What is the name of the studio that asked the expatriate to provide music for a 1932 film?
In the first years of the silent film era, from the 1890s, films were generally accompanied by live music, often improvised, provided by piano or pump organ. In the early 20th century, larger cinemas began to use orchestras, which would accompany the film with out-of-copyright classical pieces or, increasingly, with original compositions. The score for the 1916 classic The Birth of a Nation, compiled by Joseph Carl Breil from various classical works and some original writing, was a landmark in film music, and inspired notable composers of the day to provide scores for silent films. Among these were the Americans Victor Herbert and Mortimer Wilson, from France Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger, and the Germans Gottfried Huppertz and Edmund Meisel.In 1927 developments in sound technology brought the arrival of "talking pictures". In these, accompanying music was originally recorded on a disc, separately from the film images, but within two years the "Movietone" system enabled sound to be captured on the film itself. Music could now be aligned specifically with the film's on-screen action—the so-called "diegetic" approach. Early pioneers of this method were the Germans Friedrich Hollaender and Karol Rathaus, who provided the music for The Blue Angel (1930) and The Murderer Dimitri Karamazov (1931) respectively. By this time in the Soviet Union, the young Dimitri Shostakovich had already begun his prolific career as a composer of film sound-tracks, with The New Babylon in 1929 and Alone in 1931.When planning their proposed film Lieutenant Kijé in 1932, the Belgoskino studios of Leningrad asked the expatriate Prokofiev to write the accompanying music. In some respects Prokofiev was a surprising choice; he was at this stage better known abroad than in the Soviet Union, and had acquired a reputation for dissonance. Moreover, his ballet Le pas d'acier had fared badly at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in 1929. The composer's first response was to refuse the commission; a member of the production team recalled that Prokofiev "categorically rejected my proposal. His time was scheduled far into the future, he had never written music for film and he didn't know 'what kind of sauce' to put on it." But, attracted by the story, Prokofiev quickly changed his mind and accepted, seeing this first venture into film music as an opportunity to demonstrate his ability to appeal to a mass Soviet audience.
Belgoskino