I have a lot to thank for Shostakovich's music from the Gadfly. Since I was a small child my family have had a CD which featured this, and I even remember looking the CD box as one of my earliest memories. As a result, this music seems to be well and truly embedded into my mind.
However, there's something quite magical about revisiting it after all these years (and also after having spent a good deal of time studying some Shostakovich a few years ago). I am now able to perceive that character that I could when I was younger as well as appreciate the music in more complex ways. I think that's what's so impressive about Shostakovich - there's simplicity there, but it's always very complex. He can take a very simple idea and play with it, manipulate it and distort it very effectively. There is, in fact, something about Shostakovich's music that conveys that very complex emotion of stoicism with that of anxiety, of joy with torture, and of love with hate.
Shostakovich was a prolific composer for film - sometimes for films he might have preferred not to be composing for such as Soviet propaganda type ones, and other times his film music stands as a masterpiece on its own. The Gadfly especially seems to be one of those times, and Shostakovich really relishes in the chance to be expressive and perhaps more free in his composition. Perhaps, on some level, he even wanted this soundtrack to become a renowned work in its own right, as notice how the 'Scene' (moderato, the penultimate movement) has echoes of Tchaikovsky's 'Scene' from Swan Lake. Perhaps, some might say, this is Shostakovich saying 'look, I stand among the greats'.
The music has so many facets to it and, if there was such a thing, I'd argue that it was quintissential Shostakovich. It contains the complexity described above along with simply beautiful, heartfelt and clever music by turns. Maybe, even though I didn't realise it, it was this level of musical ingenuity that sowed the seed for my love of music in later life.
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