“The Meeting on the Elbe”. Op. 80

The whereabouts of the author’s manuscript of the score is unknown. The copyist’s handwritten copy of the score, which was used for the 1948 sound recording of the film, is kept in the Library of the Russian State Symphony Cinema Orchestra. This copy is the main source of this publication of the score.

Eight items from this score (Nos. 10, 13, 22-25, 28 and 34) have been reproduced in this edition: D. Shostakovich, Collected Works in 42 Volumes, Vol. 42, Muzyka Publishers, Moscow, 1987. The scores of several items have been lost and there are no music sources; they have been restored by Mark Fitz-Gerald from the film soundtrack.

This score has been verified with the film soundtrack. According to some sources (E. Sadovnikov, D. D. Shostakovich. Notographic and Bibliographic Reference Guide, Muzyka Publishers, Moscow, 1965; Derek C. Hulme, Dmitri Shostakovich Catalogue. The First Hundred Years and Beyond, 4th Edition, UK, 2010), there is a hand-written Suite consisting of eight items, but these sources do not indicate its whereabouts or place of storage.

Several items in the film have been cut, some items are not used in full, while other items or parts of them are repeated in different places in the film, and there is also music that has not been included in the film soundtrack.

The sequence of the items in this edition is identical to that in the soundtrack. The editor has numbered the episodes; these numbers do not coincide with those in the hand-written copy.

Two songs from The Meeting on the Elbe were printed in 1949 by the State Music Publishing House and subsequently published many times in various arrangements. In 1958, the choral song “Dawn Is Coming” (under the title “Daybreak”, borrowed from its lyrics) was published for the first time in a collection compiled by Levon Atovmian. The chorus was later published in Volume 34 of Shostakovich’s Collected Works in 42 Volumes (Moscow, 1985).