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Film Scores of Dmitry Shostakovich
By Ron Holloway | July 1, 2008
Ask any Russian scholar who was the greatest Soviet film composer, and you’re asking for a bare-knuckle fist-fight. The list quickly boils down to three: Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1951), and Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) – with Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) thrown in on the side because he was always criticizing Shostakovich for lowering himself to work on pedantic Soviet movies.
Arguments get heated when the quality of film compositions by Shostakovich and Prokofiev is thrown into the debate. Nearly everyone agrees that Prokofiev’s compositions for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (USSE, 1938) and Ivan the Terrible (USSR, 1942/44) were brilliant pieces of work. Indeed, they helped considerably to raise film scores to an art form. At the same time, most music scholars will agree that Shostakovich was the greatest Soviet composer of the 20th century. Although they are generally puzzled that he would waste so much time on scores for films that seemingly amounted to nothing short of political propaganda?
A partial answer was to be found in the hotly disputed and largely discredited “autobiography” by Solomon Volkov, a 1980 hoax publication by a dissident defector who claimed to have edited the authentic memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich. Titled Testimony, the supposed memoirs rang so true that the book inspired in turn a film version in 1988 by British director Tony Palmer. But the story doesn’t end there. When Tony Palmer’s Testimony (UK, 1988) was offered to the 1988 Berlinale, festival director Moritz de Hadeln jumped at the chance to screen a film in which Ben Kingsley played the frightened composer twisting in the wind at the capricious whim of the dictator Stalin.
When the entry was announced in the press, however, a howl could be heard in Moscow that shook the decor of the Berlinale. The authorities at Goskino protested on two counts. First: the Solomon Volkov description of events was blatant anti-Soviet. Worse: a court case was threatened because of Palmer’s apparent piracy of Shostakovich’s music. The festival brouhaha eventually rose to such a fever pitch that Testimony had to be removed from the Berlinale program altogether. The bone of contention was not whether piracy had actually taken place. Indeed, it had. Rather, that the Soviet Union had never officially copyrighted the Shostakovich symphonies heard on the Testimony soundtrack. No doubt, under these circumstances, Tony Palmer had a better than even chance to win his day in court. Viewed from this angle, too, Tony Palmer’s Testimony was as much about “The Great Terror” under Stalin as it was about the degradation heaped upon one of the 20th century’s great composers.
Not just Shostakovich, but Prokofiev as well. For both were denounced in 1948 for “formalism” by the nefarious Zhdanov Decree, a hard-fisted tract on the official position of the arts in Soviet life. One of the key scenes in Testimony is when Shostakovich looks back over his shoulder apprehensively at Prokofiev while the decree is being read. Between 1948 and 1953, when Stalin conveniently died of a stroke, Shostakovich searched for a way out of his dilemma. Thus, for the sake of political compliance, he returned to his oft-used ploy of maintaining his integrity as a composer at the service of “socialist realism” – depicting the triumph of Leninism and Stalinism wrapped in the contrived optimism of Soviet life.
Shostakovich’s symphonies and string quartets – fifteen of each respectively – are well known. His film scores, however, are still the subject of research and rediscovery. Altogether, Dmitry Shostakovich composed scores for 34 films. The best known are the films he helped to raise to a popular art form in collaboration with friends and colleagues at the Leningrad Film Studio. He worked with Leonid Trauberg and Grigory Kozintsev on New Babylon (USSR, 1929) and on the suite for their Maxim Trilogy (USSR, 1935-39). Later, his scores for Grigory Kozintsev’s Hamlet (USSR, 1964) and King Lear (USSR, 1969) stand alone among movie scores for their dramatic power.
Unfortunately, Shostakovich also composed some scores for films that trumpeted the Personality Cult in a manner that borders on artistic disgrace. One of these is Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin (USSR, 1949), in which Stalin is seen as an omnipotent god arriving triumphantly amid the ruins of Berlin. Another is Chiaureli’s The Unforgettable Year 1919 (USSR, 1952) in which Stalin is again seen as the all-seeing leader who singlehandedly orchestrates the victory of Bolshevism over their enemies. Even in the worse cases, however, one can still feel the tension in Shostakovich’s compositions between songs of revolutionary fervor and otherwise sincere efforts in the service of a popular art form that he had helped to nourish from the silent period of the creative sound cinema.
One astute observer of Soviet cinema has gone so far as to claim that if it had not been for Dmitry Shostakovich’s soundtracks for some of the masterpieces of Soviet cinema, he would have fallen ultimately under the dreaded pen of Stalin’s hit list.
– Ron Holloway
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