Suite (The Gadfly)

The Gadfly is film music, written in 1955 for Aleksandr Faintsimmer's adaptation of Ethel Voynich's novel about a revolutionary conspirator in Austrian-ruled Italy — a book that had sold in millions in the Soviet Union and was read there as a political classic. Shostakovich supplied a dozen numbers of period pastiche: barrel organ, galop, folk feast, contradance. Levon Atovmyan assembled the concert suite from them. The Romance, written for a scene of remembered love, became the best-known item and reached a further audience in 1983 as the theme of the British series Reilly, Ace of Spies.