ABSTRACT
The appearance of the symphonic type of dramaturgy is thought to have been connected with the music composed by Shostakovich for the film Mountains of Gold (1931), shot by Yutkevich at the same time as Alone. But, unlike the film of Kozintsev and Trauberg, Mountains of Gold was a full-fledged sound reel containing speech dialogues, noises, and music, whose former power was already to a great extent lost due to a highly developed verbal element. But, strange as it may seem, it was just this discrete character of the musical material that made the composer search for an effective means of coping with thematic fragmentation and mosaicity, and establishing the dramatic integrity of the theme. The leitmotiv proved to be the best means for this purpose.
