Long winter’s nights are made for reading.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” you’ll find plenty of inspiration in music from movies adapted from Russian literature.
Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” one of the most revered novels of the 19th century, has been filmed at least twice. A seven-hour Soviet adaptation, begun in 1965, is generally regarded as the superior of the two. The other, released in 1956, was a big-budget Italian-American venture, supervised by Dino di Laurentiis, with an all-star, international cast, including Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, Vittorio Gassman, Herbert Lom, and Anita Ekberg. It was directed by King Vidor, the cinematography was by Jack Cardiff, and the music was by Nino Rota.
Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” has also been adapted several times. A 1948 British production stars Vivian Leigh, Ralph Richardson, and Kieron Moore. The score is by Constant Lambert, also well-respected for his concert music, though perhaps even better recognized as conductor of the Vic-Wells (later the Sadler-Wells) Ballet.
Even more highly-regarded was Arthur Honegger, who wrote five symphonies, nine ballets, and a number of large-scale choral and theatrical works. His best-known piece is probably the symphonic movement “Pacific 231,” which famously emulates the sound of a steam locomotive.
Perhaps the most “serious” of the composers that made up the group known as Les Six, Honegger nonetheless enjoyed a sideline working in film over a period of three decades. His scores include those for Abel Gance’s “Napoléon” and a 1934 French version of “Les Misérables.” He was also a mentor to Miklós Rózsa, the Hungarian émigré he met in Paris, who went on to great success writing film music, first for the Korda brothers in England, then in Hollywood.
Honegger’s score for a 1935 version of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” includes a part for the ondes martenot, an electronic keyboard instrument with an uncanny, otherworldly timbre.
Finally, we’ll turn to what some regard as the greatest Russian novel of the past century, “The Master and Margarita.” Mikhail Bulgakov began his book in 1928, but destroyed it in despair over the state of things as he saw them in the Soviet Union. He restarted it in 1931, and the manuscript went through multiple drafts until his death in 1940. It’s only since the late ‘60s that uncensored editions of the novel found their way into print. The first complete version was published in 1973, with an even more authoritative edition following in 1989.
In one particularly meta episode in this multi-layered tale, the author burns his own manuscript! Faustian imagery abounds: Satan figures prominently, the Master’s love is named Margarita, and there are elements of intellectual curiosity and redemption.
A film version, released in 1994, attracted one of the biggest names in, by then, post-Soviet music, Alfred Schnittke, a composer noted for his “polystylism.” In one particularly grotesque passage, he alludes to Ravel’s “Bolero.”
Pull a chair up to the fire and say “Da” to Russian literary classics on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
