City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

man in his fifties, the conductor, Eliasberg, a stalwart of the Kirov company, elegant, with swept-back, nicotine-stained hair, pale bullfrog-like cheeks and a pinched mouth, came threading his way through the second violins to reach the rostrum. He paused halfway up the steps, catching Rossel’s eye for a split second, giving him a curt nod.

This was the man who had conducted Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in the depths of the siege, with the worst not over by a long way. He had taken a band of starving musicians, forced them to defy their privations, master Shostakovich’s gigantic work and hurl it into the face of the surrounding Germans. Vronsky had spoken of the toughness of mind necessary to ‘make the harsh decisions truly great art demands of its creators’. Eliasberg was notorious for it – denying his players half of their meagre bread rations until they did his bidding, hauling them from their beds and demanding they put bow to string, mouth to reed, forcing them to play on.

Eliasberg turned to the orchestra and quelled it into silence with a glare.

For the second half of that evening’s rehearsal, the conductor declared, they were to receive a huge honour: the opera would be conducted by the great composer himself, Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky, ‘People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, winner of the Stalin Prize, winner of . . .’

Whatever else the maestro was winner of was drowned out by tremendous applause as the mighty frame of Vronsky, now shorn of his wolfskin and in a dark three-piece suit, trudged through the pit to take his place on the rostrum. Eliasberg, keen either to learn or to pay calculated homage, found a space at the bottom of the steps that led up to the rostrum and sat down.

Vronsky pointed at the oboe for an A and the orchestra began tuning up. On stage, a chorus of no fewer than one hundred singers gathered in the ruins of Leningrad to bury their dead and shake their fists at the Fuhrer.

Vronsky looked slightly behind him, along the front row of seats towards Rossel. If he was displeased, he didn’t let it show. His gaze fell instead upon the lieutenant’s still-gloved hands. Rossel had rested them on the brass rail along the first row; he drew them back, not knowing where to place them, before thrusting them in his pockets. Vronsky smiled.

‘Let us begin,’ he murmured.

The lights in the auditorium began to dim – as if, it seemed to Rossel, the great man controlled even the heavens – and a hush blanketed the stage and pit as he raised his arms.

It began with an undulating pulse in the violas and violins, a motion suggesting quiet bleakness, a troubled peace. The key was E flat – the hero’s key. An abrupt cres-cendo and a sudden return to pianissimo was the only change for perhaps sixteen bars, before a clarinet sounded a note of slight dissonance, an F, like a drop of paint in clear water.

More strings joined in, the pulse beating a little harder. A bassoon stabbed a hard A – sforzato, subito diminuendo. Vronsky’s hands were barely moving; he cued in one of the French horns with his eyes – an E flat, the core note. The sound was rising now, the cellos and basses adding more dissonance but gradually, in layers, as the major key became minor with a muscular clench of Vronsky’s fist.

On stage, the members of the chorus rose from the rubble of the flattened city. Rossel looked for Marina but the survivors of the blockade, the tank makers, the armaments workers, the firefighters, trench diggers and soldiers, the lorry drivers who risked the Road of Life across the frozen Lake Ladoga to bring supplies to the city that bore Lenin’s name, they were all one. The people.

The oboe played a B flat, this time sustained, with a sweet, shallow vibrato, and the chorus began a soft chant.

Here men work without ceasing, rest and sleep forgotten – burdened and labouring with dread . . .

Was that Marina? A slim and feminine figure stepped forward to the sound of a repeated staccato G from the principal trumpet. Now Vronsky turned towards the mass of his first violins and now the music became sublime, epic; inside his coat Rossel felt himself curling his already twisted and broken left hand into a protective fist.

Let our gruel be no more than mere water, our bread worth more to us than gold. Like men of steel, we will endure . . .

He stared at Vronsky, who was exhorting both orchestra and singers to ever greater heights, and sensed the maestro could somehow feel his eyes upon him. At that exact moment, the composer began to conduct the piece even more intensely, more passionately, forcing the violinists towards new peaks of excellence, forcing them to play at a level Rossel could once reach but was now far, far beyond him. The musicians were being pushed to the limits of their technique, some clinging to the soaring melody, others tackling a furious moto perpetuo that underpinned this section. Playing as if their lives depended on it.

As the volume subsided, Marina’s not quite crystal-clear soprano – his ear detected an imperfect but almost indiscernible emotional tension – floated through, a wordless line following the notes of E flat major before ending on an ethereal A natural at the top. Rossel closed his eyes and let the rest of the section wash over him until, at last, the music subsided and only a regular rhythm in the double basses and timpani remained – the sound of a cortège.

The lieutenant opened his eyes again and saw Vronsky conduct the final bars with only the faintest gestures from one enormous paw.

Rossel himself was the thing that connected them all. Nadya, Max and now Sofia – they had all gone to the conservatory with him. Lipukhin and Taneyev were still working busily on identifying the other two corpses but he had no doubt now – whoever they were – that