The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda (Сказка о попе и о работнике его Балде) is a partially lost Soviet animated feature film directed by the husband-and-wife team Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Vera Tsekhanovskaya and based on the 1830 eponymous fairy-tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin.
[2] The film was created at the Lenfilm animation studio headed by Tsekhanovsky and his wife who also served as the directors, leading artists and screenwriters.
They also invited an acclaimed poet Alexander Vvedensky shortly after his return from under arrest to write additional lyrics.
Shostakovich loved the opportunity to compose an innovative satirical opera with abstract characters led by his music and not by someone else.
[6] Vera Tsekhanovskaya managed to save only the 4-minute Marketplace scene, and it stands alone as a classic of Russian animation.
The world premiere recording of the 50-minute work was made by the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Thomas Sanderling and released in 2006, a century after Shostakovich's birth.
1The violin, viola, cello and contrabass parts are only present for one loud chord at the end of the piece.
Note: the exact number of choralists is mostly not indicated; "2+" means that there are at least two harmonic lines somewhere in a part, or at least 2 voices are specifically called for.