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You know, Alan, this is really useful information that I doubt anyone has done before. You must keep it in case it's needed as empirical material in future analyses.
I do have the "background work" kept but I didn't go so far as detail where in each movement pieces were excised from.
I know that there have been several performances of Shostakovich's work shown to picture and I assume that the appropriate pieces have been tracked down before for these performances. But I wasn't able to track any details down online so I decided to have a go myself.
I need to check back with Chris' analysis of the music used as I know there are a couple of discrepancies between lists where I found the music in different locations to the ones suggested by Chris (sorry Chris!).
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Before this, I hadn't heard any of Shostakovich's symphonies from start to finish. Now I have 5-6 to listen to. And the quality and variety of the pieces of music used in the film have definitely inspired me now to listen to them intact.
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I have a theory about the Shostakovich music used for many of the commercially-available DVD transfers of the film.
The Shostakovich "suite" that others have made the expert analysis of was prepared for a new print of the film released by the Soviet authorities in 1955, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution and the mutiny on the 'Potemkin'. The excerpts from the 11th Symphony that accompny the Odessa Steps sequence fit so well - and indeed, I had visualised this music as being shown alongside that sequence long before I ever saw the 1955 print - that I suspect that Shostakovich may actually have written it for the film, but then found he could not complete the rest of the commission, either because of time constraints or because his creative juices did not flow for the project until he took the new approach of setting the Odessa Steps music (despite the fictionality of the incident itself!) into the wider context of the whole 1905 Revolution. So he pulled that music off the shelf, dusted it off, and used it in his 11th Symphony, "The Year 1905", in 1957.
I've been searching for sources that would support this hypothesis, so far without luck. (But equally, I've found none that demolish the theory either!)
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Posted: |
Mar 1, 2014 - 11:45 AM
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By: |
Tall Guy
(Member)
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I've also seen OCTOBER (or TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD), arguably a better film, with music by Shostakovich. I thought it was the Eleventh Symphony that somebody had tracked in, but Wikipedia says, "In 1966, Dimitri Shostakovich wrote a new soundtrack for the film, which later appeared as a tone poem 'October' Op.131."
The youtube version of TEN DAYS that I've found has a snippet of the 11th for the introduction but then launches into the 12th for at least the first eight or ten minutes. I haven't had time to watch it all yet.
I doubt that "October" opus 131 was written for a film. There's no mention of it in my usual references and everything points to it being written on commission for the 50th anniversary of the revolution. Typically, DDS starts it with a quotation from his own 10th symphony, the work he wrote to mark/celebrate the death of Stalin and which more than any other work up to that point asserts Shostakovich's own signature in his work - as if to say "I survived, Comrade Stalin, and you're dead".
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