Shostakovich composed more film music in the late 1930s than at any other time in his career. Within five years he had composed complete scores for eight feature-length films and one shorter animated film. Autumn of the year 1938 was especially productive. Within four months he composed the music for four films: Friends, The Great Citizen, The Man with the Gun, and The Vyborg District, the last of the Maxim trilogy by the directors Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg tracing the rise of the character Maxim through the ranks of the Communist Party. Unfortunately the music for The Vyborg District is not currently available, and the film itself is in the Soviet film archives, so it is impossible to say what the music is like. All that exists is a single except from the score in the Suite, Op. 51a, compiled from the three Maxim movies by Lev Atovmyan in 1961. Although this one movement sounds like the kind of banal and bombastic music Shostakovich all too often turned out for propaganda films of the period, it is impossible to say with conviction that this movement is typical of the whole score.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide