The Soviet silent film The New Babylon (1929) depicted the events surrounding the failed uprising in Paris in 1870 - 1871 by a group of workers which called itself the Commune. Needless to say, the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. viewed the uprising as a preview of their own successful 1917 Revolution. At the centenary of the Paris Commune, The New Babylon was revived in Russia along with the film score by Dmitri Shostakovich. The score had gone missing after the failed premiere of the film (last-minute editing and a projectionist who ran the film faster than the music contributed to the film's failure) but the indefatigable Shostakovich conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky searched the archive of the Glinka Museum in Leningrad until he found the manuscript of the score. He meticulously restored it and the film and the score were triumphantly re-premiered in time for the centenary of the Commune.

The score, however, accompanied the entire film which ran for nearly and hour and a half. This made concert presentation of the score impractical. In order to present Shostakovich's music in a more contained form, Rozhdestvensky selected seven numbers from the film totaling about 40 minutes of music. Those seven numbers are "The War," parody of the Franco-Prussian War as a burlesque operetta; "Paris," a portrayal of the decadent city of the bourgeois to mock-Offenbach including the "Can-can" from Orpheus in the Underworld; "The Siege of Paris," a brutal and often harrowing depiction of the privations of the city of the workers under blockade; "Operetta," a jaunty sequence of tunes for woodwinds; "Paris has been here for Centuries," a succession of sad images from the nearly decimated city after months of siege; "Versailles," an other savage portrayal of the bourgeois who have fled Paris for the pleasures of Louis XIV's pleasure palace; and "Finale," a dramatic symphonic conclusion which far outstrips the finales of Shostakovich's contemporaneous Second and Third Symphonies in force and power.

Taken together, these seven numbers present not only a précis of the film but a portrait of the composer as a young modernist.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide