The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich. By Joan Titus

Abstract

The appetite for Shostakovich’s film music is evident from the number of available CD recordings containing his film suites and ‘complete’ film scores. For the vast majority in the West, this is the only way to engage with his film music, since it is still impossible to obtain many of these Soviet-era films in a commercial format (with or without subtitles), although some can be viewed illegally via the Internet. Given this barrier, it is perhaps unsurprising that only a handful of writers have published on this topic in English. Chief among these is John Riley, who has written extensively on the subject in a wide variety of publications but is best known for his succinct, comprehensive survey Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film (London, 2005). This ground-breaking survey quickly became an essential reference source. Of the other writers, the most prominent include two American scholars, Erik Heine—whose Ph.D. dissertation (University of Texas at Austin, 2005) focused on three late scores (The Gadfly, Hamlet, and King Lear)—and Joan Titus. Her Ph.D. dissertation ‘Modernism, Socialist Realism, and Identity in the Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich, 1929–1932’ (Ohio State University, 2006) examined Shostakovich’s first four film scores (New Babylon, Alone, The Golden Mountains, and The Counterplan) and forms the basis of this volume.