Reply To: Scores to films/TV shows about oppressive regimes?
Shostakovich’s film career stretched from 1927 (New Babylon) to 1971 (King Lear)- although in my opinion he should have been given a posthumous credit for Escape to Victory…
During that period, certainly up to Stalin’s death in 1953, almost everything any Soviet artist did in any genre could be described as propagandistic. If it didn’t follow the (sometimes wildly inconsistent) party lines, it either didn’t get done, or nothing further would be heard of that creator. Many of his almost forty film scores would fall into that category, being written simply to put food on the table during the various times he was classed as an enemy of the people.
After the Pravda denunciation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, for instance, he withdrew his 4th symphony just before the premiere and worked on puff pieces to commemorate Lenin such as The Man With The Gun and The Great Citizen (parts one and two!) whilst building up to his rehabilitation with the fifth symphony. World War Two relieved the pressure somewhat, and with the Seventh Symphony and the various legends surrounding it Stalin realised his worth to the state and he was back in favour, at least tentatively.
His new found fame led to Dmitri Tiomkin’s adapting his music for Frank Capra’s The Battle of Russia in 1943, and Bernard Herrmann was approached to play the composer in a biopic, which failed due to Herrmann’s refusal to play “a cut-rate Shostakovich”.
Life for everyone got easier after Stalin, but Shostakovich was still prey to state demands for the rest of his life. You could look at the 11th and 12th symphonies as being propaganda, but he buried phrases in them that the audience would recognise as being symbolic of resistance. The 13th and 14th were song cycles wrapped up as symphonies using texts that could still have got him “disappeared”, even into the 1960s.
As you often find with Shostakovich, his public and private faces were very different when you look at his film scores. A great book on this is John Riley’s “Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film”, published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris.