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- Voices in Potemkin: Izvestia publishes a fragment of a book about the soundtracks to Eisenstein's film
Voices in Potemkin: Izvestia publishes a fragment of a book about the soundtracks to Eisenstein's film
What path has one of the greatest films in the history of cinema traveled in 100 years? And how did his perception change due to music? A new book by Sergey Uvarov, Candidate of Art History, musicologist, head of the Scientific and Creative Center for Film Music at the Moscow Conservatory and a columnist for Izvestia, published by Composer Publishing house, is dedicated to the masterpiece of silent cinema, Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein.
The narrative is built around the history of the film's soundtracks, starting with the premiere compilation at the Bolshoi Theater and ending with the latest scores created last year as part of the project of the Union of Composers of Russia "Battleship Potemkin: a New Course" (curated by Sergey Uvarov and film critic Naum Kleiman). The author claims that it was thanks to the music that the film acquired different meanings and absorbed the ideas of each of the eras. On the eve of the publication, Izvestia publishes a fragment revealing previously unknown details about the appearance of the textbook accompaniment to "Potemkin" from the symphonies of Dmitry Shostakovich.
Sergey Uvarov "The Musical Age" of the Battleship "Potemkin" (fragment)
He started with a scene on the Odessa stairs.
He is the music editor of Mosfilm, Arseny Lapisov. He had to put a compilation of Dmitry Shostakovich's music, compiled by film critics Naum Kleiman and Leonid Kozlov, on a restored version of Battleship Potemkin: its release was being prepared for the 50th anniversary of the film. First of all, Lapisov combined the key moment of a line of soldiers shooting at a mother with a child in her arms with the end of the Allegretto section from the second movement of the Eleventh Symphony "1905". The music should have exactly covered the entire previous action of the episode. (Although it didn't work out exactly — I had to lengthen the credits). And what followed was Largo from the Fifth and Allegretto from the Fourth Symphonies.
A shot from the movie Battleship Potemkin
So the entire soundtrack began to line up around the Odessa Stairs, which, in addition to the listed opuses, included fragments of the Twelfth and Tenth Symphonies, as well as the piano quintet.
The decision to use Shostakovich's music for the sound of the tape did not come immediately, although it seems obvious. After all, Dmitry Dmitrievich, like Eisenstein, created his own image of the 1905 revolution in the Eleventh Symphony. And the great composer was connected with cinema all his life. By the way, an interesting question: did "Potemkin" himself influence Shostakovich when he wrote his opus? The parallels between the scene on the Odessa Stairs and the musical picture of the shooting of the demonstration on January 9th are too obvious! "Perhaps," the composer replied cryptically to this suggestion in a conversation with his old friend, director Sergei Yutkevich, who headed the Commission on Eisenstein's Creative Legacy of the USSR Union of Cinematographers, which in 1973 achieved Goskino's decision to create a new sound version of Potemkin.
Shostakovich, of course, saw Potemkin back in the year of its first release in 1926: the film was widely shown. But was the young composer sitting in the auditorium at that moment?.. At the piano? Shostakovich was 19 years old, and he was finishing his taping career in Leningrad cinemas, illustrating silent films for a living. This fact of his biography is well known to everyone. But we don't know what kind of paintings he accompanied — with some exceptions, which suggest that there was a lot of stuff in his forced repertoire, including popular science films, to which, however, the gifted young man sought to find an original approach.
A shot from the movie Battleship Potemkin
In a letter to Lev Oborin, Shostakovich said:
"Yesterday there was a view painting "Wading and waterbirds of Sweden." I sat down to illustrate it. He got into a rage and began to depict such birds that the sky became hot. Suddenly, there is a great roar of applause in the hall, with whistles blowing. They usually applaud in the cinema, protesting, and not admiring at all. I thought: "We must assume that the painting is rubbish, so the public is protesting." Then everything went quiet. After a while, there was another round of applause. Then the painting ended. A certain Schaeffer came up to me and said, "The public is told to run away from such music." Then the head of the theater approached Vladimirov (the conductor) and began to say something. Then I went up to Vladimirov and asked him what the head of the department had told him. Vladimirov laughed and said, "The audience came to Zava during the painting and said that the pianist was probably drunk." And Vladimirov told the head of the department: "The illustration is excellent, and your audience does not understand anything."
The last place of Shostakovich's taper work was the Piccadilly Cinema on Nevsky Prospekt, later renamed Aurora. A young graduate student at the Conservatory, who had not yet managed to declare himself with his First Symphony (its premiere will take place in the spring of the same year), got a job at Piccadilly in the second half of January, just when Potemkin was released, but left this business in early February — forever. Could he have "met" Armadillo during the final couple of weeks of his illustrating work? Why not? However, Shostakovich did not mention this anywhere, either in public statements or in conversations with Yutkevich about the music for Battleship. But it is known that, in general, the experience of working as a piano player was very traumatic for Dmitry Dmitrievich, and in later years he spoke about it extremely sparingly.
If Shostakovich really happened to play to "Potemkin", one can only envy the audience who witnessed the "live" dialogue between the art of the two geniuses, and regret that almost half a century later Shostakovich could not create an original score for the film. In 1974, when it was discussed with Yutkevich, the composer was already very ill and could hardly afford to take on such a large project. But he readily gave permission to use music from his compositions to sound the tape, leaving the choice of specific fragments at the discretion of the cinematographers.
A shot from the movie Battleship Potemkin
Before that, there was a single sound version of "Potemkin" in the USSR, with a soundtrack by Nikolai Kryukov. It was released in 1950, but it was very imperfect both in terms of authenticity of the video sequence and musically. The now almost forgotten Kryukov was considered one of the leading film composers at that time. For the films "Admiral Nakhimov" and "The Legend of the Siberian Land" he received (as part of film groups) Stalin prizes of the first degree. In the wake of this success, he was obviously entrusted with the Battleship. It turned out to be straightforward and impersonal. The black-and-white tape has acquired "gray" music, even in the scene on the Odessa stairs, which does not rise above the background level.
The rhythmic, ponderous tread, apparently designed to illustrate the relentless pace of the tsarist soldiers, becomes a shackle on the assembly dynamics. Evil is symbolized, of course, by brass instruments. And the timid attempts of the strings to add elements of supplication and lamentation (something that would later be brilliantly done in a compilation of Shostakovich's symphonies) are defeated by the lack of expressive melodic material. If you try to make a list of the most unsuccessful, passing soundtracks of "Battleship", Kryukovsky will be at the beginning of it.
But the installation itself was far from complete. In 1926, the negative of the film went to Germany. Eisenstein, who arrived before the European premiere, made a number of notes and changes in the order of shots at the request of German censorship. In the early 1930s, this abridged negative returned to Moscow, and it was used for dubbing and re-releasing in 1950 — for the 25th anniversary of Potemkin. In addition, the titles were edited in the spirit of the times. Back in the early 1930s, the epigraph from Trotsky's book 1905 was removed, quoting Lenin, and in 1950 it was even replaced with other words, also from Ilyich's writings...
A shot from the movie Battleship Potemkin
By the middle of the century, the last copies of the film in its original version had worn out and were decommissioned, and in the Gosfilmofond, organized in 1948, the tape turned out to be, professionally speaking, in incomplete condition. A comparison with the editing sheet, prepared during Eisenstein's lifetime and describing the film frame by frame, testified to many losses. It was only in the early 1960s that the Gosfilmofond began searching for missing personnel and restoring the author's editing. Naum Kleiman, who joined the film archive after graduating from the film science faculty of VGIK, took over. When comparing different positive copies, there were moments that were missing from the negative.
So, an episode on the Odessa stairs was found in the VGIK film library, from there several shocking plans were returned to the negative: people running in panic step on the arm of a fallen wounded boy. There were two parts of the film in Siberia, one of which contains a fragment with waves during the passage of the battleship through the squadron... Later, the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) managed to obtain early copies of Potemkin from foreign film libraries — the most complete in terms of personnel composition and accurate editing turned out to be a positive from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Step by step, the Potemkin regained its original appearance.
But what kind of music should I use? Definitely not Kryukov. Alas, both of Eisenstein's co—composers were no longer there.: Sergei Prokofiev died in 1953, and Gavriil Popov, an employee of the director on the film "Bezhin Meadow", banned and destroyed, died in 1972 (by the way, he did not like to recall the tragic story of working with Sergei Mikhailovich, although he used fragments of music from "Bezhin Meadow" in his academic works).
A shot from the movie Battleship Potemkin
Then the idea came up to offer to write a new score to some young composer. First, the name of Alfred Schnittke appeared: at that time he was not even 40, and he had just performed his First Symphony, and in his filmography there were already a dozen and a half titles — "Glass Harmonica" by Andrey Khrzhanovsky, "Adventures of a Dentist" and "Sport, Sport, Sport" by Elem Klimov, "You and I" by Larisa Shepitko, "Uncle Vanya" by Andrei Konchalovsky and others. Yes, he probably could have offered a really non-standard view of the Battleship. Nahum Kleiman tried to convince Alfred to take up this task, but he did not agree: "I cannot write music for the red banner!"
Nikolai Karetnikov, another prominent avant-garde artist who loudly declared himself in the cinema, a musician of the same generation as Schnittke, refused more delicately: "Not my material. And they won't let me do such a project..." (they say, too unreliable). Well, Shostakovich's pupil, an even younger Boris Tishchenko, whose ballet Yaroslavna showed a "Prokofiev" combination of melodic gift and vivid plasticity, did not take up Potemkin for purely personal reasons: at that moment he was going through a difficult divorce from his wife.
Yutkevich offered to talk to Shostakovich. By the way, this was the second attempt to involve Dmitry Dmitrievich in the dubbing of Eisenstein's works. In the mid-1960s, when they wanted to return the film October to the screens for the 50th anniversary of the revolution, the composer was ready to take part in this matter. Recalling his only meeting with Shostakovich, Kleiman told how he found himself in the screening room with him, ready, on behalf of Yutkevich and Grigory Alexandrov, to explain to Dmitry Dmitrievich Eisenstein's installation theories and the features of the October structure.
A shot from the movie Battleship Potemkin
When the show began, the composer was completely immersed in the picture, and in the scene of fraternizing sailors with soldiers of the Wild Division, the wand, on which the elderly master leaned, began tapping the rhythm of the montage. It became clear: the music was already playing in Shostakovich's head! After the session, Dmitry Dmitrievich briefly confirmed that he was ready to work, and, refusing any explanations, took his leave: "No, no, everything is clear to me." But in the end, he did not create a new score, but commissioned musicologist Alexander Kholodilin to make a compilation of previously created works.
It turned out to be overloaded, straightforward. And the cuts Alexandrov made to the film itself did not allow this work to be considered respectful of the original.
Starting with "Potemkin," the members of the Commission on Eisenstein's Creative Legacy worked under the slogan "Just not like Alexandrov's October!" And the suggestion to use Shostakovich's music again at first caused at least wariness. After all, the artistic worlds of Eisenstein and Shostakovich are too different. Sergei Mikhailovich's cinematography is much closer to the art of his namesake Prokofiev, the "antipode" of Shostakovich. Well, if you're making a compilation anyway, why not use Sergey Sergeevich's legacy?
A shot from the movie Battleship Potemkin
Kleiman and his colleague and friend Leonid Kozlov (by the way, the author of an article about the role of music in Ivan the Terrible) listened to all of Prokofiev's orchestral opuses and even took up his piano works — but alas: they could not find anything suitable for Potemkin. But it succeeded — among the symphonies of Shostakovich. This option was also supported by Goskino. The decision turned out to be final. The idea of involving young composers in writing music for Battleship had to be abandoned. For 50 years.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
