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Realising the new work’s propaganda value, in early October the authorities evacuated Shostakovich and his family by air to Moscow. From Moscow they travelled, in a chaotically overcrowded train (for a horrible half-hour the symphony’s manuscript was thought lost), to the Volga town of Kuibyshev. There, despite shared living quarters and desperate anxiety for his mother, sister and in-laws left behind in Leningrad, Shostakovich finished the Seventh’s orchestration.

Its various premieres — in Kuibyshev on 5 March 1942, in Moscow (in the Kremlin’s Hall of Columns) on the 29th, and in London and New York in June and July — were sensations. ‘The Seventh Symphony’, Pravda exulted after the Kuibyshev performance, ‘is the creation of the conscience of the Russian people. . Hitler didn’t scare Shostakovich; Shostakovich is a Russian man.’6 Attending the Moscow concert, Olga Berggolts passionately wished that her dead husband could be there too — ‘Oh what sorrow that I can’t tell Kolya about it. How terrible and unfair that he can’t hear it. . Inside I was weeping all the time, listening to the first part, and was so exhausted from the unbearable tension that the middle section disappeared somehow. Did they hear it in Leningrad?’7 For Alexander Werth, also listening in Moscow, the symphony reflected ‘infinite pity for the Russian people’, and its sinister pipe and drum march, repeated eleven times at ever-increasing volume, the feeling that ‘naked evil, in all its stupendous, arrogant, inhumanly terrifying power’, was overrunning the country.8

The symphony’s London premiere — held on the first anniversary of Barbarossa — was broadcast across the Empire. Its opening movement, the announcer intoned in what he was instructed should be a ‘sincere’ and ‘enthusiastic’ voice, introduced two themes. The first was ‘straightforward and sturdy, like the plain, tanned faces of the millions of Soviet men and women who gathered together on Sunday 22 June last year, in the midst of peaceful, joyous life’. The second symbolised the German invasion — ‘the theme of the Fascists — brutal, senseless, implacable’. (References to its ‘insidious’ and ‘sardonic’ nature were cut from the script.) ‘If you have ears to hear and heart to feel’, the announcer sonorously concluded, ‘I am sure you will agree that that music tells a story of sublime heroism, of unquenchable faith in victory.’9 A proms performance followed under the baton of Sir Henry Wood, for which six thousand people packed the Albert Hall.

In New York the symphony sparked a tussle between the great conductors Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, both of whom lobbied the Soviet embassy for the honour of directing its first performance. Toscanini and his NBC Orchestra won, and though Shostakovich privately loathed his interpretation (‘He minces it up and pours a disgusting sauce all over it’), it glued millions of Americans to their radios. Time magazine celebrated the event by putting ‘Fireman Shostakovich’ on the cover, strapline ‘Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad, he heard the chords of victory’. During the 1942–3 season the symphony was performed sixty-two times in the United States, many of the concerts turning into public demonstrations of support for a second front. Determined not to be outdone again by NBC, CBS paid the Soviet government $10,000 for whatever symphony Shostakovich composed next. Shostakovich himself, though praised to the skies in the Soviet press, was unnerved by it all — ‘A new success’, he later said, ‘meant a new coffin nail.’10

The Seventh’s final and most poignant premiere was that held in Leningrad itself, on 9 August 1942. The city’s more prestigious orchestras having been evacuated as the siege ring closed, the performance fell to the Radio Committee Symphony, directed by Karl Eliasberg. Though severely depleted by the draft, the orchestra had continued to perform as the mass-death winter set in. It had given its last public concert (of Tchaikovsky) on 14 December, in the Philharmonia’s freezing blue and white Great Hall, and its last live broadcast on New Year’s Day 1942, of excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden (the lead tenor, I. A. Lapshenkov, barely made it through his aria and died the same evening). A few weeks later Berggolts overheard Makogonenko dictating a memo: ‘Leader, first violins — dead. Bassoon — near death. Senior percussionist — dead.’11 Twenty-seven members of the orchestra had perished altogether.