After a moment’s hesitation, he sat down at the piano and played the magnificent, noble exposition of the Seventh Symphony and the variation theme depicting the Fascist invasion. We were both extremely agitated; it was a rare event for Shostakovich to play a new work with such manifest emotion. We sat on, plunged in silence, broken at last by Shostakovich with these words (I have them written down): ‘I don’t know what the fate of this piece will be.’ After a further pause, he added: ‘I suppose that critics with nothing better to do will damn me for copying Ravel’s Bolero. Well, let them. That is how I hear war.’ I believe that on that memorable August day Shostakovich was still unaware of the titanic scale of his symphony, for which a fate unique in the history of music was already in preparation. << less