‘Leningrad’ Symphony

Dmitri Shostakovich's seventh symphony, Op. 60, awarded the Stalin prize in 1942 and first performed in Kuibishev (present-day Samara, Russia) by the evacuated Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra of Moscow on 5 March 1942. The symphony was written during World War I, whilst Shostakovich was trapped in the besieged city of Leningrad.

The first movement is famous for its huge crescendo which is based around a single repeating melody, usually taken to be representative of the approach of the Nazi armies – the tune is a parody of a melody from The Merry Widow, one of Hitler's favourite operas. Shostakovich's march was subsequently parodied by Béla Bartók in his Concerto for Orchestra (1944).