“Yesterday I was in the realm of shadows. If you knew how strange it is! (…) You see them roar with laughter… yet you cannot...

“Yesterday I was in the realm of shadows. If you knew how strange it is! (…) You see them roar with laughter… yet you cannot hear a sound.” Writer Maksim Gorky’s comment on the first Russian screenings of the Lumiere brothers’ films shows how the need was immediately felt, in cinema, for sound and a musical element to accompany the moving images. This album traces the soundtrack’s birth and gradual development from a simple comment to a language in its own right through the “voice” of a protagonist that was “within and without,” the piano, for which numerous original scores and transcriptions by renowned composers were written.