Silenced – Composers in Revolutionary Russia

The documentary series Music in Times of War and Revolution explores the connections between music and politics. In this second segment, Anne-Kathrin Peitz explores the lives and the work of a lesser-known generation of Russian composers that includes Arthur Lourié, Nikolai Roslavets, Alexander Mosolov, Sergei Prokofiev, Leon Theremin and Arseny Avraamov. Adventurous, flirting with futurism and deconstructing conventional musical codes, this avant-garde group, which lived through the First World War, the October Revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union under Stalin, was banned, forgotten or erased from the musical map. They are rediscovered here in a skillfully crafted film that looks at Russia past and present, music and life, cultural and political contexts and individual destinies.