Originally published in Academia.edu
The films of Georgi Tasinand Mykola Shpykovskyiunder a musical lens.
Premise
A brief statement – this article is from the perspective of film scoring, and the comments and ideas expressed directly about the filmic lost gems of Ukrainian Soviet Cinema, Georgi Tasin and Mykola Shpykovskyi are from the composer’s experience only. I am not a film critic, and my training and specialisation are in music.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Professor José Antonio Jiménez de las Heras – Director of CAI at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid – and my colleague, Phillip Byrne, and Kateryna Shevchenko of ‘Semana del Cine Ucraniano’, for their support and recommendations prior to the publication of this article.
Introduction
This article covers my musical experience around Georgi Tasin’s The Night Coachman and Mykola Shpykovskyi’s brilliant 1930 film Bread, a film that shares with the former the censorship by the Main Repertoire Committee of the RSFSR (1.6), and the complete obliteration from public memory by the Soviet regime.
After the fall of the USSR, these two films were rediscovered and released again, finding modest interest from the public and the institutions. The cultural rejection of everything that could be associated with the Communist past and seventy years of poverty and isolation might have added to a certain lack of interest.
I have the unexpected task and pleasure of being the first western composer to write bespoke scores for both of these cinematic gems commissioned by international film institutions . Before me, the Ukrainian Film Institute put a music soundtrack to Bread to coincide with its Ukrainian DVD release; however, this resulted in a missed opportunity in my opinion, as the resulting soundtrack washed the film from beginning to end, disregarding all the important dramatic markers and making it harder of the viewer to appreciate the film’s beauty.
In May 2022, at the Cannes Film Festival, I met with film critic and programmer Carlos Reviriego from Filmoteca Española, the Spanish film institute. At that time there was strong support for the Ukrainian cause following the horrible and unprecedented Russian invasion. Given my life experience in Ukraine and my musical trajectory in film, Carlos offered to commission from me a new musical score for Georgi Tasin’s masterpiece of Ukrainian ‘psychologism’, the silent film ‘The Night Coachman’.
In June of that year I travelled again to Kyiv and under difficult conditions due to regular Russian night attacks, I started working on the score, which we agreed with Carlos would be for piano only. The first part was completed after two weeks, and the second at the end of August, polishing the work on trains, at long border checks, and at airports in Poland and Italy.
Night Coachman – Early Challenges
The Night Coachman immediately presented some unique challenges, the most important of which was a badly damaged negative across the crucial last fifteen minutes of film. As previously mentioned, it was the first time this film received a bespoke musical treatment in over a century, which allowed me to reimagine its interpretation and historical meaning.
My task was therefore crucial, as it not only rendered the outcome of my work pioneering but also injected a certain Western energy—one that might not entirely align with Ukrainian sensitivity and political reality, and which could potentially displease those who would have preferred a local talent to undertake this work.
Given the bad condition of the film (2.0), the festival ‘Semana del Cine Ucraniano’ of Madrid, founded by producer and cultural manager Kateryna Shevchenko, considered getting the film restored prior to its premiere. In August of 2022 Shevchenko contacted the Bologna Film Lab who kindly offered very advantageous terms to rework the entire film.
Shevchenko travelled to Kyiv to discuss the condition of the negative with the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centr, and discovered that only a telecine version of the film existed in their storage facilities, which unfortunately included the same damaged ending that we already had. The actual original negative is believed to exist in the vaults of the Film Institute in Moscow and is unavailable to Western film scholars and producers due to the ongoing war and severed communication channels. And so our hopes of restoring this wonderful film vanished.
Besides the damages in the negative, the film presents a second challenge due to its narrative structure, which resolves an otherwise perfectly-developed first two acts into a very hasty and perhaps even ‘rushed’ third act and dramatic ending.
In the last ten minutes, the protagonist takes the story on a magnificent and terrifying carriage ride that crashes carriage and passengers down the famous Odessa steps, killing the villain of the film and freeing the underdog. Everything happens so fast and the film resolves in no more than a few minutes.
The information available in Ukrainian is limited and difficult to access. This gives us little to work with when understanding why certain creative decisions took place. It is possible that an abrupt and short ending would be seen as a way to catch the audience by surprise, shocking the viewer with an amount of energy and suspense unseen before this point.
Amvrosii Buchma
The entire film is carried through brilliantly by none other than the legendary Amvrosii Buchma (1.8), perhaps one of the most famous actors in the Soviet world at that time, and still a timeless and magnetic screen presence to this day .
Night Coachman is possibly one of Buchma’s most realised performances, a film shot almost entirely at night, adding to its engulfing and intense vibe. The narrative develops linearly from the opening’s cosy settings around a tender and loving family of two – father and daughter. The actor delivers warmth with a comedic touch, effortlessly adding to the character’s depth and charm.
Quite shortly a stranger appears: a mysterious character who raises the suspicion of the jealous father, who mistakes him for his daughter’s suitor. In reality – and here the film adds an expected political bias – the man is working alongside the young woman as a revolutionary agent in hiding, spreading pamphlets and propaganda for the Soviet cause. The film becomes a carrier of – like many other Soviet films – the dominant political mantra, a sort of ‘ticket to survival’ on the part of the filmmakers. Without these sort of ideological statements, a film would not be released. This also reflects how important cinema was as a powerful propaganda vehicle at the time .
Night Coachman – Historical backdrop and censorship
However, and in spite of this, the film was struck by censors and removed from circulation and never to be seen again until the end of the 20th century. The story goes that a keen observant spotted a real portrait of Alexei Rykov hanging from a wall in one of the film’s interior scenes. Rykov had been a prominent Russian revolutionary and was later accused of treason and executed during the Great Purges of the late 30s.
In early 1937, the censors put literally every frame under the lens to see if the rumour was true or false. After a few months of research, the report from the censor’s office could not produce a conclusive result, and although the investigation did not find evidence of Rykov, the film was banned from public performance as a mere “precaution” (2.5).
And so Night Coachman joined the enormous body of artistic work which was either persecuted or destroyed by the Soviet regime . From our distant historical perspective, the movie is very interesting because it introduces the audience to a part of Russian and Ukrainian history quite forgotten: the year 1919 during the end of the civil war, when the White Army, under Denikin’s leadership, settles in parts of Ukraine. Odessa in the south is kept under tight and cruel military control with widespread abuse of power and regular police arrests and killings .
This level of daily violence is well reflected in the film and embodied in the marvellous and equally despicable secret police officer, performed by a fantastic Yuri Shumsky. In spite of the father’s plea to release the daughter, she is taken to a field and quickly shot. The father is left agonising through a rather long sequence depicting his despair. This section is possibly the film’s most difficult to compose music to because of its monolithic energy.
But then suddenly the night’s spell is broken. The agonising father takes his carriage around the city’s centre in full daylight – this is the first time that we see the light of day in the film. A bright and energetic Odessa opens before our eyes. Through the man’s eyes we witness some of the White Army’s cruel legacy, a couple of public hangings and the military police horse regiment storming against a group of passersby (1.7). These are a couple of glorious minutes that are worth the film alone.
The telecine copy begins to degrade at this point, exactly when the father sees his daughter’s Bolshevik comrade down the street. He is about to be arrested by the same police officer who killed her. In my musical treatment of the film, this signals a change of tone, an increase in pulse, and an opportunity for using two leitmotifs, one corresponding to the daughter’s comrade and the other to the cruelty of the secret police officer.
Night Coachman & Bread – Comparing the scores
The police officer requests a ride from the father and so, the three characters – police officer, father, and Bolchevich – are now onboard the fateful carriage. A series of 16th-note themes marks the nervous galloping of the horse that pulls them towards the dangerous Odessa steps which will eventually kill the villain and bring the story to a close. During live performances I always make sure that my pianists keep rigorous timing to the click track at this point in order to reach the ending exactly at the right point and with the right chord accent.
Let’s put Night Coachman on hold for a moment and let’s turn our attention to Bread. The significance of this film doesn’t rest on the film’s performances nor the film’s dramatic ending, but on its modernist storytelling and editing, started by Dziga Vertov. This approach combines an unambiguously progressive narrative with an avant-garde artistic form, the cornerstone of which is montage. The editing is bold, constantly juxtaposing unexpected images against each other. In the edit, the Kuleshov effect is used for expanding the film’s impact on the viewer. The action is driven by imagery, and the subtle, almost fragile story thread seems to dissolve after each chapter, which exist to interrupt the flow and the usage of secondary narrative plots. The interaction of “the image with the inter-title cards, the transmission of timbre, rhythm, intonation through montage, make Bread one of the strongest films of Soviet Ukrainian cinema“.
The greatest musical challenges in Bread are the correct interpretation of the multiple narrative strands and the assigning to each of a cohesive thematic stamp that can help the audience understand the film. This also means using thematic ideas to help the viewer through the many non-linear narrative jumps.
As with most film music performed live to picture, the instrumentalist – in this case the pianist –has to be well trained in confidently following a click track metronome, as the score is accurately synced to the many hard edits in the film. In Bread, more so than in Night Coachman, the slightest shift in tempo can create problems. Both scores are populated with constant metre changes, although – following Ennio Morricone’s practice – there are no changes in tempo for ritardandos, but instead smaller and smaller metre changes that equal to a ritardando or accelerando.
There is something both primitive and aristocratic about the piano that can help the screen composer. The ability of this instrument to deliver rich and velvety melodic passages as well as harsh percussive ones, gives the piano a winning hand over other instruments (1.4). A few notes hanging in the air can fill a scene just as well as a fierce cascade of semiquavers.
My compositional methodology is to deliver any instinctive ideas upon first or second viewing, usually through improvisation, and to develop the material henceforth in stages, each pass adding more detail. The challenge is, on one hand, to improvise freely whilst following the essence of each scene and the stylistic requirements of the film.
Secondly, it is important to preserve the energy and spontaneity of the first improvisation in any consequent takes, including any pickups that might be needed after the end of the project.
Usually the latter is the most challenging. In Night Coachman, for example, there are two scenes in a local inn that I delivered in a stride piano style. I later decided that this same style would be very appropriate for an additional third cue; however, in this case, the scene needed something slightly different: a stop in the middle; a change of tone at the end; a mellower usage of embellishments and grace notes on the right hand. Perhaps due to fatigue—I was at the end of the project at this point—every time I tried to improvise something at the piano, the result sounded mathematical and calculated.
In these situations it is better to take a break from the material, dealing with any corrections later in the process, when most of the material has been confirmed and the composer has had time to fully understand the effect of his/her work on the film.
Here a few words are needed to describe the discipline required to score silent films specifically. In my case, the first attempt at this genre was also my first at film scoring. In the year 2008 I started working on a new musical score for Murnau’s magnificent horror film Nosferatu.
With this experience I realised that any musical effort in silent film runs the risk of ruining the result on two accounts: on one hand by making the music overpowering and ‘blind’ to the film, turning the images into a music video of sorts. Here the film becomes a mere vehicle for the composer’s work and music, engulfing and suffocating the movie with material that can be both redundant and irrelevant.
This variant is only partially acceptable when the goal is only that of promoting the music, and in my opinion works best with popular music e.i. music that is already in the public’s psyche. This, in my view, is the only kind of approach that can justify this variant (famous examples of this would be: Freddie Mercury – Love Kills – Metropolis).
On the other hand, we must consider the risk related to the absence of dialogue, which normally provides substantial support for spotting the music cues (e.i. the starting and finishing of the music cues). Without dialogue, the music is the only audio available on the soundtrack. In silent films, every action and event in the story must be correlated to the music score. It is the score itself that provides the emotional tapestry that the audience needs – in the absence of dialogue – to understand the film. The music score must be closely linked to the core narrative, the character development, the direction of the scene and the action.
Added to these challenges, we add one more: that the composer of silent films works in isolation, and without a director or producer to consult or ‘argue’ with, as is sometimes the case. These collaborators are important to achieve a good result. The combination of all these factors – overpowering music; lack of dialogue; creative isolation – often spell disaster and complicate the work of the composer in this field.
Generally speaking, the following points should be considered: 1) a consideration for the key narrative strands; 2) a correct musical presentation of the scenes; 3) a thoughtful treatment of any key emotional passages; 4) a consideration for the style, genre, historic period, and direction of the film and 5) how all this information translates to a conscientious musical colour and tone. In short, the composer must focus on developing a thoughtful musical strategy that will guide the viewer throughout the film and will help to connect with the film’s key emotional passages.
More often than not silent films have been damaged by over-the-top soundtracks or wild improvisations on stage or studio that have contributed little or nothing to the enjoyment of the film. A composer can throw any musical material he or she wants at the screen, but the result will be nothing more than a crass vilification of the movie via a hideous choice of music elements sometimes guided by nothing but personal preference, lack of time, talent, money or all of the above.
Bread, more so than Night Coachman, requires a keen ear and a developed sense of the key dramatic functions of film. While scoring the film we navigate through its many hoops, emotions and events, some of them not in full display. The composer is required to have an advanced technical ability with the chosen instrument, knowledge of composition, film theory, instrumentation and orchestration.
It is fair to say that Bread is a film full of hidden meaning. A key example of this can be seen in the emergence of a number of anonymous people in Part 2 of the film (9’:08’’). At first they seem to be beggars or very poor farmers. These ghost-like figures appear to represent the suffering and misery of those who have literally nothing (2.4). But these silhouettes are placed against mountains and vast scenarios, exemplifying freedom and the potential for escaping misery. Here we can also see a fine example of the Kuleshov’s effect.
Furthermore, these metaphorical images are there to justify the forthcoming actions of the protagonist – Luka – who, in the following scene, will ignore any claims on the land by the current owner. Luka’s authority is undisputed and undeniable. These ghosts, these floating figures with malnourished faces, are also speechless and are there to prepare the viewer for what is to come: a new era; a new order (1.5).
It is important to keep track of the year the film Bread was made. 1930 is a pivotal moment in USSR history, as Stalin, now in full control of the political apparatus, is about to implement the infamous five-year plan, an ambitious restructuring of land ownership following strict collectivisation guidelines that will completely change the social fabric of the nation whilst sending hundreds of thousands to the gulags in Siberia or worse.
Bread, like Night Coachman, also displays a degree of political conformity with the system, which I have described before as a ‘ticket to survival’. The protagonist is courageous, young, strong and ready to do what is needed. He is also a former soldier in the Red Army. In the narrative context he is a defender of Soviet ideals as we later witness during the scene of the ‘quarrel with his father-in-law’, an older man who initially sees in collectivisation a form of thievery.
So why was Bread confiscated immediately upon its release, never to be seen again until the fall of communism sixty years later? (2.6). The answer to this question lies – in my view – in the subtext that permeates the film, affecting the generic story by way of contradictory gestures, ambiguous scenes and secondary actions, which, more than altering the narrative directly – which they don’t – they affect the mood and the perception of the main ideology proposed.
One example of this is the fight at the end of the film where the protagonist kills the kulak (wealthy farmer). Here, the main narrative thread is telling us that the hero has slain the villain. But the secondary narrative and the subtext display the internal transformation of this murderous act by transforming the face of the killer e.i. the protagonist. Grotesque and maniacal-like faces following the killing make us understand that this heinous act has changed the soul of the perpetrator (1.9). A man has been transformed by way of blood. The spirit has changed – nothing will be the same again.
A third and subtle example is the characterisation of the first landowner whose land is taken away from him. This man is depicted as a dirty beggar. He is also deeply and authentically attached to his land. He cries, he gulps. He is barefoot and covered in dust. But this is not enough to be spared. His land is taken.
The movie Earth proposes an equivalent character who is instead dressed up as a dandy, displaying not just wealth but arrogance (2.2). The contrast between the same character in these two films is striking. Whether through poetic means or otherwise, Dovzhenko’s Earth positions itself in favour of the regime’s policies in no uncertain terms, and is no surprise that it quickly became a successful film and its director so admired by Stalin.
In Earth the narrative structure is reversed: the tragic hero tries to take the land from the wealthy Kulak, but he is soon killed by the ‘greedy’ landowner.
This sets in motion a chain of events. The people of the village, outraged by the murder, move in favour of the land-grabbing policies whilst the murderer is driven to madness by way of remorse. The result is a much more convincing ideological message. In Bread the kulak is a beggar-like figure; in Earth the kulak is a repented murderer. My argument is that in Bread we find several subliminal messages that interfere with the mainstream ideological narrative. These messages defy the main discourse and are available to those ready to see them. In its hidden brilliance, Bread predicts the nation’s future as a bloody and soul-consuming chapter – exactly how it eventually turned out to be.
Days after its release, Bread was removed from public distribution. The tragedy about this film is that to this day, it is seen as a straightforward piece of Soviet propaganda by many. In its day the film faced oblivion because of its lukewarm commitment to the Bolshevik cause, and now, a hundred years later, some, even with the benefit of history on their side, are incapable of seeing the film for what it truly is.
Another example of Bread’s subliminal narrative and subtext can be seen during the confiscation of grain in Part 3 (18’:38’’). Here we see the Red Army confiscating the grain and taking it away in train wagons.
This a chilling foresight of what was to come two years later in Ukraine during the Holodomor. The soldiers force the mob away from the carriages and the train heads off to – presumably – the villages. The mob is depicted as a vicious, uncontrolled, egoistical, unrestrained lot – in this violent, desperate scene the relationship between power and the people announced by leaders and theorists of the revolution is presented as something grotesque, brutal. Authoritarianism is seen in action and the spectacle is not pleasant.
Alongside each wagon we see chalk markings with the year 1917 and 1918. We know from historical records that during this period and until the end of the war the widely confiscated grain travelled in the opposite direction: from the farmers to the city. This was know as the Policy of Prodrazvyorstka. Most of the proletariat in factories supported the Bolshevik war effort. In return for this support they were generously looked after at the expense of starving farmers across the country. There were many revolts against the Bolsheviks organised by the farmers, rich and poor, during the Civil War, and all, without exception, were savagely crashedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekache
.
In the same scene, and written on one dialogue card we can read: ‘by order of Felix Dzerzhinsky’. Dzerzhinsky was the then infamous head of the Cheka, the secret police which later became the NKVSD and eventually the KGB. Without entering into Ukrainian and Soviet history too much, I can advance without any degree of error that Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka were responsible for realising the world of repression and tyranny envisioned by Lenin and Stalin that would later become the core of the Soviet regime.
The red terror and the de-Cossackization, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, are mostly the work of Dzerzhinsky. I cannot but wonder what would have been the real intention of the scriptwriter and futurist poet – Viktor Yaroshenko – and Shpykovskyi himself, upon mentioning Dzerzhinsky here. Looking at the scene as a whole we see that it shies away from being a real propaganda piece. There is a fair amount of violence that is ‘energising’ the urban mobs and which doesn’t seem to find a clear resolution. The masses are depicted in a negative light in their egoistical efforts to stop the grain leaving the city.
Once again, Bread is a treasure without equal those ready to read the subtext. After more than a century the film exists between oblivion and scholarly recognition. Films like Bread are much more demanding for the composer than the average, precisely because of the complexity in the narrative and dense historical backdrop. Other films can be easier to score – I once performed a live set with synths and electric guitar Vertov’s ‘A Man With a Movie Camera’ and found my way through the film effortlessly due to the fantastic imagery that unfolds with little narrative complexity. The task of the composer is to research and understand the vision and creative decisions of the filmmakers and the historical context that formed their choices. This approach allows enough creative freedom and brings musical cohesiveness to the scoring work.
Music Methodology
The above guidelines are even more relevant when working with silent films. In Bread for example, do we need to know who Felix Dzerzhinsky was? Is it relevant to the composing task? How does his historical influence affect our choice of music material? Do we need to know anything about the Holodomor, which, two years after the release of Bread and under similar historical circumstances, brought death across all of Ukraine with unprecedented cruelty? Should we consider that perhaps the feelings and decisions of the filmmakers were affected by the new political trajectory implemented by the Communist party at the time, in Ukraine and the rest of the USSR? The reader can understand how important these questions can be and that the discipline of composition for the screen must consider every aspect to its fullest in order to connect emotionally with the subject matter, if any degree of credibility is to be achieved.
My choice of compositional material for the two films differs substantially. Both scores no doubt show the influence of some of the 20th century great piano repertoire however, Night Coachman features two cues for stride piano that escape the European classical tradition.
The decision to use elements of stride piano did come rather instinctively. The right hand melody displays a more Eastern-flavoured influence featuring a series of passing tones featuring the Altered Phrygian scale, chromaticism and the Double Harmonic scale. This material features during the inn scene (11’:18’’) where the father spends his after-work hours. He decides to buy a present for his beloved daughter. The atmosphere is infused with tobacco smoke and waiters come and go serving drinks. Food and alcoholic beverages of all kinds are served – this is a unique universe in itself.
Throughout the film, the music relies heavily on leitmotivs, covering things like character intentions, places and recurrent emotional events. The opening theme (2.1) is repeated again in the middle of the film and again at the end through a variation to reinforce the last moment together of father and daughter.
During rehearsals for the premiere and other public performances since, I explain the pianists the meaning of the opening composition to allow them in the emotional core of the composition: the film is the story of a father who, accidentally, puts his daughter in the hands of the police and is later executed. It is very rare to find stories that carry so much emotional angst in the form of regret, remorse, pain, etc.
I decided earlier on that the opening theme had to position itself at the core of this tragedy and that it was inevitable not to ‘speak’ – in musical terms – about the father’s loss (2.1). However, I didn’t want to be direct about my approach because of the very characteristics of silent cinema discussed above, risking to be too obvious, too direct and only adding melodrama to the overall effect. Instead I opted for a different approach e.i. to write the music from the perspective of the father in a point in time in the future, looking back with pain about the events that took the life of his daughter.
The result is a musical tone of deep sorrow and melancholy, but this sadness and sorrow are controlled e.i. the dramatic event that is the killing of the daughter has been accepted over time (speaking from a point in time in the future), and it is free from any exaggerated emotion. This gives the opening material a wider emotional palette, a range of expression that is more mellow and more diffuse than that of a piece of music speaking from a point of view in the present. The piece ‘evokes’ the correct emotional register, but it doesn’t quite tell the whole story e.i. it doesn’t reveal the drama with the grittiness of the ‘now’, but it preserves the authenticity of its emotional intention.
Overall I would say that the score for Night Coachman turned out to be more conservative than I would have anticipated. Its difficulty on stage lays on its rigorous tracking of the film changes; technically advance passages that require time to master; and a wide music dynamic range which can be difficult to deliver live, especially if a quality grand piano I not available.
The score uses a large amount of sequences which serve as variants to leitmotifs and themes, and relies on transpositions and use of extensions and reductions to create movement and cohesiveness throughout the film. The spotting is quite precise, taking into account that the film’s edit can be jumpy sometimes. Most of the ‘jumps’ are followed closely by the score (e.g. 12’:17’’) such as the cigarette case shot (2.5).
During the second revision of this score, I was surprise by the linearity of the arrangement and how sparse it is in certain parts. Bread in contrast, is a much more dense work for piano and benefits from two years of added experience on my part, two film scores between the two works, and a symphony which was finished eventually in late 2025 titled ‘An Italian in Kyiv’. I feel this works created between the two films scores, ended benefitting the latter film.
The pianistic work of Bread features a more modern harmonic language (1.4), perhaps closer to the tradition of Rachmaninov and Stravinsky, but also Reich and Adams, bringing more percussive parts to the fore and adding a more articulated and fluid harmonic material (2.3). This score was commissioned by Alexis Soriano and was premiered in February 2024 at his marvellous Alborada Clasica music festival in Granada, to a standing ovation (1.1).
After its premiere, the work performed in several European cities and is schedule to release on vinyl disc with Hungarian virtuoso Kalman Olah at the piano, a phenomenal pianist who will bring his unique blend of swing to the composition.
Conclusion
This article finishes with a paragraph dedicated to an interesting concept that sometimes is attached to the life of a musical composition; that of the ‘revision’. Stravinsky improved some of his works through later revisions, especially his 1947 Petrushka which in my opinion is a more fluid version than the original from 1911. I mention this because some of these works will eventually, if I find the time and the energy, undertake revisions which I hope will improve the original. I feel that revisions are part of the process of composing which can be a continuous exploration of new possibilities. I equally look forward to expand the score for Night Coachman focusing on the internal voices and the lower octaves of the keyboard.
I finish by saying that working on these three scores has been an honour and intense pleasure for me and a great way of exploring the legacy of Soviet and Ukrainian cinema in much greater detail. There is a lot more that can be done to rescue some of the forgotten films of the past and my wish is for fantastic new music from great composers of the future to help connecting new audiences with these films. This is –without a doubt– a wonderful challenge that I invite talented composers to take.
Luke Corradine, London Dec 2025