p Early in the year the composer began work on his Sixth Symphony, which engrossed him completely and was to be his main achievement of the year. It was first performed on 5 November by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky. He also conducted its Moscow premiere, given a month later by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra: once again, a new work by Shostakovich embellished the programme of a ten-day festival of Soviet music.

p Shostakovich also continued to work on the Lenin Symphony, hoping to have it finished by the following year. Among the new films with his music were Vyborg District and Part Two of A Great Citizen.

p From time to time he still gave concerts, although less often than in his younger days. On 6 January he performed his First Piano Concerto in Moscow. On a memorable evening in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, on 9 April, Shostakovich and the cellist A. Ferkelman performed his Cello Sonata, and sonatas by Grieg and Rakhmaninov. In April and in September-October he gave concerts in Sverdlovsk, and on 30 October performed his 24 Preludes and Cello’ Sonata (again with Ferkelman) in the Small Hall of the Leningrad Conservatoire.

p On 23 May Shostakovich was officially confirmed as professor at the Conservatoire,

p At a pre-election meeting held at the Leningrad Conservatoire at the beginning of December, the composer was nominated as a candidate for election to the Leningrad City Soviet of Working people Deputies.

p On 29 December the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad staged a new production of Verdi’s opera Othello.

p My love for this opera and its great composer is so deep that I set off to the opera as though I were- going to some great celebration. On returning home after the performance, I felt impelled to put a pen to paper, although I am not a professional critic.

p Unfortunately, the production was unworthy of Verdi’s brilliant work, the only serving grace being Nikolai Pechkovsky’s memorable portrayal of Othello.

p It seems to me that one of the chief reasons for the failure of the production lay in the conductor, Sergei Yeltsin. Verdi’s tragic, passionate score was plainly a little too much for the conductor, whose interpretation bore the stamp of insufferable indifference. The whole of the start of the opera, up to Othello’s first phrase, was performed vapidly. The orchestra played with no sign of inspiration; the brass section-trumpets and trombones-was particularly poor. The marvellous grace-notes of the brass just before xhe A-minor tutti in Act One were messed up completely. The double-bass solo in Act Four sounded obnoxious.

p I feel exceedingly grieved: may that serve to justify the harshness of my judgement. Boredom, indifference, insipidness and slackness are quite unforgivable in performances of Verdi. Yet this self-evident truth appears to have found no adherents among the musical directors of the theatre.

p While film actors, directors and cameramen have a theory and a whole range of special cinematographic means at their disposal, we musicians have so far been working in the dark, knowing little or nothing about the peculiarities and techniques of the cinema.

p And yet, to write music for the cinema with no theoretical or technical background, is more or less the same as orchestrating a piece of music without knowing what the instruments of the orchestra sound like.

p The emergence of sound cinema was bound, perhaps, to bring into the foreground the whole question of the musical cinema as an art form. The fusion of word and sound, of sound and action, and the opportunity of using interesting new orchestral combinations—all this raises the same problems for cinema music as have long been successfully solved in ‘general’ music: in the musical drama, opera, the symphony.

p Film music is still very often merely illustrative, something ‘added’ to the picture. But it should be,, in my view, an inalienable artistic component of the film.

p Admittedly, we are partly ourselves to blame. I am afraid I know of no Soviet theorist or composer who has seriously looked at the theoretical problems of film music. Our music schools are also lagging behind. i’Which of our conservatoires has a composition department which includes in its syllabus the writing of music for the cinema?. f Yet, through the cinema music reaches the widest sections of the popuRation. In this sense, no theatre or concert hall can compete with the cinema, with its audience of millions.

p I have done a certain amount of work for the cinema (the music for the films The Counter Plan, Alone, Golden Mountains, Girlfriends, Friends, Maxim’s Toutk, Maxim’s Return, Vyborg District, Volochqyevka Days and The Man with a Gun}. In the course of all this work, the real idea of cinema music has become clearer and clearer to me. This idea, or rather its purpose, may be formulated something like this: film music must participate in the actual action of the picture. The same demands can and should be made of the music in a film as are made of the scenario, the acting and the production. But if that is the case, the music must also be of the same high quality. Of course, this cannot be achieved overnight: a lot of experimental work is still needed.

p I am currently writing music for a^short cartoon film based on Marshak’s Tale of the Stupid Mouse. Cartoon-animatidri is^another very inter:sting device which requires its own kind of expression in music... I am greatly enjoying working on this, my first attempt at children’s film nusic. I hope the attempt will be successful and win the approval of :hildren,

p ...I am contemplating writing a film-opera, exploiting the principles of realism to the full. I am very attracted by the ’limitless possibilities opened up by the cinema screen, by the possibility of resolving the questions of place, time and action which are so complex for the theatre.

p In the theatre, action broken up into many scenes inevitably loses its continuity. In the cinema, the same action, shown in a stream of swiftly 79 changing sequences, retains all its power. What a rewarding task the composer has in trying to catch the rhythm of this dynamic stream of film sequences and writing music which plays a full role in the film, sometimes even leading it. Sergei Prokofiev’s music for the film Alexander Nevsky was, for me, an example where the theatrical effectiveness of the music was often very successful.

p Unfortunately I have so far failed to realise my dreams of a film-opera, The question of collaboration between poets and composers, which has occasionally been successfully solved in the musical drama, has not yet been posed as regards the film-opera; indeed the whole question of the film-opera in general has not yet been properly examined. All my attempts to interest poets, librettists and producers in the idea have so far been to no avail.

Through the medium of the Literaturnaya Ga&ta, I should like to appeal to poets and producers: who would like to collaborate on the production of a film-opera? ^^2^^

p Work on my Sixth Symphony is nearing completion. I have finished the first two movements, and in the coming weeks I expect to compose the third and final movement.

p The moods and emotional tone of the Sixth Symphony will differ from those of the Fifth, which was marked by elements of tragedy and tension. In my latest symphony, music of a contemplative, lyrical tenor predominates; I wished to convey moods of joy, spring and youth.

p At the same time I am finishing the music for Part Two of Friedrich Ermler’s film A Great Citizen. In this film the music has the important function of expressing the national sorrow after the perfidious murder of the Great Citizen, Shakhov. The music for this central episode in the film takes the form of a mournful symphonic poem.

p Recently I started writing an operetta entitled Twelve Chairs, based on the well-known novel of the same name by Ilf and Petrov. It is very difficult to reproduce the action and characters of a long adventure novel in a three-act operetta, but the librettist, E. Petrov, and the poet, V. Vladimirov, have, in my view, coped with the problem well.

p It has long been my greatest dream to write a symphonic work dedicated to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. A year has passed since I first started this work. My librettist has selected the richest folklore material about Lenin (songs, tales and legends) and is now working on the literary scenario for the symphony.

The Lenin symphony is planned as a work in four movements, involving a choir, soloists and a narrator. The first movement deals wilh Lenin’s youth, the second with Lenin at the helm of the Revolution, the third with his death, and the fourth with life without Lenin himself, but guided by his principles. Various musical fragments are already written, and will eventually be incorporated in my Seventh Symphony-my most important recent work-in memory of the brilliant leader of mankind.^^3^^