from several months later.189) But in the light of the withering remarks attributed to Shostakovich, it is worth mentioning that Toscanini’s intuited tempi in the piece were actually almost identical to Shostakovich’s own, according to Weintraub: “It is interesting to recall that the original score did not contain tempi markings, but that Toscanini had marked in the score what he believed to be the right ones. When Shostakovich sent us his tempi indications in a three-page cable we rushed to Riverdale and compared them to the Old Man’s. In every instance but two they were identical!”190 Weintraub preserved the list of tempo markings sent by Shostakovich in his papers.191 When, years later, Weintraub read the galleys of Volkov’s Testimony, he was dismayed and hurt at the Shostakovich figure’s churlishly rude dismissal of Toscanini. Assembling the NBC event had been a highlight of Weintraub’s career, something of which he was deeply proud: the bringing together of a conductor he loved with a deeply important work. He was particularly galled, therefore, to read Shostakovich’s crack about giving Toscanini’s records away as gifts to people he didn’t like.192 “It is the saddest line in the book,” Weintraub wrote, “filled with vulgar meanness.”193 It is probably no consolation that the feelings of artistic scorn were apparently mutual: Years later, after the glimmer had faded, when Toscanini listened to his own historic performance of the “Leningrad” Symphony, created amid such excitement, such an air of giddy, festival travail, he muttered, “Did I really learn and conduct such junk?”194 This close inspection of the battle of the conductors reveals several things. (1) It was, at its inception, more about the lack of communication between various Russian agencies tasked with the dissemination of Russian cultural material than it was about individual personalities. The logistical snafu became rapidly more personal after the arrival of the microfilm in New York. (2) Toscanini, the eventual victor in the struggle, was the last of the conductors to become involved, and he was drawn in by the Am-Rus Music Co. It was Stokowski, and not Toscanini, who initially was attached to a proposed NBC performance of the piece, and Toscanini’s participation was secured through the timely intervention of his son Walter. (3) What all of this hullaballoo ignores is the fact that by the time of the American performances, the work had in any case already been premiered in the Western Hemisphere. Sir Henry Wood had performed the symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the BBC studios on June 22, the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, and again at Royal Albert Hall on June 29.195 This information was universally available—the major American newspapers had run reviews of the performance,196—and yet the need to make a mythic event out of this “Western premiere”—the need for a herculean struggle—apparently quelled any mention of this important, somewhat deflationary fact.197 The machinery of myth-making had already gone into motion. Eugene Weintraub’s work was done—or almost. He recounted years later, “The day after the Seventh was launched and we were to depart for sunshine and rest in the country, we received a call from a conductor (the same one [Rodzinski] who had sent all Soviet music to Hades) who eagerly enquired…, ‘Weintraub, how about the first performance of the Eighth.’”198 Weintraub’s reaction is understandable: “Packed bags in hand we ran like a shot from our office to the train.” Mission Accomplished? Following the two historic American premieres, other cities rushed to present their own performances of the symphony: local orchestras and touring orchestras played it in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Providence, Cleveland, Hartford, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Ann Arbor, among others.199 During the 1942–43 concert season, the “Leningrad” was performed in the Americas a combined total of sixty-two times.200 Throughout the fall, congratulatory cables flashed back and forth between the Soviet Union and musicians in the United States. “This musical bond shall stand as a symbol of unity of all the forces of culture and progress linked together against the degeneracy and barbarism of Fascism,” the members of the New York Philharmonic raved in a telegram.201 Soon, Life magazine commented wryly, “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.”202 The critical reception by the American press has been covered in several excellent studies.203 The salient points may be summarized: (1) reported audience reception was initially very positive, but (2) critical opinion was lukewarm; and (3) critical reception for the piece is a superb case study for understanding the deeply troubling issues of musical meaning, intrinsic and extrinsic, as well as questions of populism and its effect on the perceived aesthetic worth of a piece. Overwhelmingly, positive and negative, the critics seemed to agree (as John K. Sherman wrote in the Minneapolis Star Journal) that “one of the important points about this ‘Leningrad’ symphony—probably THE important point—is its cargo of message, its inspiration and its purpose.”204 We have seen how this “cargo” traveled backward along the route that other, more material cargos traveled toward the USSR. How did this “cargo of message” fare once it reached its destination? How well did this delivery achieve its mission objectives? In accessing the symphony’s successes, we first must remember that Shostakovich’s piece was simply the most prominent and visible of a whole raft of cultural strategies the Allies used to convince their electorates of the importance of collaboration. For example, the first body to bear officially the name of the United Nations—the United Nations Information Organization (UNIO)—was devoted to the exchange of cultural and political information between the Allies for positive propagandistic purposes of exactly this kind, to ease relations and, in particular, to acclimate Americans to the idea of Lend-Lease. UNIO’s international musical efforts were considerable—and, in fact, it is entirely possible that Victor Seroff, Shostakovich’s first American biographer, erroneously believed that they were involved in the transport of the Seventh.205 Concerted propaganda efforts to emphasize international collaboration were spread across different media—radio, film, print, and even such impedimenta as matchbooks and shredded wheat boxes. The premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh, however, was the major Russo-American propaganda event of 1942. Certainly, the impression the symphony made was huge. Marc Blitzstein, applying for a grant for his own nationalist war opus, enthused: “The symphony, symbolizing, even representing courage in the face of withering fire and destruction, was responsible for an immense worldwide wave of enthusiasm and admiration for the people of the USSR and their fighting forces. Music was on the map as a positive weapon in winning the war.”206 Blitzstein’s own “Airborne” Symphony was not the only American symphony to capitalize on the demand for programmatic, nationalistic concert music on the model of the Shostakovich Seventh: Paul Creston’s Chant of 1942 and George Antheil’s Symphony No. 4 (“1942”) both drew directly on the “Leningrad” Symphony blueprint. Roy Harris, thirsty to follow the Shostakovich example and become a figure of national myth-making, dedicated his own monumental Fifth Symphony to the Russian people, dedicated his Sixth Symphony to the American armed forces for good measure, and was first in line to have his own work sent reciprocally to Russia on microfilm.207 As Virgil Thomson wryly remarked, “One would think, to read his prefaces, that he had been awarded by God or at least by popular vote, a monopolistic privilege of expressing our nation’s deepest ideals and highest aspirations.”208 At the same time, Harris wrote a jealous, spiky letter to Eugene Weintraub in which he growled that the Shostakovich piece was all hype and was, he claimed, written before the German invasion in any case.209 More public in his irritation, Béla Bartók famously included a snide reference to the “Invasion Theme” in his Concerto for Orchestra.210 In a wider sense, the frenzied reception Shostakovich’s piece received opened the floodgates for war symphonies by composers such as Howard Hanson, Don Gillis, Samuel Barber, and David Diamond. Later Cold War disavowals in America of music written for political and propagandistic purposes should, therefore, be taken with a pinch of salt—this was a form that American nationalist composers embraced when it was politically expedient to do so. But the aesthetic impact of the Shostakovich work, its impact within the sphere of professional musical composition, pales in importance next to its impact in other political and social spheres. It is here that its success or failure should truly be measured. As mentioned earlier, the Russians were seeking two benefits from improved relations: a Second Front and an increased Lend-Lease yield. In the time between the shipment of the Seventh and its performances in the West, the European Second Front was put on hold. Allied defeats in North Africa and (in August) the catastrophic and emblematic failure of an amphibious assault on Dieppe necessarily shifted Anglo-American strategic emphasis away from the shores of France. As of the end of July 1942, the United States aborted their plans for a European invasion in 1942 (Operation Sledgehammer) and focused their anti-German efforts in North Africa, much to Stalin’s chagrin.211 In a passage of Testimony, Solomon Volkov quotes Shostakovich complaining specifically about the way his symphony was used by the Americans to deflect Russian demands for the Second Front. “The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich’s symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something. Stalin was incensed. Wendell Willkie came to Moscow, when he was a presidential candidate. He was considered a big shot who could do much. He was asked about the second front and he replied, Shostakovich is a great composer. Mr. Willkie, naturally, thought that he was an extremely deft politician; see how he got out of that one.”212 While the accuracy of any given portion of Testimony is always open to doubt, in this case we have a strikingly similar obverse or reciprocal version of the Willkie story. In a Time article, “Willkie and the Bear,” the presidential hopeful, visiting Moscow, attends a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, as well as inspecting munitions factories, anti-aircraft defenses, and Leonid Utesov’s jazz band. His comments about all of these are countered by almost comic repetitions of the Russian demand, “What about a second front?”213 Later, Willkie confirmed Shostakovich’s impression that the Soviets were getting somewhat frustrated by Americans using their enthusiasm for the composer of the Seventh to stall conversations about more substantial military involvement. Attending a party of the intelligentsia, Willkie suggested that Shostakovich himself be flown to America as a goodwill gesture. “We have got to understand each other… . Why can’t Shostakovich be sent to the United States where he already has a host of admirers and where he could help immeasurably in this job of understanding that we both face?”214 Playwright and war correspondent Konstantin Simonov responded sharply, “You see, we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle… . To suggest to us that we should send a musician to the United States, which is also involved in this war and where human lives also hang in the balance, to persuade you with music of something that is as plain as the nose on your face is in a funny way insulting to us. Please don’t misunderstand me.”215 There was no way of smoothing over easily the Soviets’ fury that a European front was being delayed—but, from the point of view of American policymakers and military strategists, Operation Sledgehammer simply could not be implemented without disaster. On the other hand, the parallel Soviet request—for material aid—yielded tremendous results. The increase in Lend-Lease shipments throughout the summer and fall of 1942 was dramatic. In the first quarter of 1942, the United States shipped about $168 million dollars’ worth of aid goods to the Soviet Union; by the fourth quarter, they were shipping $493 million in aid.216 This radical increase, which continued through 1944, was due primarily to logistical improvements. For one thing, in October 1942, a specially designated American task force took over the Persian Corridor through which the microfilm had passed and set to work overhauling the Iranian transport infrastructure entirely.217 At the same time, airfields all along the South Atlantic Route were radically improved, and shipments therefore became increasingly routine. While practical considerations such as these were obviously at the forefront of expanding Lend-Lease, we should also not forget that attitudinal and ideological intangibles were also playing a very material role in the Lend-Lease program. In the months between the announcement that the Seventh would be shipped and its bouquet of fall performances, the United States formulated its Second Lend-Lease Protocol for Russia, put it into action before its official ratification (beginning shipments on July 1, 1942), and finally rubber-stamped it (October 6, 1942). This was not all performed by presidential fiat; congressional delegates clearly felt that their constituents were no longer so hostile to the idea of aid to Russia. The impact of pro-Soviet propaganda on all fronts—the “Leningrad” Symphony being only the most visible of these efforts—clearly had done its work. Shortly after the Germans launched their attack on Russia, only about a third of Americans favored extending Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. By January 1943, an American poll showed that the Lend-Lease program had 80 percent approval.218 Ninety percent of the respondents favored increased food aid to Britain and Russia, even at the expense of domestic food supplies. This is a remarkable turnaround for a nation that just a year and a half earlier had looked on the Soviet Union with unbridled distaste. By the beginning of 1943, Life magazine was crowing that the Russians were “one hell of a people,” who “look like Americans, dress like Americans, and think like Americans”—a dubious erasure of alterity based on the circulation of propaganda like that surrounding the Seventh.219 Even more direct was the aid the Shostakovich symphony inspired in the fund drives of RWR. RWR presented the Seventh (and other works by Shostakovich) across the country to raise awareness for its cause. By the end of 1942, the charity was averaging shipments of about one million dollars’ worth of material aid per month to the Soviet Union—a not inconsiderable amount.220 Their donations exceeded those of the Red Cross.221 Their organizational footprint had spread throughout the United States—by the end of 1942, there were 290 regional committees collecting both goods and monetary donations.222 The aid that they provided for the USSR’s civilian population strongly indicated the growing sense of goodwill between the Allies, especially in the wake of the exhausting victory at Stalingrad. To a great extent, this goodwill can be chalked down to the RWR’s repeated and very public use of the Seventh to diminish a sense of suspicion and cultural “Otherness.” As Victor Seroff insisted in the biography he quickly assembled with the help of Shostakovich’s garrulous aunt, the “Leningrad” Symphony tells the man who hears it, not the story of a stranger, but his own story. It makes him the hero of it; it cries out his own sorrows and celebrates his own victories. Shostakovich states that the beginning of the Seventh depicts the peaceful life before the war in the quiet homes of Leningrad. But to a listener in Iowa it could mean the meadow and the rolling hills around his home. After the fantastic theme of war, Shostakovich has put into his music a lament for the dead—and the tears of a Russian mother and of an American mother are the same.223 This is questionable; it is directly in opposition to other current views of the piece as being invested with meaning precisely because of the specific circumstances of the audience—especially in beleaguered Leningrad. Nonetheless, the dual role of this piece both as a fund-raising draw for specific RWR events and as an ideological tool in easing relations clearly functioned well and contributed materially toward the organization’s success in supporting the Soviet war effort. The machinery of myth-making continued to operate around the symphony, and continues to operate to this day in anecdotes and program notes. In a sense, the Weintraub Papers are a testament to the power of what his publicity blitz added to the symphony. They preserve a flurry of drafts and versions of the story written over the decades; for the rest of Weintraub’s career he was struggling to shape, to reanimate, and to own the narrative that he was part of once. American critics, if anything, judged the Seventh more negatively because they felt the publicity of the circumstances surrounding the work and its transportation had distorted the piece’s reception. The New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote peevishly: “The consensus [among critics] was to the effect that the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony was a work puffed and cannonaded into public attention for the purposes of political propaganda; that the enormous publicity it received in advance of the hearing gave it a fictitious value for conductors and audiences, and that, inherently, the composition was inexcusably long, superficial in its contents, poorly put together, and highly derivative.”224 Downes and others were frustrated by audiences’ enthusiasm for the piece’s narrative; they imagined a noumenal Seventh, pure music shorn of extrinsic context, and wished it could somehow be assessed without topical narrative engagement. As W. H. Haddon Squire proclaimed in the Christian Science Monitor, “Whether a symphony is composed in a submarine, a bomber, a tank, a besieged city, or in a state of patriotic emotion, it is by strictly musical values that the work will ultimately be judged.”225 Reviews such as this suggest yet another element of cultural alterity between the two Allies: a positivist attitude in America toward musical appreciation—that music should be a structure somehow viewed without historical context or ideology—and the Soviet view that musical structures are always imbricated in ideological narrative.226 Writer Nikolai Tikhonov, after attending the defiant Leningrad premiere, believed he heard the “authentic” symphony not due to the shearing away of historical context, but in that context’s vivid presence: “Perhaps it was not so grandiose as in Moscow or New York,” he admitted of the performance. “But in Leningrad it had something authentic, something that joined the storm of music with the storm of combat around the city. It was born in the city, and perhaps only in this city could it have been born.”227 This is a model of musical “authenticity” diametrically opposed to that imagined by American critics of the piece such as Downes. The history of the Seventh is valuable partially because it makes an interesting test case of this ideological difference: given the piece’s architectural peculiarities, it promotes the entanglements of what Christopher H. Gibbs calls its “double story,” the story about the symphony and the programmatic story within the symphony.228 The “invasion” of the first movement’s standard sonata form, in particular, assaults musical structures in a way that demands explanation, unfolding the piece’s intrinsic formal arrangements so that they extend into a larger extramusical context.229 It is, as the New York World-Telegram commented astutely, “both program music and absolute music.”230 As Keri Blickenstaff has pointed out, it was the first movement, with its tendentious structure, on which American reviewers and audiences tended to focus.231 As suggested in this essay, the estimated twenty million American listeners who first heard the piece as Toscanini conducted it heard the piece as part of a very particular story that they had been told for months; they heard it sandwiched structurally between pleas for assistance by Edward Carter of RWR. How were they to understand it divorced from this context? In any case, interpretations of the Seventh, once divorced from its wartime function, would not turn out to be more neutral or objective. The Cold War dismissal of much of Shostakovich’s oeuvre as propaganda—in an age when the Lend-Lease doctrine had fallen steeply into disfavor—was no more objective than the wartime embrace of the Seventh. And we find the physical traces of this ideological shift, too, in Weintraub’s papers. His main report, “Shostakovich: Seventh Symphony: Some Facts Relating to the NBC Broadcast July 19, 1942,” at some point had the name of its addressee torn off in two places. From internal evidence, it was clearly written for a Russian audience, almost certainly for VOKS. It seems likely that Weintraub defaced the document in the McCarthy era, when the then-defunct Am-Rus Music Corp. was cited as a Communist front,232 and when previous correspondence with VOKS was enough, for example, to incriminate Edward R. Murrow in the eyes of the good senator from Wisconsin. Similarly, another Weintraub report to VOKS, “Some Notes on the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” is incomplete in Weintraub’s own copy, but is preserved in full in Moscow, in VOKS’s extant archives.233 We must come to grips, then, with the fact that the experience of listening to the Seventh is one indelibly colored with knowledge. The knowledge of specific historical context becomes part of the aesthetic object, every bit as legitimate and determinative as a prior contextual knowledge of, say, sonata-allegro form or rondo form. As Richard Taruskin has written, the symphony “gives the lie to the dear old dichotomy between the ‘purely musical’ and the ‘extramusical,’ which cannot even be disentangled within the work, let alone in any symbolic explication of it.”234 The operations of propaganda and marketing—socialist and capitalist versions of the same myth-making process—adhere to the work and, indeed, become part of it. Why should we try to expunge them, rather than understand them, attend to them, and experience the work more richly? The Shostakovich Seventh is a compressed message lobbed from one civilization to another, both geographically and conceptually. It straddles overtly the lines between the musical and the extramusical—and, similarly, as an object in a system of wartime exchange, the lines between the notional and the physical. In Russia, especially in Leningrad, this was clear. By affecting morale, the symphony altered the mental, strategic, and even physiological experience of listeners and the musicians themselves. Music forced material change. Like other cultural continuities in the ravaged city, it gave people a reason to go on, casting them not as victims, but as national heroes. A symphony’s score is always a transition point between the immaterial and the embodied—a border station or entrepôt between the mute physical noun of print and an action, a verb, a gerund (a playing, a performance). As Shostakovich’s symphony, embodied on microfilm, traveled to the West, it passed not merely through geographical and political regions of influence, it became a conceptual and material chit of exchange for real and solid goods, crossing the borders of the substantial and the disembodied, the insubstantial and the real. M. T. Anderson, a writer for both young people and adults, won the National Book Award for his novel The Pox Party (2006) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his novel Feed (2002). His nonfiction book Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad appeared on the long-list for the National Book Award in 2015. Email: tobinanderson0@gmail.com Thanks to Dr. Alina Ryabovolova; all translations from Russian correspondence in the article are hers. Thanks also to Dr. David Fanning of the University of Manchester, and to Timothy Nenninger, chief of the Modern Military Record division of the US National Archives and Records Administration. Footnotes 1 “Shostakovich’s Humdinger,” Listen (Fall 2013): 79. 2 For details of these standard elements of the story, see M. T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and Siege of Leningrad (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015); and Brian Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony (London: Quercus, 2013). 3 Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 154. 4 Briton Hadden and Henry Robinson Luce, “Shostakovich and the Guns,” Time, 20 July 1942, 53. 5 Nicolas Slonimsky, “Dmitri Dmitrievitch Shostakovich,” The Musical Quarterly 28 (October 1942): 415. 6 M. Ross, liner notes to “Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7, Op. 60, ‘Leningrad,’” cond. Yuri Temirkanov, Signum Records (2010), 7. 7 Christopher H. 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), 59–113. 8 Terry Klefstad, “The Mass Appeal of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, November 2004, 1–2, http://www.southwestern.edu/academics/bwp/pdf/2006bwp-klefstad.pdf. 9 Eugene Weintraub, “Shostakovich: Seventh Symphony: Some Facts Relating to the NBC Broadcast July 19, 1942,” typescript, Eugene Weintraub Papers, 1929–1992, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division, JPB 12–02, Folder 2.9, 5 (hereafter Weintraub Papers). This document is a postmortem that must have been presented to VOKS in the early fall of 1942. 10 Eugene Weintraub, “Battle of the Conductors,” Music Journal 34, no. 3 (March 1976): 16. 11 Weintraub, “‘Seventh Symphony’ in America,” Weintraub Papers, Fol. 2.9, 1. 12 “Letters to the Editor,” Life, 20 December 1943, 8–11. 13 Weintraub, “Volkov’s ‘Testimony,’” Weintraub Papers, Fol. 2.9, fragmentary and unpaginated. 14 Obituary, “Eugene Weintraub, Music Publisher, 88,” New York Times, 24 November 1992. 15 “Eugene Weintraub,” typescript obituary, Weintraub Papers, Fol. 1.1. 16 David Weintraub (son), email correspondence, 5 July 2019. 17 For more on Grigori Shneerson and his role in international musical exchange, see Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 216–20. 18 Ibid.; Eugene Weintraub, “Musical News from Moscow,” The American Music Lover, July 1937, 91–92. 19 For further details on that later relationship between Leeds, Am-Rus, and Soviet music licensing, see Viktoria Zora, “New Directions in Soviet Music Publishing: Preslit, Am-Rus Music Agency and Anglo-Soviet Music Press Between 1944–48,” in Entangled East and West: Cultural Diplomacy and Artistic Interaction During the Cold War, eds. Simo Mikkonen, Jari Parkkinen, and Giles Scott–Smith (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019). 20 Weintraub Papers, JPB 12–02, Boxes 1 and 2. Telegrams relating to the microfilm transfer are in Fol. 2.8; later memoranda relating to the transfer and premiere are in Fol. 2.9. The full titles of these memoranda are as follows: “Shostakovich: Seventh Symphony: Some Facts Relating to the NBC Broadcast July 19, 1942” (Fol. 2.9), which was written prior to October 1942; “Some Notes on the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” written in early 1943, is missing its first page in the New York cache (Fol. 2.9), but exists in a complete version in the VOKS archives in Moscow, State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132; “Some Additional Notes About the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony” (Fol. 2.9); “The Shostakovich ‘Seventh Symphony’ in America” (Fol. 2.9); “Volkov’s ‘Testimony’” (Fol. 2.9), with several additional untitled fragments of another similar review; and “Letter to the Editor,” ms., dated 1990 (Fol. 2.16), which is an unpublished response to Harlow Robinson’s review of Ian MacDonald’s The New Shostakovich. 21 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” Fol. 2.9, 5. This date—15 January 1941—is cited specifically, despite the fact that on the next page (6), in the body of a transcribed telegram, Weintraub states that the agreement was made in November 1940. This is a rare discrepancy, and is likely simply a typo. Former VOKS music department head Grigori Shneerson also cites 15 January 1941, so that is likely to be the correct date; see “Obrashchennaya k Chelovechestvo,” (Addressing Mankind), Sovetskaya Muzika 5 (1975): 13. In any case, both dates considerably precede the beginning of Shostakovich’s work on the symphony in July 1941. 22 Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Knopf, 2004), 170–71; see also Olga Gladkova, Galina Ustvol’skaia: Muzyka kak navazhdenie (St. Petersburg: Muzyka, 1999), English translation (Galina Ustvolskaya: Music as Enchantment), http://ustvolskaya.org/eng/interview.php. Ustvolskaya claims that Shostakovich told her he had written most of the symphony well before the onset of the Great Patriotic War. Rostislav Dubinsky of the Borodin Quartet presumes that the symphony was written a year before the German invasion, but his wording echoes Testimony’s so closely that it seems likely he came upon this idea there. Compare Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004), 156, with Dubinsky, Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 155. Weintraub dealt with early versions of this rumor; see, for example, his unpublished “Letter to the Editor” (1990), Fol. 2.16, 3. 23 Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 115. 24 Ibid., 119. 25 Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 113. 26 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 12. Rodzinski appears to have renewed his bid in February 1942 as per Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 113. 27 Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 113. 28 For example, “Shostakovitch’s Seventh, Symphony of War in Russia,” Boston Globe, 5 April 1942. This is a fascinating response to the piece—deeply thoughtful and pressing about its form and how that form suggests narrative. In particular, it makes a distinction between the first movement’s clearer trajectory and the more nebulous imagery of the later movements. “I don’t know what they meant to say. All I know is what arose in my imagination and what I felt and experienced.” See also “Red Army’s Fight Told in Symphony,” Washington Post, 2 March 1942; “Shostakovich’s Music of Red Army Hailed,” New York Times, 2 March 1942; and Ralph Parker, “Shostakovich—A Major Voice of the Soviets,” New York Times, 5 April 1942. 29 Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: A Social History of American Concert Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 174–75. According to Stokowski’s own account, he began pressing NBC for the rights to the American premiere in December 1941. Oliver Daniel, Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co, 1982), 454–55. 30 Leopold Stokowski to Arturo Toscanini, 22 June 1942. Toscanini Legacy Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, JPB 90–1, Fol. L97.L (hereafter Toscanini Legacy Collection). 31 Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–40: From Red Square to the Left Bank (New York: Routledge, 2007), 120. 32 Simon Morrison, Lina & Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 109–10, 128, 177, 188. 33 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 5. A corroborating copy of this telegram was later made for Walter Toscanini, and survives in the Toscanini Legacy Collection, JPB 90–1, Fol. L97.M. 34 Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 176. 35 Major Kenny Allred, “The Persian Corridor: Aid to the Soviets,” Military Review 65, no. 4 (April 1985): 24. 36 Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2011), 197. This poll reflects attitudes, therefore, on the eve of the American premieres of the Seventh. 37 For a discussion of the diplomatic niceties of this situation, see George C. Herring, Aid to Russia 1941–1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), esp. 1–39. 38 Allred, “The Persian Corridor,” 19. 39 Herring, Aid to Russia, 19. 40 Herbert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941–1945, Contributions in Military Studies No. 90 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 32. 41 Herring, Aid to Russia, 21, 58. 42 Ibid., 85. 43 As explosively pointed out by Ambassador Standley to a group of American journalists in 1943: see Herring, Aid to Russia, 80; Allred, “The Persian Corridor,” 23. See also Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 66: “Our indecency knew no bounds. Nowhere was mention ever made of the significance of foreign aid.” 44 Herring, Aid to Russia, 28. 45 Wendell Willkie, “One World: Chapter Four,” Associated Press, Daytona Beach Morning Journal, 1 July 1943. He went on to blame this intransigence on the rigors of their political system: “Train a man from boyhood in a system of absolutism, and he will think in blacks and whites.” 46 Herring, Aid to Russia, 37. 47 Allred, “The Persian Corridor,” 22. 48 Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Penguin, 2009), 280. 49 Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Anchor, 2013), 19. Emphasis in original. 50 Overheard by Alexander Werth. Herring, Aid to Russia, 95. 51 Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 287. 52 “Willkie and the Bear,” Time, 5 October 1942, 27. 53 Robert Coakley, “The Persian Corridor as a Route for Aid to the USSR” (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1990), 227, 233, http://www.history.army.mil/books/70–7_09.htm. 54 Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 113. 55 “The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” typescript screenplay, 16 April 1943, 1, Toscanini Legacy Collection, JPB 90–1, Fol. L105D. 56 Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 399–400. 57 Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 137. 58 Ibid., 108. 59 Ibid., 86. 60 Terry Klefstad, “The Reception in America of Dmitri Shostakovich, 1928–1946” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2003), 190. 61 Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin, 177. 62 For the history of VOKS in the 1920s and 1930s, see Stern’s excellent Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1940, the focus of which is actually much tighter than its title suggests: It concentrates throughout on VOKS, MORP, and the Soviet Writers’ Union. For the fate of the organization just after the war and during the Zhdanovshchina, see Fairclough, Classics for the Masses, esp. 198–201. 63 Stern, Western Intellectuals, 144. 64 VOKS report, “United States (1942–43),” State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow (GARF), f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 50. Despite this, Vladimir Bazykin, VOKS agent in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, later returned to Russia and was placed in charge of the whole organization. 65 Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 229. 66 Announcer Ben Grauer credits VOKS in the language of that original telegram to NBC. Radio broadcast, “Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, 1942–07–19,” Toscanini Legacy Collection, LT–10 6238. 67 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 6. It is the transcript of this telegram that anomalously places the original agreement with Koussevitzky in November 1940. Note that Stokowski claimed, in a letter to Ambassador Litvinov (12 February 1942), that he had spoken to Am-Rus about securing the rights to the symphony in December 1941, right around the time the piece was finished. Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 113. Nonetheless, from Am-Rus’s point of view, Stokowski had been beaten to the punch by Koussevitzky by roughly a year—regardless of whether Koussevitzky had contacted Am-Rus in November 1940 or January 1941. Clearly, Am-Rus intended to honor that earlier agreement. 68 Abram Chasins, Leopold Stokowski: A Profile (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1979), 187–90; Harvey Sachs, Toscanini: A Musician of Conscience (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2017), 748–49; Daniel, Stokowski, 447–48. 69 Correspondence from VOKS to Vladimir Bazykin, 30 March 1942, GARF, f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132. 70 Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 113. 71 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 12; “Battle of the Conductors,” 16. 72 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 6. 73 Ibid.; “Some Additional Notes About the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” Fol. 2.9: 4. 74 Weintraub, “Some Notes,” 2. 75 Memo, Loy Henderson, “Sheet Music of the Seventh Symphony by Shostakovich,” 23 May 1942; memo addendum, 25 May 1942 US National Archives, Washington DC, US State Department Central File, 1940–44, 861.4038/1–2. Note that these memos are filed in reverse chronological order. 76 Memo, Loy Henderson, 23 May 1942. 77 Memo addendum, Loy Henderson, 25 May 1942. 78 Handwritten note in ibid. 79 US Office of War Information, “The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony” (16 April 1943), typescript screenplay, Toscanini Legacy Collection, JPB 90–1, Fol. L105.D, 12. Despite this apparently accurate early account of the route, the screenplay has its own mythologized inaccuracies—dramatically, if nonsensically, claiming that the microfilm was created in Leningrad itself and smuggled out across frozen Lake Ladoga on the Road of Life, just as the ice route melted (11); and that “it was only a matter of days from the time it left Leningrad that the score arrived in New York” (13). 80 For example, Charles Cooke and Russel Maloney, in “Talk of the Town: Symphony” (The New Yorker, 18 July 1942, 9), give the route as Moscow to Kuibyshev by rail, by plane to Tehran, by car to Cairo, by plane to South America, and from thence to North America. Nicolas Slonimsky, writing in October 1942 “Dmitri Dmitrievitch Shostakovich” (The Musical Quarterly 28), gives the itinerary of “the symphony of struggle and victory” as “from Russia to Persia, from Persia to Egypt, from Egypt to Brazil, and from Brazil to New York” (415). The major variation in citations of the itinerary is that some sources omit the South American leg of the journey; for example, “Delivering a Score in Microfilm from the Soviet Union by Air” (New York Times, 21 June 1942) and “Shostakovitch [sic] Seventh Symphony Has ‘Chin Up—We’ll Win’ Quality” (Boston Globe, 20 July 1942) both mention stops only in Tehran and Cairo. Kuibyshev, rather than Moscow, is typically listed as the point of origin. 81 Coakley, “Persian Corridor,” 228. 82 James Lea Cate and Wesley Frank Craven, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. I (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 319. 83 The unfortunate PQ17 convoy. Coakley, “Persian Corridor,” 237–38; Herring, Aid to Russia, 65; Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 285–86. 84 Allred, “The Persian Corridor,” 17–18. 85 Cate and Craven, Army Air Forces, 1:319. The name of the “Air Transport Command” was being reassigned at the time that the microfilm was shipped. It is used here to designate the organization that retained it until the end of the war (361–62). 86 VOKS regional report on Iran (1942–43). GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 50. 87 The VOKS archive for the Middle East also contains a letter of 4 December 1942, from the Soviet Embassy in Turkey requesting a score of the Seventh for the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra. GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 9. 88 D. Komissarov to Vladimir Kemenov (VOKS), 15 November 1942. GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 9. 89 Roy Blokker and Robert Dearling, The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich (London: Tantivy Press, 1979), 30. It seems equally likely that the Casablanca route was taken by the British package, and error has inserted it into the American pouch’s itinerary. 90 Allred, “The Persian Corridor,” 19. 91 Michael Steinberg, The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 553. Steinberg includes no citation for this specific detail, but he was active at the height of Eugene Weintraub’s career as an agent and raconteur, and it is not impossible that he got this detail directly from Weintraub. As Weintraub’s papers reveal, he was approached several times in the latter half of the century with questions from journalists about the microfilm transfer, and it would have been quite natural for Steinberg to know him and talk with him about these details. 92 “U.S. Naval Bases—Recife” at “Sixtant: Archives of WWII in the South Atlantic,” http://www.sixtant.net/2011/?option=com_content&task=view&id=290; Cate and Craven, The Army Air Forces, 7:53. 93 It did not appear in the early newspaper reports of the route (listed in note 73), which are much more general. It did, however, appear in other accounts at the time, such as the Office of War Information newsreel about the Seventh listed in note 75 above. 94 Sofia Khentova, D. D. Shostakovich v godï Velikoy otechestvennoy voynï (Shostakovich in the Years of the Great Patriotic War) (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1979), 130. It is unclear, incidentally, why Brian Moynahan, in his Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, believes the microfilm arrived in New York on 25 June, as he gives no citation (461); the date is similar to, but different from, Khentova’s error. Later on the same page, Moynahan cites a New York Times article from 21 June 1942 that describes the arrival of the microfilm in the past tense, clearly contradicting the timeline he just laid out a few paragraphs earlier. He ascribes other information to that article which is, oddly, completely lacking in the original. The article does not provide any “account of [the score’s] arrival on a US Navy aircraft from Brazil” (461). A lively journalistic account of the symphony and siege, the book is unfortunately marred by hasty errors of this kind. 95 This seductively specific date of delivery is contradicted by several highly credible sources, both American, such as the State Department memos mentioned above, and Soviet, for example, Shneerson, “Chelovechostvo,” 113. 96 A few pages earlier in Voynï, she writes: “On March 6, 1942 the rolls of photographic film with the score were sent from Kuibyshev abroad, following a very complicated itinerary—by plane through Tashkent, Ashkhabad, to Iran, from there to Iraq, Egypt, through Africa, the Atlantic, to London” (126). No other source attests to the Tashkent stop. She also appears to have believed that the microfilm went via London to the United States. In fact, the London premiere preceded the New York premiere by almost a month. This version of the itinerary is reproduced in Michael Mishra, A Shostakovich Companion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990), 134. Krzysztof Meyer quotes Khentova directly, also reproducing the odd error that the score went from the United States to London, in Schostakowitsch: Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit, trans. Nina Kozlowski (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag, 1995), 284. 97 “[Toscanini] received the first copy of the score, on film brought to the United States by military ship.” Volkov, Testimony, xxxv. In his later Shostakovich and Stalin, Volkov sketches another itinerary further scrambling Khentova’s error: “But the real public-relations effort came when the work was performed in America, where the press sensationalized the story of the symphony’s creation and the score’s delivery (which smacked of adventure films) by plane from Kuibyshev to Tehran, then by car to Cairo, and then again by plane through Africa to London and across the Atlantic to New York” (181). 98 Weintraub, “Volkov’s ‘Testimony,’” 20 November 1979, typescript, Weintraub Papers, Fol. 2.9: 1. 99 For example, MacDonald, New Shostakovich, 154. 100 In a 1990 manuscript “Letter to the Editor” preserved among Weintraub’s Papers (Fol. 2.16), the agent responds to Harlow Robinson’s review of MacDonald’s The New Shostakovich. In the course of his response, he reminisces about the publicizing of the route: “Millions around the globe continued to read every day the exciting journey of the score, on film, as it was being flown from Kuibishev to America. My small office was crowded with members of the press demanding to know just where the plane had landed on one of its innumerable landings before it reached America. Readers insisted in getting this information.” This is an uncharacteristic distortion—there were no serial updates of the microfilm’s travels, as thrilling as such accounts might have been. Newspapers only mentioned the route once the microfilm had arrived and was already in New York, being processed. As discussed above, during the delivery period no one knew where the score actually was. 101 Handwritten note and stamp on memo addendum, Loy Henderson, 25 May 1942. Henderson, incidentally, went on the next year to set up a subcommittee for musical exchange between the United States and Russia under the aegis of the Division of European Affairs. Fauser, Sounds of War, 104. 102 Weintraub, “Some Additional Notes,” 1–2. 103 D. Zhitomirsky, “Shostakovich,” Muzïkal’naya akademiya 3 (1993): 27. 104 Khentova, Voynï, 58. 105 This story is taken from a bizarrely fanciful article by Ralph Parker, “The Symphonist of Russia’s Travail” (New York Times, 7 February 1943), which claims that Shostakovich delayed his departure from Leningrad because, when he headed across the airfield to the plane, the final movement of the Seventh blew away: “Whether it was the blast of the plane’s engines or some subconscious act it is not clear, but just before entering the plane several pages of the score were swept from his hand and sent floating across the airfield. They were never found and Shostakovich stayed in Leningrad to rewrite the finale.” It is unclear where the reporter got this clearly inaccurate anecdote, though the article is footnoted: “For many facts in this article the writer is indebted to Lucia Kappler, the well-known scenario writer in the Soviet Republic.” Among other errors, the article—with more prophesy than accuracy—refers to Shostakovich’s wife at the time as “Irina.” 106 According to her own account in one of the alternate endings to “The Poem Without a Hero.” Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, ed. Roberta Reeder, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997), 576n, 580n. See also Dmitry Sollertinsky and Ludmilla Sollertinsky, Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, trans. Graham Hobbs and Charles Midgley (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 212; MacDonald, New Shostakovich, “Appendix B,” esp. 273–74. 107 Weintraub, “Some Additional Notes,” 2. 108 U.S. Office of War Information, “The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” screenplay, 14. 109 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 1–3; see also Cooke and Maloney, “Talk of the Town: Symphony.” 110 Weintraub, “The Shostakovich ‘Seventh Symphony’ in America,” 2. 111 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 9. 112 Ibid., 2n, 3n. 113 Ibid., 2. 114 Ibid., 16. 115 Khentova, Voynï, 126, 130–31. 116 D. Shostakovich, “Nazi Desecration of Russian Cultural Monuments,” Voks Bulletin 3, no. 4 (1942): 83. The VOKS Bulletins are not dated, simply numbered. To confuse things, they are numbered by twos, so that the first issue of 1942 is issue 1/2, the second issue is 3/4, and so on. 117 The involvement of various prominent Soviet composers with VOKS in the latter years of the war is a matter that may deserve further academic investigation, especially as those who were involved with the organization’s music section—Myaskovsky (as head of the section), Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian—were also those prominently decried in 1948 during the Zhdanovshchina. Outside of any professional contact, Shostakovich appears to have developed a close social relationship both with VOKS head Grigori Shneerson and with US VOKS operative Vladimir Bazykin, who returned from the States to replace Shneerson. Young Maxim Shostakovich, for example, had a schoolboy crush on Bazykin’s wife, while Galina Shostakovich remembered gawking at this suave couple who had just flown in from America, which seemed to her like another planet. See Michael Ardov, Memories of Shostakovich: Interviews with the Composer’s Children, trans. Rosanna Kelly and Michael Meylac (London: Short Books, 2004), 93–95; see also Grigori Shneerson, “At the Birth of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony,” in Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwartz, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 253–57. Gregor Tassie has talked briefly about Myaskovsky’s engagement in VOKS in his biography Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), esp. 248–49. 118 Hadden and Luce, “Shostakovich and the Guns,” 53–55; see also Gibbs, “The Phenomenon of the Seventh,” 67–71. 119 We can probably dismiss Dmitri Tolstoi’s extreme claim that the famous photo-op was not merely the only time Shostakovich actually wore the helmet, but the only ten minutes he spent acting as a fireman (Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin, 178). It is the lone assertion that the composer’s service was entirely a put-up job. Aron Ostrovsky, an official at the Conservatory, admitted that he had stationed Shostakovich up on the roof only when the coast was clear (Fay, Shostakovich: A Life, 123), and the general impression has been that his service as a fireman was concentrated in July and August of 1941, before German air-raids actually began; see, for example, Khentova, Voynï, “Timeline,” July, n.p. A propaganda account, supposedly penned by Shostakovich himself, suggests that he was placed on the rooftop well after the German investment of the city. E. A. Lind, Sed’maya (Seventh) (St. Petersburg: Gumanistika, 2005), 15. Even as Shostakovich (or a ghostwriter using his name) describes this most extreme scenario of rooftop service, he still admits, “No firebombs fell on my sector and I never got a chance to put one out” (Lind, Sed’maya, 15, trans. here by Ellen Litman). The raw facts about his rooftop service are less straightforward than they appear, and the precise chronology is impossible to determine at this point. 120 See Anne Shreffler’s interesting, though perhaps overstated, cultural unpacking of the iconic Time cover: “Denkmal wider Willen: Der Komponist der Leningrader Symphonie,” in Zwischen Bekenntnis und Verweigerung: Schostakowitsch und die Sinfonie im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen and Laurenz Lütteken (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2005), 109. 121 Weintraub, “Some Additional Notes,” 3. 122 Ibid. 123 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 7. 124 Ibid. (emphasis added). As discussed below, the British scooped both the American premieres. 125 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 7. 126 Ibid., 8. 127 Weintraub, “Battle of the Conductors,” 16. 128 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 11. 129 Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 292. 130 L. Stokowski to A. Toscanini, 22 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L. This letter is discussed below. 131 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 11. 132 A. Toscanini to L. Stokowski, 25 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L. 133 Contractual letter, NBC to Arturo Toscanini, 23 April 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.A. 134 Weintraub, “Remembering Toscanini at Carnegie,” Weintraub Papers, Fol. 1.1, 2–3. 135 Weintraub, “The Shostakovich ‘Seventh Symphony’ in America,” 2. 136 Ibid., 3. 137 Ibid. 138 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 8. 139 Arturo Toscanini to Leopold Stokowski, 23 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L. Suspension points are Toscanini’s. 140 B. H. Haggin to Arturo Toscanini, 19 July, 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.D. Haggin writes praising Toscanini for the performance, though he reiterates several times that “what was moving for me was the honesty of emotion and musicianship that I felt in the performance and not in the music.” 141 B. H. Haggin to Eugene Weintraub, 10 April 1966, Weintraub Papers, Fol. 1.3. 142 Eugene Weintraub to B. H. Haggin, 20 April 1966, Weintraub Papers, Fol. 1.3. 143 Am-Rus Music Corporation to Dmitri Shostakovich, c/o VOKS, telegram, n.d., Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.M. 144 L. Stokowski to D. Shostakovich, 16 June 1942, GARF, f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132; D. Shostakovich to L. Stokowski, n.d., GARF, f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132. For more on the aborted attempts to use the piece in film during the war, see M. T. Anderson, “The Shostakovich Seventh on the Silver Screen: American Propaganda Films and the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony,” DSCH Journal 51 (July 2019): 13–24. 145 Eugene Weintraub to Arturo Toscanini, 18 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, L97. L. Bruno Zirato worked for Arthur Judson at Columbia Concerts Corp., and as such, had long and complicated relationships with both Toscanini and with Stokowski. In 1942, Stokowski himself was officially managed by Michael Myerberg, and would only later switch to Columbia Concerts. Daniel, Stokowski, 496–97. 146 Shneerson, “Chelovechostvo,” 114. 147 Telegram, Walter Toscanini to Dmitri Shostakovich, 18 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy, Fol. L97.L. 148 Eugene Weintraub to Arturo Toscanini, 18 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L.97.L. 149 D. D. Shostakovich to Vladimir Bazykin, telegram, 18 July 1942, Weintraub Papers, Fol. 2.8. 150 The entire correspondence is preserved in the Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L; see also Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 174–75, Chasins, Leopold Stokowski, 190; Sachs, Toscanini, 758–59; and Daniel, Stokowski, 454–58. 151 Arturo Toscanini to Leopold Stokowski, 23 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L. 152 Leopold Stokowski to Arturo Toscanini, 24 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L. 153 Arturo Toscanini to Leopold Stokowski, 25 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L. 154 Chasins, Leopold Stokowski, 190. 155 Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 165; Daniel, Stokowski, 462–67. 156 Dmitri Shostakovich to Walter Toscanini, telegram, 24 June 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.L. 157 Weintraub, “Battle of the Conductors,” 17. 158 Daniel, Toscanini, 457. Though Daniel was not privy to all of these transactions, he clearly understood the general outline of events. 159 Khentova, V mire Shostakovicha (From the World of Shostakovich) (Moscow: Kompozitor, 1996), 26. 160 Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 113. 161 Weintraub, “Some Additional Notes,” 2. 162 Newspapers as far away as Buenos Aires cited Weintraub as an “exclusive” source of information about the symphony. Donald Richards, “Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony,” Buenos Aires Herald, 17 February 1943. 163 Weintraub, “‘Seventh Symphony’ in America,” 1–2. 164 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 16. 165 Ibid., 10. 166 Haddon and Luce, “Shostakovich and the Guns,” 54–55. The New York Times was more neutral in its announcement that Koussevitzky had received the rights to the first concert performance in the United States—“Koussevitzky Gets Shostakovich 7th,” 16 June 1942—while misleadingly referring to it as “the first concert performance in the Western hemisphere.” 167 Weintraub, “The Shostakovich ‘Seventh Symphony’ in America,” 3. 168 On Toscanini’s four rehearsals, see Weintraub, “Some Additional Notes,” 5. On Samosud’s forty rehearsals, in “Some Notes,” Weintraub quotes Samosud in a passage worth reproducing: “Never in my 33 years as conductor have I ever seen professional musicians perform a work in a state of agitation verging on tears. Forty rehearsals were held in that city before the first performance and the playing time was 86 minutes. For this performance we hit upon the idea of placing the trumpeter, at the concluding part of the first movement, apart from the orchestra behind the curtain. This produced the necessary impression of distance and the composer approved of this idea” (4). 169 Cooke and Maloney, “Talk of the Town: Symphony,” 9. 170 Weintraub, “Some Facts,” 15. 171 Weintraub, “The Shostakovich ‘Seventh Symphony’ in America,” 4. 172 John M. Harlan, “Memorandum Concerning the Origin, Nature and Activities of Russian War Relief, Inc.,” typescript, 3 February 1942, 1, 8. See also “Russian War Relief: Origin and Nature of Fund, 1942,” carton 3, Fol. 6, Edward C. Carter Collection, University of Vermont Library. 173 For a more complete snapshot of the organization, see Edward C. Carter’s “Russian War Relief,” Slavonic and East European Review, American Series 3, no. 2 (August 1944): 61–74. 174 Harlan, “Memorandum,” 12, 20. 175 “Mrs. Fuller to Open House for Concert to Aid Russian War Relief,” Boston Globe, 10 May 1942. 176 On the benefit concert, see Isabel Morse Jones, “Hollywood Pays Tribute to Shostakovich with Recital,” Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1942. On Groucho Marx’s attendance, FBI Memorandum, “Julius H. Marx, wa. Graucho [sic] Marx,” Doc. LA 100–46665, 1 December 1953, 9. The document does not inspire much confidence in the FBI’s intelligence gathering, not least because they persist, over some seventy-five pages, in spelling their subject’s name wrong. 177 Shneerson, “Chelovechestvo,” 114; also see Downes, “Shostakovich 7th Has U.S. Premiere,” New York Times, 20 July 1942. 178 “Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra,” radio broadcast, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Toscanini Legacy Collection, LT–10 6238/39. 179 Ibid. 180 Downes, “Shostakovich 7th Has U.S. Premiere.” 181 “Music: Shostakovich Premiere,” Time, 27 July 1942. 182 U.S. Office of War Information, “The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony,” screenplay, 19. This was about double the audience of the typical NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast. Fauser, Sounds of War, 137. 183 “Russian Relief Benefitted by Shostakovitch’s [sic] Seventh,” Boston Globe, 15 August 1942. 184 Gibbs, “The Phenomenon of the Seventh,” 98. 185 Leo Gruliow and Sidonie Lederer, Russia Fights Famine: A Russian War Relief Report (New York: Russian War Relief, [1943]), 1, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924013759117;view=1up;seq=17. 186 The authenticity of Volkov’s Testimony is hotly disputed. For the major salvos in the debate, see Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, Shostakovich Reconsidered (London: Toccata Press, 1998); and Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ed., A Shostakovich Casebook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Shostakovich scholarship as a whole seems to have settled on the uneasy conclusion summarized by Pauline Fairclough, that Testimony is “a document that we cannot take at face value but which in places seems to ring true… . We just do not know where Shostakovich’s voice ends and Volkov’s begins.” From “Facts, Fantasies, and Fictions: Recent Shostakovich Studies,” Music and Letters 863 (August 2005): 452–60. 187 Volkov, Testimony, 25. Ironically, according to Maxim Shostakovich, the composer was quite enthusiastic about Stokowski’s performances of his music: “I remember that my father often spoke passionately about Stokowski’s interpretations of his compositions, about his excellence in the art of conducting, and that he often expressed his personal ‘sympathie’ toward Stokowski as a person.” Daniel, Stokowski, 458. 188 For example, Khentova, V mire, 26; but also see Sachs, Toscanini, 759–60. 189 The symphony was broadcast on NBC, 13 December 1942; it was recently remastered on CD, Pristine PASC 527. 190 Weintraub, “Some Additional Notes,” 5. 191 Shostakovich to Am-Rus, telegram, 13 July 1942, Weintraub Papers, Fol. 2.8. The only metronome markings that vary at all significantly from later printed scores are in the fourth movement, which the telegram instructs should be launched at W = 138, switching, at measure 179, to Q = 96, tending to emphasize the disparity between the two halves of the finale, slightly brisker in the first section, slightly slower and broader in the second section. 192 Volkov, Testimony, 25. 193 Weintraub, untitled, n.d., miniaturized, unpaginated fragments of Volkov criticism, Weintraub Papers, Fol. 2.9. 194 Mishra, A Shostakovich Companion, 135; but compare the slightly different account of the composer’s and conductor’s mutual dissatisfaction given in Sachs, Toscanini, 759–60. 195 Pauline Fairclough, “The ‘Old’ Shostakovich,” Music & Letters 88, no. 2 (May 2007): 275n. See also Moynahan, Symphony and Siege, 459, where he states that the date 22 June simply “slipped past” without any performance at all, likely an error caused by Moynahan’s confusing the Western radio premiere (22 June) with the Western concert premiere (29 June). 196 For example, F. Bonavia, “Shostakovich in London,” New York Times, 2 August 1942; W. H. Haddon Squire, “Shostakovitch at the Proms,” Christian Science Monitor, 1 August 1942. 197 Despite the fact that the Christian Science Monitor, for example, reported on the earlier British premiere of the piece, L. A. Sloper began his later review of the NBC performance in the same paper by trumpeting, “As all the world knows by now, the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich had its first performance in the Western Hemisphere on the afternoon of July 19, with Arturo Toscanini conducting.” L. A. Sloper, “The Shostakovich Seventh,” Christian Science Monitor, 25 July 1942; also see New York Times: “Koussevitzky Gets Shostakovich 7th,” 16 June 1942; and “Symphony to Be Heard,” 29 June 1942. In Time’s cover story, the British premiere is squeezed out of the story into a footnote. Hadden and Luce, “Shostakovich and the Guns,” 53. Weintraub himself habitually referred to the American premieres as premieres in the Western Hemisphere, for example in “Some Notes,” 7. 198 Weintraub, “Some Additional Notes,” 5–6. 199 Gibbs, “The Phenomenon of the Seventh,” 64, charts some of the most prominent performances. 200 Meyer, Schostakowitsch, 286. 201 Gibbs, “The Phenomenon of the Seventh,” 88. The propaganda value of greetings like this was explicit. The Office of War Information, for example, asked Toscanini to come up with a cabled birthday greeting to Shostakovich specifically “emphasizing the cultural attachment between Russia and America.” Edward Barrett [OWI] to Arturo Toscanini, telegram, 23 September 1942, Toscanini Legacy Collection, Fol. L97.M. 202 “Shostakovich’s Seventh,” Life, 9 November 1942, 99. 203 Most notably Christopher H. Gibbs’s “The Phenomenon of the Seventh” but also in Keri Blickenstaff’s “Re-Examining the Warhorse: Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony” (MA thesis, University of Georgia, 2010); and Terry Klefstad’s “Mass Appeal” and “Reception.” Though it focuses on a British context and on the Fifth Symphony rather than the Seventh, see also Pauline Fairclough’s “The ‘Old’ Shostakovich,” which deals usefully with the vicissitudes of Shostakovich’s public image in the West. 204 Quoted by Gibbs, “The Phenomenon of the Seventh,” 97. 205 “The transportation of his score was provided, not by a music agent, but by the governments of the United Nations and under their protection.” Victor Ilyich Seroff with Nadejda Galli-Shohat, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer (New York: Knopf, 1943), 4. At the time this was written (1942–43), the phrase “United Nations” did not connote the official body as we now know it, but was generally a synonym for “the Allies.” Seroff may have believed that UNIO, which did already bear that name, was involved in coordinating the transport, as they were in several other almost identical projects. They were not involved: UNIO’s extensive meeting minutes for 1942 are preserved intact at the United Nations Archive in New York City (S–0537, Box 0003), and contain no mention whatsoever of arranging for the transport of the symphony. 206 Fauser, Sounds of War, 261. 207 Hugo Leichtentritt, Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the New American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), 134; also Fauser, Sounds of War, 258–60. 208 Nicholas Tawa, The Great American Symphony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 61. See also Thomson’s review of Harris’s Fifth: “His tendency to write as if the work he is writing has already been judged a masterpiece (at least by himself) even before it has been composed is not one of Mr. Harris’s most winning traits.” Dan Stehman, Roy Harris: A Bio–Bibliography (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 392. 209 Roy Harris to Eugene Weintraub, 1 March 1943. Weintraub Papers, Fol. 1.3. Weintraub is here called by his first name, Sam, which appears to have been how he identified himself early in his career. 210 See Béla Bartók, “Introduction,” in Concerto for Orchestra, ed. Klára Móricz (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 2017), 17–18. 211 Coakley, “Persian Corridor,” 238–39. 212 Volkov, Testimony, 137. 213 “Willkie and the Bear,” 27. 214 Willkie, “One World,” 4. 215 Ibid., 5. 216 Van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear, 165. 217 Allred, “The Persian Corridor,” 20. 218 Herring, Aid to Russia, 90. 219 Ibid., 94. 220 Gruliow and Lederer, Russia Fights Famine, 1. 221 Carter, “Russian War Relief,” 66. 222 Ibid., 67. 223 Seroff, Life and Background, 5–6. 224 “Essence of a Score: Toscanini’s Treatment Casts New Light on Shostakovich Seventh,” New York Times, 18 October 1942. 225 Haddon Squire, “Shostakovitch [sic] at the Proms,” 10. 226 See, for example, Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1970 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 180; and Olin Downes’s own admission of this aesthetic/theoretical difference in “Shostakovich 7th Has U.S. Premiere.” Also see Emily Abrams Ansari, “Musical Americanism, Cold War Consensus Culture, and the U.S.—USSR Composers’ Exchange, 1958–60,” The Musical Quarterly 97 (October 2014): 368–69. 227 Moynahan, Symphony and Siege, 499. 228 Gibbs, “The Phenomenon of the Seventh,” 60–61. 229 An article published under Shostakovich’s name, “O podlinnoi i mnimoi programmnosti,” Sovetskaya muzyka 5 (1951): 77, confirms the intentionality of this manipulation of sonata form, if such evidence were needed. See David Fanning, “Shostakovich: The Present-Day Master of the C Major Key,” Acta Musicologica 73, fasc. 2 (2001): 132–33. 230 Gibbs, “The Phenomenon of the Seventh,” 89. 231 Blickenstaff, “Re-Examining the Warhorse,” 1–2 and passim. 232 House Committee on Un-American Activities, Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Documents, 1951), 24. This document cites the “American-Russian Music Corporation” as a Communist front based on a 1948 report by the California Committee on Un-American activities. By 1948, Am-Rus had actually been dismantled, and Eugene Weintraub, along with many of the agency’s clients, had been folded into the Leeds Music Corporation. We do not know whether Weintraub was aware that Am-Rus had posthumously been accused of Communist collaboration. He did write pugnaciously, “Surely it was thought, Weinie is a commie. Wrong. Never joined … anything.” Undated fragment of a letter about Volkov’s Testimony, with no heading, Fol. 2.9. Punctuation is Weintraub’s. 233 GARF, f. 5283, op. 14, d. 132. 234 Richard Taruskin, review,“Dmitri Shostakovich ‘Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad” op. 60 (1941), Commentary by Manashir Yakubov,” Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 50, no. 2 (December 1993): 761. See also his expanded version of this review, “Shostakovich and Us,” in Shostakovich in Context, ed. Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–42. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Flight of the Seventh: The Voyage of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony to the West
JF - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdz014
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-flight-of-the-seventh-the-voyage-of-dmitri-shostakovich-s-yz99a9Xr1C
SP - 200
VL - 102
IS - 2-3
DP - DeepDyve
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