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- "Gaidai didn't know where to insert the "Island of Bad Luck". I've thought of everything."
"Gaidai didn't know where to insert the "Island of Bad Luck". I've thought of everything."
Alexander Zatsepin, a classic of film music, now calls musicals his main professional interest. He composed "Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf" for the ROSTA Theater, "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", "The Little Prince". He is finishing "Ivan Vasilyevich changes his profession", where there are now 20 musical numbers against three in the original. On March 10, Alexander Zatsepin celebrates his 99th birthday. On the eve of this date, in an interview with Izvestia, the creator of the main songs of Soviet cinema reflected on the modern stage, how the melodies of the songs that the whole country sings today arise.
"I was lying on the couch and imagining a snowy desert, loneliness, cold"
— The song "Goodbye, Summer" has been with me all my life, and I'm 50 now. How do you manage to create such melodies?
— All this is born spontaneously. I was once asked how I compose. It's hard to say how. In different ways. Sometimes I go to bed, then I jump up and write it down, because I'll forget by morning. And before, when there was a piano, I wanted to go and play right away. That's how I got, for example, my very beautiful music for the film "The Red Tent" by [Mikhail] Kalatozov about the North Pole. I lay on the couch and imagined a snowy desert, loneliness, emptiness, and cold. And so the theme was born. I got up, played the piano, and recorded it.
I also asked my poet Leonid Derbenev how he finds such interesting epithets. His lanterns don't shine or illuminate. "Dropping the sad light/ And your shadow is shaking, / The lantern is looking out of the darkness." That's how it is! And he says, "How do you find the melody?" I didn't have anything to say either. I don't know.
When he was gone, I wanted to work with Rubalskaya. But Larisa said she couldn't write music.
— So you had music first?
— In my work, music comes first. They offer me a movie, I read the script, and if there are songs there, I immediately compose them, and I have ready-made melodies. It's harder for me to write poetry. And then the poems are basically the same size, four lines long. And sometimes I have a melody for five lines. Derbenev had no problems with this. "I'm at least seven. I'll find a way to rhyme," he said. Not every poet will do that.
The fact is that almost everyone writes under the so-called fish, which was created by the composer. "My dear, dear, dear, dear," and the poet sits and composes to this. And Derbenev always asked me, "Sing me 10 verses so that I can listen to this tune on a tape recorder." He turned it on and walked around the room, composing. He worked with music.
There are few songs for ready-made poems. One day, Lenya brought the "Island of Bad Luck" and said, "Show Gaidai, maybe he'll put it in the movie." I've got a melody that came together pretty quickly. I went to Gaidai, and he really liked the song. But he says, "I don't have a square footage. I don't know where to put it." And I thought of everything.: "Here on the deck. Mironov and Nikulin are talking about the weather, and let Andrey sing it." And so they did.
— More than one generation grew up listening to your songs. How do you manage to compose music outside of time?
— I think that modern youth is not affected by all this. They have their own music, and that's natural. When I was about 13-15 years old, foxtrots appeared. Our boys were very interested in this. Then came the tango, then Latin American dances. And mom and dad said, "Oh, some kind of music is completely incomprehensible. In our time it was..." Before that, they danced polka, waltz and something else.
I don't want to say that everything is bad for the young, but in our time it turned out well. They will have their own way. And if they don't have a hit right now and there's no performer, then it will appear, but in a year. And it's not just in our country. The Americans had Michael Jackson, that's the last star. Who do they have now? No one. And the French have no one. And in Europe. This is a common sinusoid — up-down, up-down.
Some young people sing my songs, but they don't know who wrote them. And it doesn't matter, the main thing is to be remembered. After all, you can write one song, and they will sing it for 100 years, for example, "A Christmas tree was born in the forest" by Beckman. He may have written something else, but this particular New Year's song has been alive for more than 100 years.
— Now you will mark 99, and in a year you will mark 100. What do you think is the most important thing you've done?
— You see, people are different. Someone says, "When I'm gone, I don't care about anything. I won't know anyway." But I'm thinking about my kids. They will still be pleased to be reminded of me. They'll remember how they lived with me. So it's up to fate to decide what happens.
— Fate has been deciding for quite a long time.
— Now she can't decide whether I'm going to live or not, and that's why I'm living. The end comes sooner or later.
— Vysotsky lived to be 40, Pushkin and Mayakovsky lived to be 37. You'll be 99 now. Do you think you've done everything?
— No, I'm catching up now. Here's the ballet done. I haven't addressed this until now. However, when I studied at the conservatory, I had a thesis on the ballet "Old Man Hottabych" in three acts. There was a children's story called Lagina, which was very funny, and everyone knew it. And when we were already rehearsing it in the theater, we remembered that we needed to get the copyright somehow. They gave up on it then, but it was still necessary. By the way, Lagin was categorically against it. He said that only his libretto should be in the ballet. But it wouldn't do. For example, the scene is a football with 20 balls, no choreographer could have staged it.
We negotiated a lot with him, called from Moscow to Leningrad. They asked: "Can I do it?" "No, only in my opinion." I just balked. Then they persuaded me through the Ministry of Culture, and I allowed it for only one theater. I was already finishing the production in Alma Ata. I also wanted to put it in the Novosibirsk Theater, so we submitted an application. But Lagin was against it. What to do...
"In the past, it was the new song that always seemed the best to me"
— Your last song "Rains" was written in 1998. I can't believe you stopped...
— I'm done with songs because there are no poems by Derbenev and Gaidai's movies. And there aren't any performers I'm used to working with either. And somehow I thought-I thought: Well, I'm going to write songs for whom? I have all the songs from the movies. Only a few are not written for the movies, and no one knows them.
Once, the Turkmenfilm studio asked me to write music for the film "The Brave Shirak" based on the script by Arkady Inin. I took on this movie just for the songs. And Arkady said: "This lyrical one will be a hit, but no one needs a fast one." As a result, everyone forgot the lyric, and even I don't remember it myself. And the fast one became a smash hit. It was the song "The Half-educated Wizard."
— And when you write, can you assume what will be sung and what will not?
— No, it's impossible to predict. Only the people can decide if they sing. Derbenev always said: "If it starts playing in all restaurants, it means it's a hit." And it really is. In those days, there were orchestras in restaurants. The people ordered the song, and it was played.
— Name the three most valuable songs for you.
— It's complicated. It's like a heroine mother: she has 10 children, and the smallest is her favorite. I don't have the last song right now. But before, it was the new one that always seemed the best to me. But if I do decide, I would call it "Goodbye, summer," "Where does childhood go?" and "There is only a moment."
— What is important for fans not to miss? What are you working on now?
— First of all, musicals. Nonna Grishaeva's fairy tale "Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf" is being performed at the Theater of Growth in Tsaritsyno. He finished "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", "The Little Prince", "The Snow Maiden". I'm finishing the musical "Ivan Vasilyevich changes his profession." There's a lot of movie material, but also a lot of new songs. There were only three songs in the movie, but there are 20 numbers.
The ballet is over. It is currently being staged by Leonid Lavrovsky. He is a hereditary choreographer. His grandfather Leonid staged ballets, then his father Mikhail did the same, and now the third generation is working at the Bolshoi Theater. I don't know how it will turn out. But there is hope, of course, that it should work out.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
