The Man with a Gun: Film music

Score for the film by Sergei Yutkevich.


In the Stalinist period Shostakovich wrote a great deal of music for the abundance of epic films sponsored by the Soviet government and made according to the wooden formulas of Socialist Realism. The idea was to bring the story of Lenin, the 1917 Revolution and the heroic achievements of the USSR to ordinary audiences in such a way that they would easily get the message and warm to the sentimental and simple certainties of propaganda. Despite the crudities of most of these films, they were made by some of the most talented directors and actorsin the Soviet union; ‘The Man with a Gun’, for example, was directed by Sergei Yutkevich, with whom Shostakovich collaborated several times.


Although Shostakovich himself was scornful of his work in this area – describing it as just a way to earn a living – what survives of the music he wrote for this purpose reflects his immense and natural skills as a dramatist and populist. ‘The Man with a Gun’ tells the story of a simple soldier who finds himself caught up in the thrilling events of 1917, as a result of which he actually gets to meet his hero Lenin. To give atmosphere to this plot, Shostakovich provided several brooding orchestral numbers, setting the scene in Petrograd at that period and suggesting the grand and threatening darkness and the violence of those revolutionary times.


A short suite exists from this music. It begins with an overture, based on a popular revolutionary song, ‘Clouds hang heavy over the city’, and there are references in the remaining movements to other revolutionary songs.


Note by Gerard McBurney