It begins with a rousing, majestic theme played by all the strings and later echoed by the woodwinds. This is in modified sonata form and lasts for around half an hour there are the usual two contrasting subjects, but no development section, this being replaced by the 'invasion' theme. Shostakovich at first gave them titles - War, Reminiscence, Home Expanses, and Victory-but he soon withdrew these and left the movements with their tempo markings alone: Shostakovich's longest symphony-one of the longest in the whole repertory-typically takes some 75 minutes to perform-but there have been wide interpretive differences over the years: Leonard Bernstein's acclaimed 1988 recording stretches to 85 minutes. That popularity faded somewhat after 1945, but the work is still regarded as a major musical testament to the 27 million Soviet people who lost their lives in World War II, and it is often played at Leningrad Cemetery, where half a million victims of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad are buried. The Leningrad soon became popular in both the Soviet Union and the West as a symbol of resistance to fascism and totalitarianism, thanks in part to the composer's microfilming of the score in Samara and its clandestine delivery, via Tehran and Cairo, to New York, where Arturo Toscanini led a broadcast performance (July 19, 1942) and Time magazine placed Shostakovich on its cover. At first dedicated to Lenin, it was eventually submitted in honor of the besieged city of Leningrad, where it was first played under dire circumstances on August 9, 1942, during the siege by German and Finnish forces. 60, nicknamed the Leningrad, was begun in Leningrad, completed in the city of Samara (then known as Kuybyshev) in December 1941, and premiered in that city on March 5, 1942.
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