The Shot

Incidental music to ‘The Shot’, a verse comedy by Aleksandr Bezymensky.


In 1929 the young Shostakovich started working as music-director for the experimental  and – for a while – widely influential theatre company, TRAM (the initials stand for Theatre of Working Youth). His first first contribution was a score for a comedy in verse by the controversial far-left playwright Aleksandr Bezymensky. Controversy indeed followed with passionate debate in the press as to whether this was the future of theatre (it wasn’t).


Most of the surviving music to this experimental production about the struggle between wicked bureaucrats and good factory workers is in tiny fragments, fanfares and marches for the onstage brassband and strange little choruses for the revolutionary working-classes. Most remarkable are a solo number for a hopeless revolutionary, which is a comical parody of a sentimental romantic song (‘Dundee’s Song’), and a fascinating movement, ‘Episode 9’ for chorus and  a very strangely constituted orchestra. This last is Shostakovich at his most self-consciously avant-garde. The chorus, which is only shouted and not sung, has violently revolutionary words: ‘All power to us! Straight to battle without waiting for a mandate!’ At the end the music just fades away to nothing.


Note by Gerard McBurney.