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DANGEROUS DRAMA: "LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK"
"Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" was banned in the Soviet Union for 30 years
"Even after Stalin's death in 1953, when he felt freer to write more
directly, he encountered opposition. In an atmosphere of intense
anti-Semitism, government officials wanted to prevent the premiere of his
13th Symphony (1962), which decried the Ukrainian and Nazi massacre of Jews
at Babi Yar in Kiev. Shostakovich continued to create music through periods
of repression and liberalization; he died at age 68 in 1975."
CLASSICAL MUSIC
By Chris Pasles, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times-latimes.com
October 27, 2002
Stalin was no music critic, but he knew what he didn't like.
It was 1936 and the Soviet dictator happened to see a Moscow production of
Dmitri Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk." The gritty story of a
woman trapped in a loveless marriage who murders her father-in-law and
husband to pursue a love affair with one of their workers, "Lady Macbeth"
had first been performed two years earlier, in Leningrad and Moscow, where
critics and crowds alike had made it a hit. But days after Stalin's trip to
the opera, Pravda ran an unsigned editorial:
"From the first minute of the opera, the listener is dumbfounded by a
deliberately dissonant, confused flow of sounds.... All of it is crude,
primitive, vulgar.... The music quacks, moans, pants and chokes in order to
render the love scenes as naturally as possible." It has long been assumed
that Stalin himself wrote the editorial; he is surely responsible for what
happened next.
"Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" was banned in the Soviet Union for 30 years, and
it was very seldom performed outside the country because of strict controls
on the orchestral score. One of only two operas by Shostakovich, it became
something of a legend: the mysterious unknown work.
It was also a personal turning point for the composer, who up until then had
been the golden boy of Soviet music. The "Lady Macbeth" controversies kicked
off decades of dangerous political ups and downs for Shostakovich. When he
was perceived as living up to the ideals of Socialist Realism, he was
awarded the Order of Lenin (twice) and the Stalin Prize (twice), named
secretary of the USSR. Composers Union for eight years and, in 1966, became
the first composer to receive the title Hero of Socialist Labor.
When he fell short, he was attacked. The Pravda "Lady Macbeth" editorial was
followed quickly by another one objecting to a Shostakovich ballet score. At
that point, the composer expected to be arrested at any moment.
His response was the controversial Fifth Symphony, with which he expressly
apologized for his supposed crimes. But in 1948, he was attacked again,
denounced for "formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies" in
his music.
Even after Stalin's death in 1953, when he felt freer to write more
directly, he encountered opposition. In an atmosphere of intense
anti-Semitism, government officials wanted to prevent the premiere of his
13th Symphony (1962), which decried the Ukrainian and Nazi massacre of Jews
at Babi Yar in Kiev. Shostakovich continued to create music through periods
of repression and liberalization; he died at age 68 in 1975.
Conductor Maxim Shostakovich, the composer's son, who was himself denounced
after his defection to the West in 1981, remembers something of the roller
coaster ride. "It was tragic," he said from his son's home in Paris, a few
days before he was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles to conduct part of the
run of "Lady Macbeth" in the current Kirov-Los Angeles Opera production of
the work. "My father suffered. Everyone in the family was unhappy. It was a
hard time; 1948 was a disaster."
Maxim wasn't born until 1938, two years after the Pravda denunciations, but,
he says, as he was growing up, the saga of "Lady Macbeth" wasn't hidden or
forgotten. "Always, when father talked about something, he liked to use some
phrase from the opera's libretto," Maxim said. "So everybody in our family
knows this opera. He wasn't worried about talking about it because he was
talking within the family."
More important, Maxim said, it was clear that the opera was his father's
"most beloved music child. He suffered a lot because of the prohibition of
this work."
Once the assistant conductor of the Moscow Symphony and later chief
conductor of the Hong Kong and New Orleans symphonies, Maxim, 64, is now a
freelancer, based in St. Petersburg since the demise of the former Soviet
Union. On Monday and Tuesday, he takes over the podium in Los Angeles from
the Kirov's music director, Valery Gergiev. He has conducted this opera for
the Kirov in the past, at the company's home Maryinski Theatre in St.
Petersburg and on tour in Rotterdam in the Netherlands."Always, when I
conduct father's music, I feel he's very close to me," Maxim said. "I can
hear his voice and personality in his music. All his feelings." The current
Kirov production, he added, is one his father would have approved of; it
hasn't been reset in time or place. "He didn't like when some stage director
changed anything. He wanted the staging to be the time of the opera."
The Soviet ban against the opera faded in 1963, 10 years after Stalin's
death. At that time, the version authorities allowed on stage was renamed --
"Katerina Ismailova" -- reorchestrated, and some of the edgier aspects of
the drama, especially a sex scene, were smoothed over. Even that wasn't
enough to get it back on stage the first time Shostakovich tried.
"The idea of granting permission to do this opera surfaced," Maxim said. "A
committee from the Ministry of Culture came to our house. Father played the
score. I turned pages. It was in the early '60s. They said, 'It's not the
time for this opera yet.'
"My father was very upset. It was like torture because he played a lot of
the score for them. They knew that he had waited for a time when he thought
the opera could appear again. But they knew it in advance that they wouldn't
permit it."
Controversial overseas
In the guise of "Katerina Ismailova," "Lady Macbeth" also made the
international rounds, appearing in 1963 at London's Covent Garden and a year
later in San Francisco. It was controversial, with many critics regarding it
as politically suspect.
"Most musicologists consider the first version the stronger one," said Edgar
Baitzel, L.A. Opera's director of operations. "The later version is
considered an artistic compromise the composer had to do to see the work
performed again. Valery Gergiev, however, thinks both versions are
fascinating and has done both back to back at the Kirov. We left the
artistic decision to him. He decided to bring the early version, which is
fine with us."
Maxim doesn't see the revision as a compromise. "I don't think the revision
is tainted at all," he said. "I like very much both versions. I conduct both
of them.
"Father preferred 'Katerina,' " he said. "He changed his opinions about some
of the words, orchestration and entr'actes. Father remembered when people in
the audience heard dirty words, they laughed. So he made the language more
pure. ['Katerina'] is absolutely the same [as 'Lady Macbeth'] except for a
little change in the words and orchestration. The orchestra was too loud at
times. He was later more experienced in orchestrating, and he decided to
change that himself."
As for why "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" was plunged into obscurity in the first
place, Maxim has a theory. It was not so much the adventuresome musical
idiom or the work's vulgarity mentioned in the original editorial, he said.
Nor was it, as others have suggested, that Stalin saw himself satirized in
the character of a busy but ineffective police sergeant.
"I think there were two causes," Maxim said. "First, there are the scenes
when the peasants and workers say to Zinovy [Katerina's husband], 'Oh, how
we like you. Oh, when will you come back? Without you, life is so poor.'
Immediately in the next scene, they are alone and they say, 'How we hate
him.' Stalin thinks, 'Ah, it's the same. In my presence, they say they love
me. Inside of their souls, they hate me.'
"Also, the idea of someone poisoning him scared him. Katrina kills her
father-in-law by feeding him poisoned mushrooms. Stalin was very upset that
somebody would poison him. He thought that after this opera, someone would
get this idea to do it."
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
http://www.calendarlive.com/music/classical/cl-ca-pasles27oct27,0,3227446.st
ory?coll=cl-home-more-channels
'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk'
Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles
When: Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m., and Monday and Tuesday at 7 p.m.
(conducted by Maxim Shostakovich)
Price: $30 to $170; Contact: (213) 365-3500
Various casts. Valery Gergiev conducts through Sunday; Maxim Shostakovich
conducts Monday and Tuesday.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Introduction
(born St. Petersburg, 25 September 1906; died Moscow, 9 August 1975).
He studied with his mother, a professional pianist, and then with Shteynberg
at the Petrograd Conservatory (1919-25): his graduation piece was his
Symphony no.1, which brought him early international attention. His creative
development, however, was determined more by events at home. Like many
Soviet composers of his generation, he tried to reconcile the musical
revolutions of his time with the urge to give a voice to revolutionary
socialism, most conspicuously in his next two symphonies, no.2 ('To
October') and no.3 ('The First of May'), both with choral finales. At the
same time he used what he knew of contemporary Western music (perhaps
Prokofiev and Krenek mostly) to give a sharp grotesqueness and mechanical
movement to his operatic satire The Nose, while expressing a similar keen
irony in major works for the ballet (The Age of Gold, The Bolt) and the
cinema (New Babylon). But the culminating achievement of these quick-witted,
nervy years was his second opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,
where high emotion and acid parody are brought together in a score of
immense brilliance.
Lady Macbeth was received with acclaim in Russia, western Europe and the
USA, and might have seemed to confirm Shostakovich as essentially a dramatic
composer: by the time he was 30, in 1936, he was known for two operas and
three full-length ballets, besides numerous scores for the theatre and
films, whereas only one purely orchestral symphony had been performed, and
one string quartet. However, in that same year Lady Macbeth was fiercely
attacked in Pravda, and he set aside his completed Symphony no.4 (it was not
performed until 1961), no doubt fearing that its Mahlerian intensity and
complexity would spur further criticism. Instead he began a new symphony,
no.5, much more conventional in its form and tunefulness - though there is a
case for hearing the finale as an internal send-up of the heroic style. This
was received favourably, by the state and indeed by Shostakovich's
international public, and seems to have turned him from the theatre to the
concert hall. There were to be no more operas or ballets, excepting a comedy
and a revision of Lady Macbeth; instead he devoted himself to symphonies,
concertos, quartets and songs (as well as heroic, exhortatory cantatas
during the war years).
Of the next four symphonies, no.7 is an epic with an uplifting war-victory
programme (it was begun in besieged Leningrad), while the others display
more openly a dichotomy between optimism and introspective doubt, expressed
with varying shades of irony. It has been easy to explain this in terms of
Shostakovich's position as a public artist in the USSR during the age of
socialist realism, but the divisions and ironies in his music go back to his
earliest works and seem inseparable from the very nature of his harmony,
characterized by a severely weakened sense of key. Even so, his position in
official Soviet music certainly was difficult. In 1948 he was condemned
again, and for five years he wrote little besides patriotic cantatas and
private music (quartets, the 24 Preludes and Fugues which constitute his
outstanding piano work).
Stalin's death in 1953 opened the way to a less rigid aesthetic, and
Shostakovich returned to the symphony triumphantly with no.10. Nos.11 and 12
are both programme works on crucial years in revolutionary history (1905 and
1917), but then no.13 was his most outspokenly critical work, incorporating
a setting of words that attack anti-semitism. The last two symphonies and
the last four quartets, as well as other chamber pieces and songs, belong to
a late period of spare texture, slowness and gravity, often used explicitly
in images of death: Symphony no.14 is a song cycle on mortality, though
no.15 remains more enigmatic in its open quotations from Rossini and Wagner.
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music; edited by Stanley Sadie
Macmillan Press Ltd., London.
For personal and academic use only
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