Book Reviews 63

Joan Titus. Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Stalinist Cinema (1936–1953)

Marshal Sovietskoi Muzyki [Marshal of Soviet Music]

Joan Titus. Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Stalinist Cinema (1936–1953)
Oxford University Press, 2024
338 pages (ills, tables, and music examples)
Hardback $99.00 (US)
ISBN: 9780197611326
Ebook (Kindle) $88.99

With the middle panel of her trilogy on Shostakovich’s film music, Joan Titus enters the most contentious part of her project. Even the title raises a question: when was Stalinist cinema?

Her first volume (reviewed in DSCH 47) took us up to The Youth of Maxim (1935), and its successor picks up in the following year with the last two panels of that trilogy, before taking us through to Chiaureli’s Stalin hagiography, The Unforgettable Year 1919 (1952). Of course, history does not proceed in neatly delineated sections, and there are arguments for pushing the envelope a little. Many proto-Stalinist creative works had difficult births (The Youth of Maxim was in the works for around five years), and at the other end, Stalin continued to be positively portrayed in films for some years after his death—perhaps this will form a prologue to volume three.1 Nevertheless, this division works well enough. Titus omits the two animated films The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda (1933-4) and The Silly Little Mouse (1939)—to be dealt with in another project, but there’s no explanation for why Love and Hate (1934) seems to have fallen into the crack between the two books. Gender, as Titus points out in both volumes, was a recurrent theme in Soviet art, and Love and Hate is a fascinating take on female self-sufficiency.

In volume one Titus drew on Asafyevian “intonational codes,” and here she extends that into cultural studies’ ideas of the “mainstream” and the “middlebrow.” As deficient as the lenses of auteurism and genre are in many ways, they at least have generally accepted common characteristics by which texts can be classified. Since “mainstream” and “middlebrow” art is not necessarily the preserve of particular artists or limited to particular genres, it becomes a sociocultural category, an expression of hegemonic control, whether by capitalist industry or communist regime, stressing the social function at the expense of the individual creative [auteurist] or the formal [genre-based].

While the Soviet film industry readily accepted genre, producing waves of war films, biopics; spy dramas and classic adaptations, it and the general Soviet art industry had a more ambivalent view of “auteurism,” remodelling it as a sort of Sovietised star system where the privileged were expected to use their stardom to promote the regime’s ideas rather than their own. Despite this, Titus only lightly touches on questions of the films, or the artists’, relationship to the regime and its ideologies. She does discuss genre in respect to the various biopics and Meeting on the Elbe’s status as a model Soviet Cold War film and has some interesting thoughts on auteurism with regard to The Young Guard, among other films, discerning some approaches that differentiate the various director/composer collaborations.

But a sociocultural approach has to accommodate the fact that different cultures at different times will have different outlooks. What is “avant-garde” to one society/time, looks perfectly normal to another. We know how rapidly Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk went from a model of socialist realism to unacceptable formalist pornophony. The “Hero”—three of the book’s seven chapter titles invoke the word—had very different meanings in Hollywood and Mosfilm, let alone the Mosfilm of 1932 and 1952. Titus understands this, pointing out that Stalinist cinema is not homogeneous over the 25 years covered by this book, being impacted by political and technological changes.

Nevertheless, with so many subdivisions and such fluid contexts, defining a general concept of “mainstream” and “middlebrow” can feel like salting a sparrow’s tail, as Mirosław Przylipiak has argued. And that’s even before we come to the role of popularity—or what the hegemon uses its power to report as popular (Titus hints at the unreliability of Soviet attendance figures), so that under such a regime, is there even anything other than the mainstream outside the self-isolating underground?

Titus, following a number of scholars, seeks to “enlarge the context” and lands on a loose and sometimes overlapping formulation where “mainstream” is congruent with Soviet bureaucracy’s aesthetics, policies or beliefs, while “middlebrow” is “taste making as determined by contemporaneous style and reception.” She cites Svetlana Boym’s terms ideinost’, partiynost’, and narodnost’, roughly, “socialist content,” “party spirit,” and “national principle,” all reminiscent of definitions of socialist realism. But she does not interrogate Boym’s addition of meshchanstvo.2 In 20th century usage this was “bourgeois philistimism,” as in Gorky’s 1901 play Meshchane (Philistines) and Abram Room’s 1927 film Tret’ya Meshchanskaya (released in the West as Bed and Sofa). In the event, Titus’ references to “mainstream” and “middlebrow” usually appear as the final paragraphs in each section, after the careful analysis of the film and the music and how they function together.

While Shostakovich urged an improvement in all fields of music, including that for the cinema, there were occasions, both in private and in public when he was dismissive of it; in A Declaration of a Composer’s Duties (1931) he ranks his “applied” compositions as lower than his Third Symphony since they are not “independent.” These public declarations may have been genuine or they may have been a position taken for personal-political reasons but letters to friends include complaints about the work or how his music had been used. While it’s admirable that Titus is going in to bat for his film music and I (of course) wholly support that, we cannot ignore that his own attitude to the work varied from project to project, often in relation to the degree of control he felt he had over the final product, though that never seemed to impact his professional approach to it.

Titus runs chronologically through the films for which Shostakovich completed scores, hence there is little on his career beyond that, including projects that came to nothing or the pieces he wrote for Arnshtam’s stopped-in-production Warmongers (1951) and the 1952 biopic of Rimsky-Korsakov before Sviridov took over. Yutkevich and Arnshtam’s The Heart of Turkey: Ankara (1934) is mentioned in a footnote. Mixing poetic travelogue and traditional dancing with military parades and heroically posed soldiers, and climaxing with a brief speech by Ataturk, it celebrates the republic’s tenth anniversary and, through the prominently recorded presence of Voroshilov, Turko-Soviet relations. Yutkevich reported Shostakovich’s involvement but he does not appear in the credits, and most of the score is quite anonymous beyond the traditional sazarandi music, pieces by Turkish composers, the Internationale and, incongruously, Debussy and Ravel. There is, however, some discussion of unused cues and sketches where this can illuminate the final product. Some, notably the two-part The Great Citizen and Man with a Gun, have very brief scores but production histories that are fascinating but so tortuous that Titus can only touch upon them, though there are some pointers for more information in the footnotes.3 While these films’ heavy reliance of speech at the expense of music may have increased their “realism” and made their messages harder to miss, the overwhelming grief at the death of Shakov (the “great citizen”) is largely beyond words, at which point Shostakovich’s music takes over.

Film is collaborative, and Shostakovich didn’t always have the autonomy he wanted, though that was also the case with his operas and even his concert works—at the premiere of the Second Symphony, he could not persuade the bass section that what he had written was playable and had to accept their performance. But the situation with film is far more complex and far more decisions are simply not the composer’s. However, Titus navigates this skilfully, identifying or convincingly intuiting the directors’ contributions, and Shostakovich’s various approaches, and how they meshed.

And he was obviously a valued collaborator. Between them, Kozintsev, Trauberg, and Arnshtam directed around half the films he worked on, and Yutkevich, Ermler, Tsekhanovsky, and Chiaureli also brought return commissions. The exact nature of the collaboration is often lost in unrecorded conversations and for some the process is barely recorded at all. But given the number of assignments Shostakovich turned down, we can assume that he was usually content with the general direction.

Fellow conservatory student-turned-director Arnshtam may have been his most sensitive collaborator. Titus notes how he leaves more room for music per se, has an interesting approach to the relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic music, and how, for instance in Zoya, the music closely follows the detail of the action and dialogue. Relatedly, the extensive score of The Young Guard may be a collaborative decision of Shostakovich and Gerasimov, but the composer could equally have been drawing on his ideas for the planned operatic treatment of the story. In contrast, Kozintsev and Trauberg were more concerned with creating a total soundscape, for example, in The Return of Maxim and The Vyborg Side, music sits within the general soundscape of speech and sound effects, though Titus also sees the use of silence and wind sounds as distinctive of Kozintsev’s later work. Some of that may be driven by technological advances. It may not be a coincidence that by 1935 cinema sound had improved and films were more logocentric, though that could equally partially be that words were seen as less open to ambiguity and could be used to project clear messages.

Returning to the idea of codes, Titus also reiterates Shostakovich’s recurrent use of popular forms in both his applied and concert music, and discusses the coding of genres: the waltz of the bourgeoisie, the galop more rebellious, and of orchestral colours; brass for the militaristic and reaffirmation of power relationships, strings for the romantic (cf Friends and The Girlfriends), and the comic qualities of the bassoon and trombone. But these equally can be simple conventions or even appropriate diegetic cues. More specific to the Soviet context are Maxim’s guitar as a symbol of revolution, and in the later 1940s, the numerous examples of folk song, especially the choral, referencing the “narod” trope, that developed into a Mighty Handful ‘Rus’ style. Here Titus has some interesting thoughts about Zoya and Glinka, and Michurin and Boris Godunov.

Another of these codes would, today, come under the category of Orientalising, in films like Volochayev Days, his only collaboration with the Vasiliev Brothers (who were not really brothers), where the adversaries in the early 20th century Russian/Japanese conflicts are portrayed with appropriate music. Shostakovich continues this exoticising in Friends and Simple People, about “friendship of the peoples,” respectively in the Caucasus and central Asia, but is something we also have already seen in Alone. Similarly, there is “war” music, a code will recur in several films as pre-empting his wartime concert works.

Titus details the DVD editions of the films she used. We are, fortunately, further on from the days when I was hustled into a corner and handed some VHSs (“don’t ask where they came from”), which turned out to be murky, terrible sounding second-generation copies that weren’t full frame and sometimes weren’t even the complete film. Stalin’s ubiquity in Chiaureli’s hagiographies meant they were shelved until about twenty years ago, but other films were edited to remove him so they could stay in circulation, though some have now been restored to some degree so that he has been reinserted.

Titus does discuss some of these alterations and their musical implications, but elsewhere, there are greater, perhaps insurmountable difficulties. Simple People and Belinsky were taken out of the directors’ hands and reedited to the point where they disowned them, The Adventures of Korzinkina was heavily cut, and when the de-Stalinised films were restored, it was not always to their exact original state, so there are various “editions” in circulation. In some cases Shostakovich’s music was affected, reorganising the music or removing completely pieces.4 With texts such as these the makers’ intentions are so muddied as to make an auteurist analysis difficult and we can only study the mutilated corpses and secondary sources to try to divine their original form, leaving us to ask the awkward, sobering and, sometimes in the face of genius, unasked question, “What is the actual text we are studying and who is responsible for it?”

Unfortunately, the publication of the scores is still spotty, a situation and prospect that was feared as long ago as 2005.5 They don’t necessarily include the complete music or even use all the available manuscript material (see reviews in DSCH 24, 27, 48, and 52). Titus’ tabulated cue sheets give brief descriptions of the action and accompanying music, and will be a useful supplement, though they often omit titles and timecodes (though these sometimes are in the text), but that would have made them much bigger. 6 Though there are some musical examples, there isn’t much analysis, and Titus relies on verbal descriptions of the various cues. The films’ visual qualities (framing, camera movement) is infrequently described, though there are some thoughts on how the music meshes with the editing. While there is some discussion of general trends, for instance, the rash of biopics that in the late 1940s attempted to portray great Russians as proto-Soviets, there is little more contextual information on developments in the wider industry.

As with volume one, there is an accompanying website, this one with 36 sometimes frustratingly brief video clips. In any case, even for those who don’t have VHSs, DVDs, etc, most if not all the films are now available on YouTube and other sources.

There is a list of published scores (manuscripts are detailed where necessary in the text), and the filmography includes details of the DVDs, though some of them are old and from companies with “interesting” histories. The footnotes and bibliography give good leads though they are rarely interrogated very far. For instance, Jay Leyda, author of the classic book Kino (reprinted in 1983) studied with Eisenstein at VGIK and had a very conventional mid-century view of Soviet cinema, seeing his master as the peak, Kozintsev and Trauberg as less interesting, and Arnshtam barely worth mentioning. There are also a few omissions that could have added useful background information on both production and reception, for example, Mar’amov’s Kremlevskyi Tsenzor: Stalin Smotrit Kino and Claire Knight’s Stalin’s Final Films.

At first glance, the book’s title may imply a little more than it delivers: it’s not so much “… and Music for Stalinist Cinema” as “… and His Music for Stalinist Cinema.” Concentrating on Shostakovich means there’s barely any mention of other, often prolific, film composers such as Khachaturian, Popov, Weinberg, Schnittke, Meyerovich, and others—let alone Prokofiev,7 or of the roles of important collaborators such as sound recordist Ilya Volk or conductor Nikolai Rabinovich. Hence, placing Shostakovich’s film work in the industrial, political, and artistic contexts can only be sketched; for instance there’s no discussion of The Man with a Gun as part the “kinoleniniana” genre, and little on the cross-pollination between his film and concert music. But of course, such a volume would be enormous—essentially a lifetime’s work. Nevertheless, Titus deepens our understanding of Shostakovich and provides one model for how the film music and other lesser studied genres of Soviet composers could be addressed.

Notes:

See the table “Selected Fictional Stalins” in John Riley, “Stalin (and Lenin) at the Movies,” in Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film, ed. Alexander Ivashkin and Andrew Kirkman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 121–39.
Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1994), 5.
For brief outlines of the production histories of these two films, see John Riley, Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 39, 41.
Korzinkina’s cue entitled “Restaurant Music” when there is no such scene in the film is a clue to the extent of the editing. Among Belinsky’s victims were two songs. See the review of the CD Sphinx in DSCH 55.
John Riley, “What’s the (Film) Score?” DSCH 22, 5.
Most of Titus’ reference DVDs use the PAL system rather than NTSC. At 25 frames per second, PAL runs four percent faster than the 24fps of the original film and NTSC. This partially accounts for the different running times of the two versions of The Fall of Berlin she references and should be accounted for in her timecodes. PAL also raises the music’s pitch by almost a semitone.
Studies of these composers’ cinema work are rare outside the Eisenstein/Prokofiev collaborations, which a weary cynic may feel have attracted more attention because of the director’s name. Of note is Kevin Bartig’s Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Titus’ own chapter “Experimentation and the ‘Mainstream’ in the Early Film Scores of Gavriil Popov and Vladimir Shcherbachyov,” in Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era, ed. Jeremy Barham (New York: Routledge, 2024), 749-61.

John Leman Riley
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amazon.com / amazon.co.uk

Leonid Maksimenkov
Marshal Sovietskoi Muzyki [Marshal of Soviet Music]
Hardback. 480 pages.
Moscow: Veche. 2024
ISBN: 978-5-4484-5311-3

Marshal of Soviet Music is the most astonishing book about Shostakovich I’ve ever read. Its author, historian Leonid Maksimenkov, set himself a truly startling task for the year 2025: to refute the widely accepted view that Shostakovich’s relationship with Soviet power (and especially with Stalin) was complex and tormenting. The author of this “political biography” (as he himself calls it) sincerely believes that Shostakovich was a “loyal son of the Communist Party” who, thanks to his “knowledge, skills, and abilities,” managed to “rise to the heights of power and become part of the highest Soviet elite,” ultimately reaching the “seemingly unattainable throne of the crowned marshal of Soviet music.”

True to its genre, the book does indeed chronologically follow Shostakovich’s life from birth to death—but it does so through the distorted lens of Maksimenkov’s perception. Let’s consider a few vivid facts from the composer’s biography, which the author interprets in rather peculiar ways, to get a sense of the book’s content.

1936. As is well known, this year was one of the darkest in Shostakovich’s life. Stalinist repressions raged around him, affecting friends and even family members. The articles “Muddle Instead of Music” and “Balletic Falsity” were published in Pravda, attacking his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and ballet The Limpid Stream. Shostakovich feared for the lives of his loved ones and waited for his own arrest.

But Maksimenkov sees the
events of 1936 from a completely different angle: “The leader […] attacked not only Shostakovich’s opera but also the ‘unhealthy’ trends in music for Soviet cinema, which were not mentioned in the article at all. This was typical Stalinist practice—publicly striking one target, implying another, and expecting results in a third,” and “we can judge this based on the transcript of one of the Kremlin film viewings, found in the papers of Shumyatsky.”

He claims that Stalin’s sole aim was to shift Shostakovich’s focus from theatre and symphonic music to film music—and that this goal was supposedly achieved. Overall, Maksimenkov argues that “the 1936 dressing-down played no significant role in the composer’s nomenklatura fate, did not affect his advancement in titles, awards, positions, rations, housing, or cars. He was simply, in the highest terms, shown his place in the imperial table of ranks, where he, a servant of the state, was to work. Namely, in cinematography.”

1948. This year saw the USSR’s largest-scale campaign against major Soviet composers, including Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian. Shostakovich was dismissed from both the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories, forced to publicly repent, and the persecution even affected his children. Maxim Shostakovich recalled: “I was 10 years old. In 1948, when my father was being persecuted after Zhdanov’s speech, I was forced to denounce him during an exam at music school.” These events directly prompted Shostakovich to write his most anti-government piece—Anti- Formalist Rayok.

And what does Maksimenkov write about this? Nothing. He details events from the previous year, 1947, and then, as if nothing happened, jumps straight to Stalin’s death in 1953. Incidentally, he doesn’t mention Rayok at all either. The omission of events that don’t fit Maksimenkov’s original interpretive framework is his primary technique, allowing him to construct a seemingly coherent and logical narrative while completely ignoring contradicting facts.

Speaking of Stalin’s death, let us again turn to quotes from Marshal of Soviet Music, this time showing Maksimenkov’s interpretation of several standard obituary articles signed by Shostakovich:

“This elegy of the fiery Stalinist Shostakovich reflected the shock of that first moment after hearing the news on the radio.”

“Indebted to Comrade Stalin for everything (apartment, car, nationwide fame, honorary titles, foreign trips, five Stalin Prizes, pardons, and possibly even his life), Shostakovich, in a comprehensible trance, screamed out and recorded in writing a fragment which a cold-blooded editor today might classify as a form of glossolalia. We don’t have the draft of Shostakovich’s initial response. Perhaps, in its original form, this speech of a mourner at a virtual funeral sounded even more heart-wrenching.”

Thus, Maksimenkov’s book is the only “political biography” of Shostakovich in the modern Russian-speaking world where the author diligently—yet unsuccessfully—attempts to present the composer’s life and work from the most distorted perspective imaginable. Does the author succeed in sounding convincing? Unlikely. But the mere existence of this book, albeit published in a modest run of 500 copies, once again raises questions about the state of Russian society.

Vladislava Shilina
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