The time Andrei Rublev was a musical

Andrei Tarkovsky slumped down in his director’s chair. He was one of the greatest directors on the planet, but even he was unable to find a practical way for a chorus of medieval peasants to tap dance in the mud.

His musical based on the life of Religious icon painter Andrei Rublev had been planned for over a year and was intended to show the world that he wasn’t just a one-trick-pony.

“Tark was worried,” said long-term collaborator Ivan Lapikov in a 1986 Wogan interview

“He’d made a number of well-regarded films, but he was concerned that people were just thinking of him as the existential black and white Russian guy, you know? He wanted to show people that there was more to him than just incredibly long meditative pieces on the nature of existence.”

When Tarkovsky learnt of the 15^th century religious icon painter who lived a nomadic lifestyle in medieval Russia, he knew it was the perfect subject for a classic Hollywood-style musical – Rublev!

“He wrote the songs himself,” continued Lapikov

“’I-con, you-con,’ ‘All the mud in the world,’ and the lovely ballad ‘It always rains in Medieval Russia,’ they were good tunes. All of them.”

But the problem was that the director’s famously ponderous and austere filming style didn’t mesh well with the lightness of a traditional musical.

“You’d have Andrei walking across a muddy field in contemplative silence for 5 or six minutes and then all of a sudden a full jazz band would strike up and he’d start singing. It was just really jarring.”

Ultimately Tarkovsky was convinced to abandon the musical aspects of the film.

“Myself and some friends took him out for dinner,” said Lapikov

“We just laid it out for him. The musical bits weren’t working. He bristled, but I think he understood. What really won him round was when Anatoly Solonitsyn pointed out the film was expected to come in at nearly five hours and film students of the 80s would probably really appreciate it if he could get it down to a breezy three and a half hours.”

Tarkovsky was convinced and Andrei Rublev became the classic study of life and art that we know and love today.

Whilst no footage of the original Rublev! Songs remain today, it is thought that Free’s Alright Now is based on the music and lyrics of Tarkovsky’s All Mud Now that would have climaxed the film.