Volume 127
The Maxim trilogy consists of films released in the second half of the 1930s by Lenfilm: “Maxim’s Youth” (1935), “The Return of Maxim” (1937) and “The Vyborg Side” (1939). In early December 1932, directors Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg submitted an application for making the film trilogy “Bolshevik”, and in 1933 they began work on the first series. Shostakovich was asked to compose the music—after working together on two earlier films “New Babylon” and “Alone”, Kozintsev and Trauberg could not imagine producing the new films without him.
In 1941 Kozintsev, Trauberg and Chirkov won the Stalin Prize, 1st Class, for the films “Maxim’s Youth”, “The Return of Maxim” and “The Vyborg Side”, becoming some of the first winners of the newly established highest state award.
The scores of the “Prologue” from “Maxim’s Youth” and the “Overture” from “The Vyborg Side” were published in 1987 by Muzyka Publishers in Shostakovich’s Collected Works in 42 Volumes (Vol. 41). In 1961, a collection of Fragments of the Music to the Maxim Trilogy edited by Levon Atovmian was also put out by Muzyka Publishers, Moscow; the music to the film “The Return of Maxim” served as its main source. There are significant differences between the above-mentioned collection and Shostakovich’s original music.
Shostakovich valued his music to the Maxim trilogy mainly for the creative lessons he learned from working on the film. In a general article on film music, entitled “Cinema as a School for Composers”, he wrote: “Cinema provides composers with brilliant lessons: there is an inner discipline that has a beneficial effect on the musical language. ... I did not adapt to the demands of cinema immediately. ... I was unable to adapt my music to the constraints of film production until I worked on the Maxim trilogy and ‘The Great Citizen’. Only then did I truly appreciate how important it is when writing film music to be as expressive as possible while being as concise as possible.”
