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The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda (film)

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The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda (film) The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda Wikipedia

The tale about priest and his worker balda


The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda is an extant Soviet animation feature film by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky based on the eponymous fairy tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin. The only surviving episode (4 mins) is called Bazar (Marketplace).

Contents

A screenplay for the film was written in the 1930s by the director Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy. Work began in 1933. In the same year, the director contacted the young composer Dimitri Shostakovich and asked him to write music to accompany the film. Shostakovich wrote some music for the film in 1933-34 but never completed the score because of the 1936 denunciation of his work in the form of the Pravda article "Muddle Instead of Music". Partially because the film now had no score, work on it was stopped and it was never completed. Other reasons included production difficulties and a general lack of organization at the studio. Although the film was nearly finished, it was put into storage at the Lenfilm archives, where almost all of it was lost in a fire during the Second World War. The 6-minute scene of the market from the tale is all that survives and it stands alone as a classic of Russian animated films.

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Music

After Shostakovich died, his widow arranged to have the score completed by one of Shostakovich's students, Vadim Bibergan. The world premiere recording of the 50-minute work was made by the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Thomas Sanderling and released in 2006, a century after Shostakovich's birth.

The score was published in 2005, in volume 126 of DSCH Publishers' New Collected Works of Dmitri Shostakovich. This publication contains text in Russian and English.

Surviving and restored parts (DSCH, 2005)

A number of items were found either in the original composer's handwriting or that of a copier's; eleven others were found only in rough draft form with missing parts or harmonies, and were restored by Vadim Bibergan.

Winds

Note: "1+" means that two instruments are specified, but only one part is written for them both to play.

Strings

Note: the exact number of violin/viola/cello/contrabass players is not indicated, except in pieces where only one instrument is to play.

1The violin, viola, cello and contrabass parts are only present for one loud chord at the end of the piece.

Other percussion

Names in italics are in their original Italian.

Voices

Note: the exact number of choralists is mostly not indicated; "2+" means that there are at least two harmonic lines somewhere in a part, or at least 2 voices are specifically called for.

References

The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda (film) Wikipedia