Dmitri Shostakovich, of course, is celebrated for his monumental symphonies and confessional string quartets, which are regarded as some of the most important of the 20th century.
But early on, he eked out a living as a pianist in movie houses, enlivening silent images with his mercurial improvisations. This was great practice for his later work with a number of notable Soviet filmmakers.
Shostakovich would go on to compose some 30 original film scores. Far and away his “greatest hit” in the field, at least in the West, is the romance from “The Gadfly” (1955), based on the novel of Ethel Lillian Voynich. The music enjoyed a revival of sorts in the 1980s as the theme for the miniseries “Reilly, Ace of Spies.”
But my personal favorite among his film scores is that for a zany fairy story after Pushkin, called “The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda.” Shostakovich, about 27 years-old in 1933, was hired by experimental animator Mikhail Tsekhanovsky to supply the manic underscore for his visionary creations. But Tsekhanovsky probably didn’t count on just how manic Shostakovich could be. The music flowed like water down the Neva, and Tsekhanovsky struggled to keep up, all the while pushing himself to create images worthy of his collaborator.
Then, in 1936, following the debut of the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Shostakovich was condemned by the Soviet authorities in an infamous “Muddle Instead of Music” denunciation in Pravda, and the composer decided he had better cool his jets. The potentially inflammatory Symphony No. 4 went into a drawer, and he halted work on the film, which he had already been involved with, on and off, for nearly three years. When the denunciation came, he was in the process of wholly reorchestrating the existing music, at the studio’s request, for smaller forces.
While the feature would remain unfinished, Tsekhanovsky compiled what he had – some 40 minutes in all – and the work was put into storage at the Lenfilm archives. Unfortunately, nearly all of it would be destroyed by fire during the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1941.
Only the bizarre bazaar scene survives. Watch this, and count your blessings.
Shostakovich regarded his music for “Balda” as some of the best he’d ever written. Here’s a complete recording, with restorations. Alas, it doesn’t have quite the pungency of the earlier suite recorded by Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
Happy birthday, Dmitri Shostakovich!
