" When he was directing some comedies by the revered nineteenth-century Russian playwright Chekhov, he started to notice how often people in nineteenth-century Russian plays faint — very often — so he called the production 33 Swoons and focused on all the fainting. Whenever someone fainted, a band played a fanfare. There was a different fanfare for men and women. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad