“Five Days, Five Nights”. Music to the Film

  The film Five Days, Five Nights, dedicated to the history of the rescue of paintings from the Dresden Gallery, was made in 1960. It was the first joint feature film created by Soviet and German filmmakers at the Mosfilm and DEFA studios (GDR).
  The film was released on 27 February 1961 and was shown nationwide, it was repeatedly broadcast on Soviet television.

  Shostakovich and director Leo Arnshtam (1905­-1979) not only had a long history of creative cooperation, but had also known each other since their younger years, when Shostakovich first began studying at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1919. This was when the composer and Leo Arnshtam formed a special bond that did not come second to any of his other close friendships.
  Shostakovich wrote the music to almost all of Arnshtam’s films, and this went without saying. His participation did not require a special “invitation” and was formally established by Shostakovich’s inclusion in the filming group. The Directorate of the Creative Association approved the signing of the contract with Shostakovich for writing the music to Five Days, Five Nights  on 29 December 1959, and two weeks later, on 13 January, Shostakovich presented the musical explication of the film to the studio’s management.
  In the summer of 1960, Arnshtam invited Shostakovich to come to the GDR for filming. This trip was preceded by a time of harrowing emotional upheaval for the composer due to the extreme pressure imposed on him by the top leadership to become a member of the Party. Attempts to avoid this proved futile, and on 4 July 1960, the day before he left for Berlin, Shostakovich submitted his application to join the CPSU.
  According to Arnshtam’s recollections, Shostakovich was very perturbed when, on 6 July, he was shown footage at the studio in Babelsberg of prisoners leaving Hitler’s death camps. And the next day, after seeing the ruins of Dresden, he was horrified by the destruction and spoke of the grief and suffering that the war waged by the Nazis had inflicted on the Soviet and German people.
  Shostakovich spent the next week in Gohrisch, where, as the filmmakers hoped, he would be able to work on the music to the film in the peaceful and beautiful environment of Saxon Switzerland. But this did not happen. The impressions created by what he saw in Dresden, added to the bitter feelings of the preceding month, inspired in the composer another idea, the Eighth Quartet, “dedicated to himself”, which was apparently already beginning to take shape internally. During his stay in Gohrisch, the quartet was rapidly committed to paper. Shostakovich reported in a letter that “the conditions are very conducive to composing: I wrote the Eighth Quartet there. As hard as I tried, I was unable to complete the rough drafts of the film assignment. Instead, I wrote a totally useless and ideologically weak quartet”. The music for Five Days, Five Nights was composed later, in Moscow.
  Starting on 12 August (by the beginning of that month, the film crew had already returned to Moscow), Shostakovich regularly visited the Mosfilm studio to watch the footage (on 12, 13 and 23 August and 2, 3, 5 and 8 September). It was during this time that the composer wrote the film score, as confirmed by the “Interim Act of Acceptance of the Music Scores by the Accounting Department of the Mosfilm Studio” found in the archives. The document is dated 6 September and contains a list of most of the parts of the score, including the final section. The date of the recording by the Film Production Directorate Orchestra (conducted by Grigori Gamburg) has not been established.
  The film was released on 27 February 1961 and was shown nationwide, as evidenced by the numerous reviews in the central periodical press and the newspapers of the Union and autonomous republics. It was repeatedly broadcast on Soviet television.
  In 1970, a Suite of five items compiled by Levon Atovmian (Op. 111a) was published. This Suite contained some re­orchestrated and revised fragments of the original music.