Shostakovich scores a belated Babylon hit

Composer’s music for 1929 film is revived decades after the fiasco of its public premiere

Eighty-eight years after it was written, a film score by Shostakovich has at last enjoyed its first public performance as the composer intended it. At a screening at the Barbican at the end of March, pianist Sasha Grynyuk accompanied a screening of The New Babylon, a silent film from 1929 that, at the time of its creation, should have proved a major boost to the young Shostakovich’s career but in fact turned into a major debacle. Commissioned to write the music for Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s film – which tells the story of the Paris Commune in 1871 – Shostkovich wrote a brilliantly detailed score that, as well as closely following the action on screen, also contained witty quotations from the Marseillaise and the Can-can from Offenbach’s

Soviet censors, at a private screening, demanded 20 per cent of the film be cut

suffer in silents: Shostakovich’s efforts were left in tatters

spokeswoman: a scene from The New Babylon