From today's Guardian/Observer: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329749166-102280,00.html
How the good land turned bad
Peter Beaumont
Sunday March 18, 2007
[...]
The rehearsal space of Baghdad's Symphony Orchestra is in the capital's largely Shia Shaab district. Hassam al-Din al-Ansari, aged 64, the orchestra's composer and principal violinist, is in his office tuning his violin and improvising little arpeggios as he does. Like most in the orchestra before the invasion, he sustained his poorly paid musical career with another job, in al-Ansari's case as a deputy manager in the Ministry of Industry.
It is an oppressive day late in September 2006. The electricity, inevitably, is down. It has been out for 40 hours, one of the musicians complains. Without a generator to light and cool the theatre, the musicians arriving to warm up before rehearsing find themselves on a stage playing in a stifling gloom peering at scores lit only by a distant skylight. In the heat, the stage smells of sweat and dust and resin.
When it becomes too dark, the musicians abandon their efforts to use the stage and cram into the kitchen, which has windows on two sides. It is instantly a pick-a-stick of competing elbows, bows, flutes, music stands, cellos and French horns.
'We are challenging the situation,' al-Ansari says with a sigh, 'by trying to not be too far from the public. We are trying to put on a concert every month, but circumstances are very difficult.' So the performances that the orchestra do put on are private and rarefied, little events for a small audience who do not have to travel very far or have their own security, and put on mainly at the city's two subscription-only 'country clubs'. Other events are by invitation only, for government officials and diplomats from the Green Zone. Even Iraq's music has become gated.
The difficulties in assembling the musicians for rehearsal have led to another kind of fragmentation: of the very music itself. Complicated symphonies, al-Ansari admits, are too difficult to prepare, especially with no certainty that all the musicians will be able to appear. Instead, their performances are dominated by overtures, fragments of larger works and short pieces - Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. The war, too, has forced the orchestra to break into smaller units, ad hoc chamber ensembles more easy to assemble and to perform around the city when they can.
'We could just stop work. We could submit,' says al-Ansari, 'but we are determined to challenge the times we live in and to do our best. In the 1950s, we used to get a lot of Russian films in Iraq. We were just talking about this a quarter of an hour ago ... there was a film from the Second World War, from the battle of Leningrad, about the orchestra there that continued broadcasting on the radio through the German attack. The film showed different players and how they came to the concert and the difficulties they had because of the fighting. I feel,' he says with a sad resignation, 'we are living that old film.'
[...](My emphasis)
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A story from the siege of Leningrad (8 Sep 1941 - 27 Jan 1944)
http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv12n2/leningrad.htm
"The Neva will start flowing upstream sooner than this city surrenders to the Nazis."
[...]
The peaceful life of Leningrad was interrupted by the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Germans had failed to capture the city in the first months of the war, therefore they imposed a siege on Leningrad. ‘Wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the Earth,’ was the directive of Hitler. ‘The defeat of the Soviet Union leaves no room for the continued existence of that large urban area. Finland, too, sees no point in the continued existence of that city so close to its new border... A tight siege should be imposed on the city and fire from all calibres of guns and incessant bombing raids should reduce the city to ashes...’
[...]
Besides their daily toil of defending the city, keeping its plants and factories rolling and tending to the wounded, the Leningraders were also writing poems and music. It was then and there that the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his famous Seventh Symphony that immediately became a stirring anthem to the unvanquished city on the Neva.
Refusing to leave the city with the rest of the Philharmonic Society early in the war, Shostakovich was bombarding the local recruitment centres with demands to send him out to the frontlines. All his pleas turned down, he then joined his friends digging trenches outside the city. After his attempt to join the militia also fell flat, Shostakovich signed with the local firefighters squad and, during his duty hours on the Conservatory roof, was putting out incendiary bombs the Nazis dropped on the city. It was during those trying days that he actually decided to write his larger-than-life Seventh Symphony…
In a radio message broadcast on September 20th, 1941 Dmitri Shostakovich said: ‘An hour ago I finished writing the second part of my big new symphony… Why am I telling you this? Because I want all the Leningraders who are listening to me to know that life goes on and we are all doing our duty…’
The Leningrad radio orchestra was now too small to play the Seventh Symphony though. The score called for 80 musicians and there were only a handful of them spared by famine and the enemy bullets at the frontlines... Then they made a radio announcement inviting the musicians who were still alive to join in. Unit commanders were instructed to dispatch their musicians with special passes, which said that they had been relieved from combat duty to perform the Seventh Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich.
Finally, they all got together for the first rehearsal, their hands roughened from combat duty, trembling from malnutrition but everybody still clinging to their instruments as if for their own life… That was the shortest rehearsal ever, lasting for just 15 minutes because that was all the emaciated players could afford… And play they did and conductor Karl Eliasberg who was trying his best not to go down himself now knew that the orchestra would play the symphony…
August 9th, 1942 was just another day in the Nazi-besieged city. But not for the musicians, though, who, visibly uplifted, were busily preparing for the first ever public performance of the Seventh Symphony. Karl Eliasberg later wrote recalling that memorable day: ‘The chandeliers were all aglow in the Philharmonic Hall jam packed by writers, artists and academics. Military men were also very much in presence, most of them right from the battlefront…’
The conductor, his tuxedo dangling freely from his emaciated body, stepped to the pulpit, his baton trembling in his hand. The next moment it went up and the hall filled with the stirringly beautiful chords of one of the best music works Shostakovich had ever written in his whole life…
When the last chord trailed off there was a momentary silence. Then the whole place literally exploded with thunderous applause. Everybody rose to their feet, tears rolling down their faces, tears of joy and pride…
Buoyed by the deafening success of their performance and visibly proud of themselves, the musicians were happily hugging each other like soldiers after winning a major battle…
A German soldier who picked up the radio broadcast of that memorable concert was stunned by what he heard: ‘When I heard Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony being broadcast from the famine-stricken Leningrad I realised that we would never be able to take it. Realising that, I surrendered…’
*****************************************What can I add?
He doesn't think of science fiction horrors, or Middle Eastern horrors, or ancient history horrors, or the Huns (the real ones), or Stalinist horrors. He thinks of the Nazi war machine attempting to reduce a great city to ashes.
Go Bush!
Go Blair!
Go hang.
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Ленинград - город герой
Leningrad - Gorod Geroy (Hero City)
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Some photos I took in St Pete a couple of years ago
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xjy/sets/72157594556340036/
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