Between the years 1929 and 1969 Shostakovich composed nearly 50 film scores and was equally active from about the same time to 1940 as a composer of incidental music for stage productions. His theatrical and film music often differ greatly from his now better-known symphonic and other concert music. It is more direct, tuneful, and full of marches, waltzes, polkas, and other set pieces. Shostakovich actually began his theatrical career while still a conservatory student playing piano in silent cinemas. One of these theaters had been run by Vsevolod Meyerhold, a director who also staged live presentations. He and Shostakovich first collaborated on stage in a production of Mayakovsky's The Bedbug in 1929. He also directed a strange "anti-bourgeois" production of Shakespeare's Hamlet in 1932, for which Shostakovich wrote a brilliantly sarcastic score. The composer's much later music for a film of Hamlet is entirely different in music and tone.

The Hamlet production was a hit. Even though Shostakovich had, by implication, disapproved of it in an article appearing over his name attacking the idea that socialism could be advanced in a positive way simply by mocking preexisting great art as "bourgeois," he was willing to collaborate with Meyerhold again when the director proposed staging Balzac's classic The Human Comedy at the same theater a couple of years later, in a translation and adaptation by Sukhotin.

This time, however, the production was a failure, and it soon closed. Shostakovich could only gather up his musical material and consider using them in future compositions. He authorized inclusion of some of the music in the Ballet Suite No. 3 arranged from his various theatrical and film scores by Lev Atovmyan in 1952—a time when Shostakovich needed to remind everyone that he had written a lot of tuneful, accessible music for the people).

There are, however, some arrangements of music from The Human Comedy as a distinct piece, some of them the result of research into State Archives and the Shostakovich family papers. One of the most striking ideas of the score is a gentle and broad theme proceeding over a waltz-time accompaniment that depicts panoramic scenes, such as the seaside and the rooftops of Paris. By contrast, there are short genre pieces including a charming gavotte, a brisk march, and a satirical march for a squad of police in the composer's typical "cop" style.

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