This was a siege, rather than a battle.
In the late summer of 1941, the city of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then known) was caught between the respective advances of the German army from the south and the German–allied Norwegian army from the north. The siege began on 8 September 1941, when German forces severed the last road to the city. Soviet forces managed to open a narrow land corridor on 18 January 1943, but the siege was not lifted until over a year later – 27 January 1944 – 872 days (two years, four months and 19 days) after it began. More than 600,000 Russians had died.
Dmitri Shostakovich, 35 years old at the time, was head of the Leningrad Conservatoire's piano department. He began work on his Seventh Symphony in the first hot days of July. "Neither savage raids, German planes, nor the grim atmosphere of the beleaguered city could hinder the flow," he recalled. "I worked with an inhuman intensity I have never before reached."
After enduring the terrible conditions for a month, Shostakovich agreed to be evacuated to Moscow, taking the completed first three movements of the symphony with him. In October 1941 he and his family were evacuated once more, along with the Soviet government, to the temporary capital of Kuibyshev (now known as Samara), on the river Volga, where he finished the symphony in December 1941. (Samara is some 1,000 miles from Leningrad/St. Petersburg, with Moscow roughly half–way in between.)
The symphony takes over 78 minutes to perform; the first movement alone takes nearly half an hour. Shostakovich asks for an equally gargantuan orchestra – including eight horns, six trombones, two harps, a piano, three side drums and a full complement of other percussion instruments. The first performance was given on March 5, 1942 by the Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, which had also been evacuated to Kuibyshev. Shostakovich microfilmed the score and smuggled it, via Tehran and Cairo, to London and New York. On 22 June 1942 – the first anniversary of the Soviet Union's entry into the war – Sir Henry Wood conducted a performance which was broadcast by the BBC, and on 19 July Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in another broadcast performance. Shostakovich was featured on the cover of Time magazine.
The symphony was finally performed in Leningrad itself on 9 August 1942. For the remainder of the 1940s it enjoyed great popularity; but it later fell out of favour, only to regain popularity in the 1960s. Despite its often obvious effects (says Classic FM), Shostakovich's Seventh is a stirring piece of contemporary history. Wikipedia describes it as "a testament to the 27 million Soviet people who lost their lives in World War II."
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