Director Mikhail Tsekhanovsky's animated adaptation of Pushkin's The Tale of the Priest and his Servant Balda (1933) was never completed, and all the finished film stock was lost during the Siege of Leningrad. Supposedly all the music composed by Dmitry Shostakovich was lost along with it until the indefatigable Shostakovich conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky reconstructed a suite from the composer's drafts and sketches. Rozhdestvensky premiered this suite of six numbers in 1979, thereby adding to the picture of Shostakovich as a film composer.

Rozhdestvensky's suite of music for The Tale of the Priest and his Servant Balda sounds like the modernist Shostakovich at his most ironic and sardonic. Indeed, the sarcastic stopped trumpets, the goofy marches, the snide trombones, and the mocking tone of the music almost make the suite sound more often like Kurt Weill than Shostakovich. Clearly, animation in the U.S.S.R. was not intended for children. Of course, the story—concerning a working-class hero who overcomes all adversity, including his oppressive employer and the Devil himself, to win the girl and freedom—is hardly for children, and it would naturally appeal to the socialist composer of the Second Symphony, "To October."

© James Leonard, All Music Guide