<b>Sunday Music – The Romance Theme From The Gadfly Suite</b>

Today’s music video is ‘Romance Theme’ from ‘The Gadfly Suite’ by the Russian Composer, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich.

This video was posted to You Tube by ClassicalMusicOnly

Don’t let the fact that this is a Classical piece of music deter you from listening to it. There may not be accompanying video, just that image of Dmitri, so just turn up the volume, close your eyes and allow this beautiful piece of music to wash over you.

As I have mentioned numerous times previously, each generation thinks it was they who actually invented music. I’ve found recently that that thinking still exists. Our grand daughter is 12 and like most of her age, they really like the ‘Glee’ TV series. She has a couple of their CD’s and when we visit them, she has them playing in the background. It’s the first interest I have taken in that program, and I was surprised at how much music they play from across the generational spectrum of music. I noticed that with one of the songs, (as she does with nearly all of them) she was singing along with the ‘team’, word for word, and in tune, which is something she has this wonderful knack of doing. Ironically, it was an old song, and after it finished, I mentioned to her that the song was a huge hit when her mother, our daughter, was the same age as she was. This somewhat astonished her and it was virtually the same for most songs, one even a hit when I was her age.

The same attitude to music applied to me as well. I came to a real appreciation of music at the dawn of the modern age in the early/mid sixties through to the mid 70′s, and anything prior to that I rarely heard as the radio stations I listened to at that time (AM mind you, as they all were then) were never tuned to stations that played what we perceived as ‘old’ music.

However, as I reached my mid to late 20′s some of this music I did start to hear, and in fact some of it was really good, as in fact most of it was. This effectively ’rounded’ my appreciation of all music.

I still was not much interested in Classical music, and this piece I feature today was the first Classical piece that made me sit up and take notice. It came somewhat out of the blue, as it was the theme to a popular TV mini series at the time ‘Reilly, Ace Of Spies‘ which was a 12 part BBC series dealing with the life of famed  master spy Sidney Reilly, and based on the book about Reilly written by Robin Bruce Lockhart. This series is what brought New Zealand actor Sam Neill to international acclaim, in the starring role of Sidney Reilly, even though he had been in a couple of movies prior to this that had done fairly well.

When I originally started contributing to this blog, I wrote that series on Kyoto, which morphed into more than 50 parts. When I finally wrapped it up, I thought that was it for me, as I thought at the time that was all there was to say on the subject, and that is something that has not proven to be the case. For a while I was somewhat at a loss as what to post about, and I did some general interest posts before settling back into what I knew the most about. I was actually going to do a series on the real life Sidney Reilly, but that would also have been a multi part series, so I delayed doing it, and I suspect I might actually get back to that sometime in the future, because it is just something that was, and is, so interesting.

This piece of music was the main theme for that Series, and even though there was some Classical music that did interest me, most of I still not had really listened to.

This truly wonderful piece of music however made me sit up and take real notice, not just of this piece, but the wider spectrum of Classical Music. A lot of it I still have not heard, but I appreciate it now as part of that wider acceptance of all music.

Dmitri Shstakovich wrote the whole Suite of this music for the Russian movie adaptation of the Ethel Lilian Voynich book ‘The Gadfly‘, that movie being released in 1955, and rarely, if at all, seen outside of Russia. The author Ethel Voynich was in fact a short term Mistress of Sidney Reilly, who ‘bared his soul’ to her during the affair. Voynich then composed a fictional novel based loosely around the life of Sidney Reilly. There is the usual conjecture that both novels on Reilly, the fictional book by Voynich, and the factual account by Lockhart are in fact not all that close to the actual life of Reilly, but the two books, and the Shostakovich music are closely bound together, and the fact that this Shostakovich piece of music was used for the BBC mini series has probably escaped a lot of people.

Shostakovich was one of the famed early and mid 20th Century composers who carried on the work from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and others, and he was in a select group with Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff, those three just some names from a much wider group of Russian Composers of that early to mid 20th Century period of time.

Shostakovich fell in and out of favour with the Russian leaders of the time. Favoured by Lenin in the period after The Revolution and up until World War 2, he fell out of favour with the early Stalin, and then came back into favour before again being denounced for a second time, this ending when he finally joined The Communist Party in 1960, taken by some as a form of cowardice on his part, giving in to the regime. At various times, his music was banned in Russia, only to have those bans lifted and then reimposed again later. Most of those bannings concerned the perception that his music was becoming too influenced by matters outside of Soviet Russia.

His work has however been critically acclaimed across the wider World as one of those truly great Russian Composers. He was a deeply complex man, and somewhat obsessive in his personal life. Married three times, he died in 1975 at the age of 68, leaving a wonderful legacy of exceptional music of which today’s featured music is but the smallest example.

You may not really like Classical music, but I defy anybody to say that they don’t like this particular piece.

Tagged: Dmitri Shostakovich, Music, Music Video, Russian Composers, Sidney Reilly, Soviet Era Music, Video

Posted in: Music, Russia, Videos