Kentridge’s cine-musical creation, made to accompany Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, is a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour, exploring humanity, grief and idealism

The Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan is showcasing an amazing cine-musical creation, perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen. Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by the 71-year-old South African artist and film-maker William Kentridge. It is shown with the live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, and this event is partly in honour of the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth this year, and partly to honour Shostakovich’s reportedly unrequited love (and lifelong friendship) for his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.

The 10th symphony was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after his death, so it seems probable that Shostakovich had been at work on it for some time before this, long enough beforehand for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin’s death. Could part of it perhaps have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? Yet the music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin’s genocidal tyranny, a darkly ambiguous respect for the great dictator whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation; perhaps there is also a feeling in the music’s swirl that a great and terrible era has passed away, and with it a kind of grief at all that had been sacrificed to it.