Leningrad Symphony

Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 60 (titled Leningrad), was written c. 1939–40. Initially dedicated to the life and deeds of Vladimir Lenin, Shostakovich decided instead to dedicate the symphony to the city of Leningrad on its completion in December 1941. The work remains one of Shostakovich's best-known compositions.

The piece soon became very popular in both the Soviet Union and the West as a symbol of resistance to Nazi totalitarianism and militarism. It is still regarded as the major musical testament of the estimated 25 million Soviet citizens who lost their lives in World War II. The symphony is played frequently at the Leningrad Cemetery, where half a million victims of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad are buried.

The symphony is Shostakovich's longest, and one of the longest in the repertoire, with performances taking approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. The scale and scope of the work is consistent with Shostakovich's other symphonies as well as with those of composers considered to be his strongest influences, including Bruckner, Mahler, and Stravinsky.

The symphony is written in the conventional four movements.

The first movement (25–30 minutes) takes on the sonata form, a common structural convention in symphonic composition since the 18th century. The original title for this movement was "War". It begins with a rousing, majestic theme played by all the strings, which is subsequently echoed by woodwinds. The melody continually rises in pitch through the first moments of the piece, with octave-long runs in the strings. This is followed by a slower, more tranquil section driven by flutes and lower strings.

This quieter part leads directly into the so-called invasion theme, a 22-bar ostinato that will pervade much of the movement. This "march" is actually a pastiche of "Da geh' ich zu Maxim," from Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow for its latter half and a theme from Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the work for which the composer suffered his first official denunciation in 1936. The prominent sequence of six descending notes in the seventh bar, derived from the Lehar, has been said by musicologist Ian McDonald to resemble the third bar of Deutschlandlied. This composite is first played softly by the strings pizzicato, then is echoed by multiple instruments accompanied by the snare drum.

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