Anton Ivanovich Gets Angry
About Anton Ivanovich Gets Angry
Anton Ivanovich Voronov teaches at the Moscow Conservatory and measures every piece against Bach. His daughter Serafima can sing, and she wants the operetta written by the young composer Aleksei Mukhin, plus Mukhin himself. Voronov treats operetta as a step down from opera and forbids the match of music and marriage. Mukhin's score is hard enough that it cannot be faked. Voronov dreams that Bach visits him and tells him people need every kind of music. He wakes up willing to let the operetta, and the composer, stand.
Cast & crew
More about Anton Ivanovich Gets Angry
Aleksandr Ivanovsky directed. Yevgeny Petrov wrote the script. Yevgeni Shapiro photographed. Dmitry Kabalevsky composed the score. Nikolai Konovalov plays Voronov, Lyudmila Tselikovskaya plays Serafima, and Pavel Kadochnikov plays Mukhin. Lenfilm released it on August 29, 1941. A second date, September 11, 1942, is also on record. The running time is 80 minutes.
Themes
Background
The film opened in the late summer of 1941, after the German invasion, from a Lenfilm production already underway. The story itself stays inside the conservatory.
Making
Ivanovsky stages the argument as a conservatory comedy and settles it with a dream visitor rather than with a public concert alone.
Look
Yevgeni Shapiro shot the conservatory rooms and the dream in which Bach appears to Voronov.
Music
Dmitry Kabalevsky wrote the music, including the operetta that Serafima insists on singing.
Preservation
A print survives.
Notes
- The Russian title is Anton Ivanovich serditsya.
- Bach's line in the dream is that people need all kinds of music.
- Kabalevsky's score has to carry both the Bach standard Voronov loves and the operetta he despises.
- Petrov, of Ilf and Petrov, wrote the script alone. Ilya Ilf had died in 1937.
- Tselikovskaya and Kadochnikov carry the romance. Konovalov carries the anger.
Scenes
- Voronov hears that Serafima will sing Mukhin's operetta and shuts the idea down.
- Bach appears in the dream and tells him every kind of music has a use.
- He accepts the operetta and the composer.
Quotes
People need all kinds of music.
