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Like much music of quality, the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Leningrad, is either loved or hated, rather than tolerated. It is famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, for its first movement, a unique statement in the history of music, a movement lasting just under half of the symphony's massive eighty minutes. It is also music, I believe, that is uniquely misunderstood, the popular interpretation being far too nave an analysis of the motives of a composer as unpredictably and alternatively complex and trite as Shostakovich. So this is my personal version. First the description. I apologise if you already know the piece.

The piece opens with a confident, harmonically complex theme which seems to pass from one place to another, from one orchestral section to another like question, answer and analysis. It seems to portray life lived ordinarily, but tangibly celebrating the sophistication and tolerance of negotiated social contact. There is conflict here, but resolution is at hand through thought, interaction and experience. The music seems to offer a sense of life lived in the unending complexity of community.

But then the movement's often derided second section begins. Over the "bolero-like" insistence of a repeated drum rhythm, an apparently innocuous, vaguely brainless, almost pop music joke theme strikes up, quietly at first, almost as if apologising for its own banality. The theme is repeated alongside an associated answering and balancing motif from the same mould. But it keeps getting louder and more assertive until eventually it transforms into a menacing presence that threatens violence. At its climax, the theme becomes a series of explosions which obviously refer to conflict and war. The complex theme of the opening returns to compete and the music fights out an exhausted resolution where the original sophisticated theme triumphs, but in an exhausted, empty way whilst the trite naivety of the drum rhythm reminds us that banality is not completely defeated.

The movement is often presented as entirely programmatic, as if it were film music. The complex themes at the start are the good people of Leningrad going about their daily lives, hence the sense of sophistication, an interpretation arising from a singularly patriotic interpretation of the work. The repeated intensity of the pop-like trivial tune is often described as the advancing German army. It begins quietly because it's in the distance and gets louder as it approaches.

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