The suite from Shostakovich's score to Five Days—Five Nights (1960) was compiled by the composer's friend Lev Atovmian in 1961. He chose five large cues from the film—the "Introduction," "Dresden in Ruins," "Liberated Dresden," "Interlude," and "Finale"—and interwove several other smaller episodes from the music into their fabric. The result is a nearly symphonic work of vast dimensions. Much of Shostakovich's music in general draws on his other compositions, and there are interesting echoes of more familiar pieces here—the Eleventh Symphony is particularly prominent in the "Introduction" and "Dresden in Ruins." And some of the music draws on the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: the cue "Liberated Dresden," a sequence in which the freed inmates from a concentration camp reenter Dresden, is literally and deliberately an expanded version of the "Turkish March" episode of the finale.

Although no one would claim that the suite from Five Days—Five Nights represents Shostakovich at his best as a film composer, it is still one of his better film scores and, according to all reports, far better than the sentimental film which it accompanies.

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