Dmitri Shostakovich intended his Seventh Symphony, nicknamed the “Leningrad,” to depict the experience of his beloved home city under the desperately cruel conditions of the Nazi siege in 1941–42. In April 1942, Shostakovich had the score of the symphony copied onto microfilm, placed in a protective tin box, and flown to Tehran. From there, it travelled by car to Cairo and then by plane to South America before finally reaching the United States.

Before the score had even arrived, two contemporary titans of classical music, the conductors Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski, were vying for the privilege of conducting its US premiere. Toscanini won out, and approximately twenty million people listened to his performance of the symphony, broadcast live via radio in July of that year. Many celebrated the music as the voice of a people at the sharp end of the fascist menace.

In August 1942, the symphony finally received its first performance in the besieged city of Leningrad itself. A military plane had to be deployed to bring the score into the city. By that time, the membership of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra had been reduced to just fifteen people, with the rest either engaged in the fighting or dead. The surviving musicians were emaciated, like most of the city’s population, but the Soviet authorities granted them extra rations for the performance.