Hardcover Paperback

Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film
John Riley
London: I.B. Tauris, 2005; 150 pages. ISBN 1 85043 484 0.

The speed at which eager Shostakovich scholars have purchased this book is testament to the high regard in which the author is held and the interest he has generated in Shostakovich's film music through presentations to the UK Shostakovich Society and his many articles and reviews for DSCH Journal. His book is the third in the new KINOfiles Filmmakers' Companions series, which, under the general editorship of Richard Taylor, is 'devoted to the most important and interesting people who have participated in Russian cinema from its beginnings to the present'. The series will include personalities other than directors, of whom Shostakovich is the first.

The main body of Riley's book is divided into an introduction and seven chapters, the last of which deals with the legacy of Shostakovich's film music. The first six chapters provide a chronological discussion of every film project, including those that never actually materialised. The number of films discussed in each chapter varies, as the rationale behind the division of the chapters is primarily political, broadly corresponding to Stalin's First, Second and Third Five-Year Plans; the Great Patriotic War to the death of Stalin; the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. There are fifteen illustrations, all except two of which are film stills. Copious endnotes to all chapters are provided at the back of the book and are worth detailed examination, as they contain many gems of information from the author's encyclopaedic knowledge on all sorts of topics, together with touches of his warm sense of humour. The endnotes are also the best source for bibliographical references, as the suggested further reading is rather brief. There are two further appendices: a curriculum vitae, charting the premieres of Shostakovich's films and major concert works alongside events in Soviet history, and a filmography. There is no indication in the filmography of the few films commercially available in the West in VHS or DVD format; indeed the filmography reads more like a discography. In order that, according to Riley's own wish from the introduction, music critics study the music 'as it appears in the films' rather than via sound recordings, we need to know how one might access these films—perhaps an article for a future issue of DSCH Journal could address this topic. However, the filmography does provide a fairly comprehensive summary of recordings (without listing catalogue numbers) and will delight any collector.

In an ideal world where time, money and copyright issues are no object, this book would have undoubtedly been more extensive, with copious music examples and accompanying DVD(s) containing illustrative film clips. In reality very few film music books even approach this imaginary ideal and it would be unfair to review the book on such terms. Instead its success should be measured within the constraints placed on its format by being part of a series with a shared editorial style and length and also against its own mission statement from the extensive blurb, 'the first book in English to look at Shostakovich's cinema career, [which] discusses every film he scored, looking at the films themselves, tracing their relationship to the changing concerns and policies of the Soviet state and examining how the music works in context'. It is also important to remember that this is a 'companion' book and as such is not a definitive account, but is designed to complement and draw together a diverse collection of sources, which include bibliographical references, manuscript and printed scores, recordings and, most importantly, the films themselves.

Using these criteria, the book more than accomplishes its aims. Riley's introduction succinctly acknowledges the Testimony debate, describes Shostakovich's early career as a cinema pianist, gives an overview of early accompaniments to Russian and Soviet silent films and encompasses the early sound theories of Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Pudovkin (the famous 1928 Statement on Sound) and Vertov (for The Man with the Movie Camera)—all within five pages of text and two pages of endnotes!

The section on Shostakovich as a cinema pianist is perhaps a little too concise and does not state what kind of music Shostakovich played to accompany films. As Riley indicates, there are many inconsistencies in sources regarding when Shostakovich actually began and ended his time as a cinema pianist and precious few details of the films he accompanied. Although some sources suggest that his improvisations were not always understood or appreciated by the cinema audiences, causing scandal and jeering[1], others imply that Shostakovich had a band of loyal followers who attended just to hear him play[2].

Whereas Riley describes New Babylon as a 'wordless opera', I see it more in terms of a musical, or at least a film with some musical numbers, such as the early American sound-film classic, The Jazz Singer (starring Al Jolson, 1927). Riley mentions Marek Pytel's privately published video and book New Babylon (London, 1999). I think that Riley should have given a warning about the nature of this source in his footnotes, heralding its values and Pytel's passion for the film but acknowledging its obvious limitations. Although Pytel's book does include some very important new material and ideas, such as the first full English translation of Shostakovich's 1929 Sovetskii ekran article, Pytel's text in general needs to be treated with care and the accompanying video should not under any circumstances be used as a basis for audio-visual analysis of the film, due to Pytel's use of Rozhdestvensky's recording of the suite for the synchronisation, without reference to either the Boosey & Hawkes or Sikorski full scores.

The main part of the book deals with the middle of Shostakovich's film career, from the Great Patriotic War to the Khrushchev years, including the 'film famine' (1945–53), when the annual number of feature films produced by Soviet studios fell, as Riley points out, to between 9 and 20 (in stark contrast to the 400–500 films churned out annually from Hollywood). Since most books on Soviet film only briefly mention the films from this period, if at all, much of the information in these chapters will be new to those (myself included), who only know the film titles from track listings on CD compilations of Shostakovich's film music and suite arrangements by Atovmian. This is indeed where even those familiar with Shostakovich might learn the most. Two genres dominate: self-sacrifice for the State (Zoya, The Young Guard and The Gadfly) and the biopic (Pirogov, Michurin and Belinsky), but it is perhaps Shostakovich's two contributions to the Stalin-cult, The Fall of Berlin and The Unforgettable Year 1919 (both directed by Chiaureli), which are the most fascinating. I only know these two film scores through Adriano's recent premiere recordings for Marco Polo (catalogue reference 8.223897, released 2002), which Riley reviewed in DSCH Journal 18. It is a pity that he fails to highlight the overt narodnost[3] aspects in these scores, belatedly mentioning narodnost only in relation to the subsequent biopic, Belinsky. Indeed Riley's account of the score of The Fall of Berlin concentrates less on Shostakovich's original contributions and more on Chiaureli's use of existing music, for example Mendelssohn's 'Wedding March' from A Midsummer Night's Dream to accompany Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun.

The miniature 'piano concerto', The Assault on Red Hill, from The Unforgettable Year 1919, is one of Shostakovich's most well-known pieces of film music, second only to the Romance from The Gadfly. I was intrigued to discover that this Rachmaninov-inspired music is used to accompany the Red Army attack on the Whites and the re-capture of Fort Krasnaya Gorka. Riley describes how the music seems an odd choice of accompaniment for a war scene and that it has to compete with other noises on the soundtrack, such as shouting, explosions and gunfire, before being abruptly cut off. Of course this could be due to bad sound editing, as in The Fall of Berlin, but it did make me wonder if Shostakovich was actually using the piano music to represent the Whites—Rachmaninov's music was banned in Soviet Russia for many years—and that the music was purposely cut off when the Whites were conquered by the Red Army.

Generally Riley writes in a very accessible style, but hampered by the lack of music examples and near-total avoidance of musical terminology (presumably in an attempt to make the book appeal to a wider audience), his descriptions of the music sometimes lapse into what I would call CD-liner style. For example, the music to the scenes of poverty from Joris Ivens' documentary The Song of the Rivers (1954) is described as 'wandering strings, punctuated by lurching chords that slowly overwhelm the music with a shuddering climax'.

Compared to Tatiana Egorova's book, Soviet Film Music: An Historical Survey (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), until now the only book in English which discussed some, but not all, of Shostakovich's film scores in any depth, Riley's book not only fills in the gaps, but also adds common sense clarifications to some of Egorova's generalisations. For instance, with regard to the immediate and widespread popularity of the Counterplan song, Egorova describes the song as being 'sung by the whole country', whereas Riley points out that its success can only initially have been an urban phenomenon, due to the lack of sound projectors. Riley has also noted that Egorova seems to have erroneously outlined the opening of Alone in her description of The Counterplan; I wondered if I had been watching the same film when reading her description of New Babylon.

Riley has laid down a challenge to Shostakovich scholars to do further research on his film music. Future studies need to include comparisons with Western film music practices, which I am convinced would confirm Shostakovich's skill in the medium.

Compared to the study of most film composers, Shostakovich scholars are very lucky to have so much film music surviving in autograph scores and a substantial selection readily available for study in printed editions, with the promise of more to be published in the future. We are also lucky to have Riley's book, with the particular insights that a film historian can bring to the subject.

Fiona Ford, University of Nottingham, UK

[1] For example the memoirs of Zoya Shostakovich and Nathan Perelman, a fellow cinema pianist, in Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 8 and 60.

[2] Dmitri & Ludmilla Sollertinsky, Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, translated by Graham Hobbs and Charles Midgley (London: Robert Hale Ltd, 1981), 33.

[3] See discussions of narodnost in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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