After Shostakovich composed the music for the East German documentary Song of the Great Rivers in 1954, he also penned the following comments, which appeared in the first issue of Iskusstvo Kino, a Soviet cinema magazine: "...the relationship between composers and film-directors has not progressed much over the last twenty years...Some of our directors are musical...others just want a 'spot of music' for their films: working for them drives me up a wall..." (Dmitri Shostakovich: About Himself and His Times, compiled by Grigoryev and Platek, page 152).

Although no trace of either the film or the music for the film Song of the Great Rivers currently exists, one cannot help but wonder whether the experience of working with director Jorvis Ivens might have accounted for this exceptional outburst of spleen by the usually extremely circumspect Shostakovich. Shostakovich had worked with many different directors at many different times in his more than 20 years as a film composer, but they had all been Soviet Russian directors, and he had for the most part apparently respected them personally even if he did not respect the mangled and mutilated form in which the Communist Party eventually allowed the films and his scores to be released. Yet after working with the East German Ivens, Shostakovich did make these angry comments.

While no one currently knows the quality of Shostakovich's music for Song of the Great Rivers, his comments seem to indicate that he found the film's musical environment uncongenial at best.

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