Shostakovich 2025: film and light music for the anniversary year

(August 2024)

Film music

Between 1929 and 1970, Shostakovich created over 35 original movie scores. This work as a film composer kept Shostakovich economically afloat, not only in times of crisis when his position was highly precarious. His works for film were a large field of experimentation on which he could time and again try out new compositional ideas. Thus, these scores are characterised by an astonishing variety of forms: from brilliant and catchy film music through to experimental compositions. In addition to the film music suites for concert use, there are a series of movie projects in which the music can be played live from the orchestra pit to accompany a screening of the film. We are happy to provide information concerning the provision of the appropriate film materials.

New Babylon
Music to the silent film by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Op. 18 (1928–1929) | 85 min.
1.1.1.1–2.1.1.0–perc(3)–pft–strings

New Babylon was not only Shostakovich’s first attempt at a complete film score, but also his only full-length live accompaniment to a silent film. Written for small orchestra, the work was first heard accompanying a movie screening in Moscow.

The experimental melodrama about class conflicts in Paris during the Commune of 1871 was filmed by two young, later very famous directors: Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. The film combined Eisenstein’s revolutionary film techniques with Meyerhold’s avantgarde acting styles. First screenings with this daring score caused a scandal. Today, New Babylon is considered a pioneering work, above all due to the satirical manner in which the music plays with the pictures on the screen.

Shostakovich’s score is full of references to the music of the nineteenth century, in particular to the cancans, galops, and folksy melodies of Offenbach.

In 2007, Frank Strobel completed an adaption of the film music, intended to accompany screenings of the original version of the film. Mark Fitz-Gerald, too, has prepared a version that makes it possible to show the unabridged original version of the film with live music.

Suite from New Babylon
Op. 18a | 50 min. (Rozhdestvensky)
1.1.1.1–2.1.1.0–perc(3)–pft–strings

Each of the six numbers has a duration of about seven or eight minutes, so that a selection can be assembled to make up a small suite of about 15 or 20 minutes.

Alone
Music to the silent film by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Op. 26 (1930–1931) | 150 min.
chorus with soloists (S, M, T); 3(III=picc).3(III=corA). 4(III=Ebcl,IV=bcl).3(III=dbn)–4.2.3.1–timp.perc–theremin–harp–harm–org–strings–banda

Shostakovich’s second film score likewise came into being for Kozintsev and Trauberg. As with New Babylon, Alone was initially planned as a silent film. However, in the middle of the production, sound recording was invented, and Shostakovich’s elaborate orchestral music could be recorded in the studio.

The film tells the story of a young teacher, who goes to a remote mountain region in Siberia in order to work in a traditional village. It is her duty to bring modern Soviet civilization to this place, in which superstition, illiteracy, and old customs dominate. She finds herself up against the Bey, a rich peasant and big landowner, who adheres to the old customs.

This powerful score shows the young Shostakovich at the transition point between his early modern style and a new, symphonic manner, which is simultaneously passionate and epic, and was soon to lead to his Fourth Symphony. Virtuoso solos for the various wind instruments conjure up the vastness of the steppe and the ancient culture of the tribes living there. Sonorous orchestral outbreaks suggest the struggle and the loneliness of the young woman alone in a foreign land.

Mark Fitz-Gerald created an adaption of the score that can be played live with the screening of the film.

Suite(s) from Alone
Op. 26a (2001) | 26 min. (McBurney/Smirnov)
McBurney: T; 2.picc.2(II=corA).3(II=Ebcl,III=bcl).2.dbn–4.2.3.1–timp.perc–harp-strings
Smirnov: 1(=picc).2(II=corA).2(II=bcl).asax.2(II=dbn)–2.1.1.0–perc–db

Suite from Golden Mountains
Op. 30a (1931) | 24 min.
3(III=picc).3(III=corA).3(III=bcl).ssax.asax.tsax.3(III=dbn)–8.4.4.2–timp–Hawaiian.gtr–2harp–org–strings

Shostakovich wrote his third film score for the epic Golden Mountains by Sergei Yutkevich. An uncultivated Russian peasant moves from the countryside to the city, where he finds work helping the industrialists break factory strikes. However, his experience with the appalling living conditions of the working class opens his eyes and turns him into a revolutionary, who ultimately leads a strike himself.

Shostakovich created this marvellous suite from his score, taking six numbers from the film music and attaching the final measures of his Third Symphony at the end in order to make a more effective climax. This music, with its brilliant orchestral technique, is not unlike the Hollywood scores of the time.

The work is conceived for a lavish orchestration, which includes an organ, two harps, and the reedy singing tone of a Hawaiian guitar. The Fugue for organ and orchestra is perhaps the most remarkable movement: an intense, dense carpet of sound, almost in the style of Charles Ives. The Waltz attained great popularity.

Three Fragments from Encounter
Op. 33 (1932) | 10 min.
3(III=picc).2.2.3(III=dbn) –4.3.3.1–timp.perc–2harp–strings

Encounter (directed by Lev Arnshtam, Friedrich Ermler, and Sergei Yutkevich), a cheerful-romantic story about the heroic deployment of young workers in a Soviet turbine factory, brought forth one of Shostakovich’s most brilliant scores. Its dance rhythms and catchy melodies combine to suit the tastes of a broad film audience.

One of these melodies, the film’s title melody The Song of the Counterplan, actually travelled around the world in an arrangement by Leopold Stokowski: it was inserted into American musicals, sung in the 1940s as The United Nations March, played by brass bands, and even used as a wedding march.

The original version of this catchy melody forms the festive conclusion of this little suite, which also includes one of the most romantic slow movements to emerge from Shostakovich’s pen.

Suite from the Maxim Trilogy
Op. 50a (1961) | 28 min.
mixed chorus; 2.picc.2.corA.Ebcl.2.bcl.2.dbn–4.3.3.1–timp.perc–2harp–strings–banda

Shostakovich’s friend Lev Atovmyan arranged this suite from the scores of the popular Maxim films (Maxim’s Youth, Maxim’s Return, and The Viborg Side). It includes music from a time that encompassed the most difficult and defining period of Shostakovich’s life. Maxim’s Youth came into being shortly before the composition of the Fourth Symphony. Maxim’s Return stems from the dark time between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, when Shostakovich stood under intense political pressure and his orchestral style was transitioning to the great simplicity of his middle period. On the other hand, The Viborg Side (or The Viborg District) was written in a more relaxed time, shortly before the creation of the Sixth Symphony. In grand symphonic style and with a powerful patriotic chorus, this suite tells the story of the factory worker Maxim, who as a young man became an anti-Tsarist resistance fighter in 1910 and ultimately joined the Red Army.

Suite from the Unforgettable Year 1919
Op. 89a (1954) | 24 min.
3(III=picc).3.3.3(III=dbn)–4.3.3.1–timp.perc–cel(=pft)–strings–banda

In 1954 Lev Atovmyan put together a suite from this film music composed four years earlier. Monumental sections with heroic revolutionary pomp alternate with moments of tender lyrical intimacy. The fifth movement, Attack on Krasnaja Gora, proves to be the driving force of the whole suite, which has also become known as piano concerto en miniature: a successful parody on the bombastic piano concerto style of the late nineteenth century, which is uncoincidentally sometimes reminiscent of Rachmaninoff.

The Man with a Gun
Music to the film by Nikolai Pogodin and Sergei Yutkevich, Op. 53 (1938) | 14 min.
2.picc.2.2.2.dbn–4.3.3.1–timp.perc–strings–banda

After the triumphal success of his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich continued to earn his livelihood as a composer of film music, writing numerous scores for historical movies. The epic drama The Man with a Gun is set during the 1917 October Revolution in Smolny, the building in which Lenin had established his headquarters at that time.

The first movement of the five surviving fragments, Overture, is based on the popular revolutionary song Clouds Hang Heavy o’er the City, and allusions to other revolutionary songs are also to be found in the other movements. This is Shostakovich on a grand scale, which would eventually lead to the impressive summits of the Leningrad Symphony.

Suite from the Adventures of Korzinkina
Op. 59 (1940) | 10 min.
mixed chorus; 2.picc.2.2.Ebcl.2–4.2.1.1–timp.perc–harp–pft(2)–strings

At the centre of Klimenti Mints’s comic film from 1940 is the beautiful railway conductor Yanya Korzinkina, who is always ready to help anybody. Naturally, she is loved by all – also by a young singer, who is on his way to a vocal competition. When he loses his voice during his performance, she jumps on stage, kisses him passionately, and his voice miraculously returns. This featherweight comedy inspired Shostakovich to one of his most charming and cheerful scores that sparkles with humour. Several famous melodies from the nineteenth century turn up unexpectedly, and in one place Shostakovich allows his earlier experiences as silent film pianist to come to life again in a delightful galop for piano duet. At the end, a small chorus extols Yanya’s kindness and beauty in a quasi-operatic apotheosis.

Only six numbers from the score of The Adventures of Korzinkina have survived. Gennady Rozhdestvensky compiled this material into a ten-minute-long suite, one of the most frolicsome that we know from Shostakovich.

Suite from Zoya
Op. 64a | 32 min.
mixed chorus; 2.picc.3.3(III=bcl).Ebcl.2.dbn–4.5.5.2–timp.perc–2harp–strings

Shostakovich wrote only a single film score during the war. Zoya (1944, directed by Lev Arnshtam) is based on the true story of the 18-year-old partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, who fought against the Germans during the first months of the Nazi invasion, was taken captive, and was finally murdered.

Zoya undoubtedly numbers among Shostakovich’s most patriotic scores. It is, however, a very unusual piece. Composed shortly after the Eighth Symphony, this composition is not a hymn of praise to Stalin or to communism, but rather an emotional appeal to humanity in a musical language reminiscent of Tchaikovsky.

Lev Atovmyan’s concert suite skilfully rearranges a greater part of this expressive film music into five movements. It begins with an almost Wagnerian passage that includes a heavenly choir, and works its way through marches, landscapes, elegies, and tender music of love, to end with Shostakovich’s arrangement of one of the most famous melodies in Russian music: the noble Slava! from the finale of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tzar.

Battleship Potemkin
Music to the silent film by Sergei Eisenstein (1925) | 70 min.
Compiled by Frank Strobel from Symphonies Nos. 4, Op. 43; 5, Op. 47; 8, Op. 65; 10, Op. 93 and 11 “The Year 1905”, Op. 103
3(II,III=2picc).3(III=corA),4(III=bcl,IV=ebcl).3(III=dbn)–4.4.3.1–timp.perc–cel–2harp–strings(14.12.10.8.6)

In his masterwork from 1925, Sergei Eisenstein tells of the mutiny on the Tzarist warship Potemkin, a central event of the 1905 Revolution. The newly developed editing technique with its powerful and dynamic rhythm created great suspense and emotional impact. With his films Battleship Potemkin, October, and Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein is numbered even today among the most pioneering directors in film history.

In 2009, Frank Strobel compiled from Shostakovich’s Symphonies Nos. 4, 5, 8, 10, and 11 a soundtrack for the silent film, which convincingly harmonises and congenially interprets and enriches Eisenstein’s imagery. Through this artistic synthesis, a film presentation of great power and forcefulness came into being.

Girlfriends
Music to the film by Lev Arnshtam Op. 41a (1934–1935) | 47 min.
Reconstruction
Male chorus, 3 female voices; 3(III=picc).2.2(II=Ebcl).3(III=dbn)–4.3.3.1–timp.perc–harp–org–theremin–strings–string quartet–banda

Soya, Natasha, and Asya are already inseparable friends since childhood days in pre-revolutionary Petrograd and quickly become aware of the glaring social injustice that reigns in their city. During the Russian Civil War, the girls volunteer for the medical service in order to contribute to the defence of Petrograd against the attack of the White Guard.

The movie, dedicated to the French socialist Romain Rolland, was Lev Arnshtam’s first autonomous attempt as director. It was premiered on 19 February 1936 – only a few weeks after the appearance of the Pravda article Muddle Instead of Music directed against Shostakovich. Simultaneously with the Russian premiere, the film also opened in movie houses in the USA, under the title Three Women. On the occasion of the film’s restoration in 1960, Shostakovich made a few musical modifications, and the orchestral introductory music was replaced by the Moderato movement of his First String Quartet. Since only eight of the 23 numbers of the predominantly chamber music score have survived, Mark Fitz-Gerald reconstructed the 15 remaining numbers by ear. He thus created a version of the soundtrack that corresponds exactly to the final version of the restored movie, and it unfurls a colourful sonority with full vibrancy during live performances of the film.


Light music

Throughout his life, Shostakovich wrote light music for radio, popular concerts, and variety shows. He never disdained this work, and often also re-used ideas from his light music in new contexts. Amusing individual numbers, such as waltzes and polkas, are suitable for New Year’s concerts or as encores.

Declared Dead (Hypothetically Murdered)
Music to a music-hall show by Vsevolod Voyevodin and Evgeni Riss, Op. 31 (1931) | 39 min.
2(II=picc).1.1.ssax.asax.tsax.1–2.2.1.1–perc–banjo–pft–strings(4.4.2.2.2)

In 1931 Shostakovich wrote a full-length score for a show in which many of the leading entertainers of the time were involved. The plot of this hilarious combination of satire and agitprop, as crazy as it is lightweight, unfolds against the backdrop of an air-raid drill in which a number of participants play the victims of an air strike (‘declared dead’, so to speak). It is obvious that the official censors understood this depiction of an important political matter as mockery. The scandalous show was cancelled after only one performance – and the score disappeared. The suite put together by Gerard McBurney from 21 reconstructed orchestral numbers includes galops, cheeky polkas, marches, and spirited waltzes.

Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1
(1934) | 7 min.
0.0.ssax(=asax).asax.tsax.0–0.2.1.0–perc–banjo–Hawaiian gtr–pft–vln.db

Jazz – or rather swing – was very popular in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, although this music was viewed as ’western’ and ’decadent’ by the authorities. Shostakovich was greatly interested in it and wrote his own delightful and melodious Jazz Suite No. 1 in a style that combines echoes of Kurt Weill and Jewish dance music with American influences.

Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2
original version (1938) | 8 Min.
0.0.2asax.2tsax.barsax.0–0.4.2.1–perc(2)–3gtr–3banjos–pft–strings(6.0.0.0.2)

In 1938 Shostakovich wrote a second Jazz Suite for a larger band. Although it was frequently performed before the war, the score disappeared in the late 1940s. The piano reduction was rediscovered in 1999, and Gerard McBurney prepared a performing version with Shostakovich’s original orchestration. Besides a soulful lullaby and a Spanish-sounding serenade, there is a scherzo that was partially reused in the Eighth Symphony. The work is not to be confused with the Suite for Variety Orchestra.

Suite for Variety Orchestra
(formerly known as Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2)
(after 1956) | 20 min.
2(II=picc).1.2.2asax.2tsax(I=ssax).1–3.3.3.1–timp.perc–gtr–harp–cel–2pft–acc–strings

This charming eight-movement suite was made in the late 1950s from Shostakovich’s film and stage scores. For a long time, it was mistakenly identified as the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2. The seventh number from the suite, the famous Waltz No. 2, became particularly popular.


Shostakovich resources
Our full Shostakovich 2025 guide for programmers is available for free download:
> View the booklet as PDF

For further information on Dmitri Shostakovich visit:
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