Posted 9:10 PM by Gene

Tonight I listened to an old (1988) "Melodiya" CD (via a defunct British label) of a 1951 adaptation by a composer named Avtomyan of Shostakovich's post-war score for a film called The Young Guard. The title summons those notorious farm-tractor musicals; then again the name Shostakovich summons a man whose face suggested a few too many sojourns under a desk, who wrote reams of "musical dissidence" -- meaning works with names like Leningrad and October and lots of gloomy and doomy chords with a heavily ironic fortissiissimo major chord at the end (with a flatted fifth snuck in like Miles Davis), works that yelled to the West, "See? I'm not in the Gulag yet!" -- even as he was winning Orders of Lenin and Stalin State Prizes or whatever they were called. But Shosty must have realized it would be hard to work that shtick in writing a film called The Young Guard. Here's IMDB.com's brief description:

The film is set in the city of Krasnodon in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Russia. Local teenagers are organizing the underground resistance. The teens manage to outsmart the Nazis in their fight. They blow up the Nazi recruitment offices. Their activity lifts the spirits of the surviving citizens. They organize other school-friends in the groups of five to help the citizens in their struggle for survival. Their courage helps many others to survive.

Whatever side the Soviets took in history they (ultimately) took the right side against Hitler, and it would be hard to be false writing such hack work in a week, as Shosty probably did -- and except for a few bathetic chords that seem to say, "Am I really writing this dreck?", it is touching and stirring music, because here was recent history, and possibly because it has the guts to be sincere. Shosty has not entered the historic ash heap for the same reasons some people must find HERR DOKTOR SONDHEIM a genius, although the former is far worthier of avoiding it, but the received opinion on things can be the wrong one, and we're too overwhelmed by it to dissent.

P. S. We must presume the Soviets didn't make up the tale of the young guards like their other tall tales -- but how would it benefit them after their own untold millions of war dead?