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Martyred Opera Reflects Its Abominable Time Richard
Taruskin On Thursday evening, the Metropolitan Opera will finally get around to Dmitri Shostakovich's second opera, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," 60 years after its first production. Maria Ewing will sing the title role in the Graham Vick production, with James Conlon conducting. "Lady Macbeth" suffered a fate unimaginable to any composer alive today, when the worst that can befall a musician is neglect. Neglect can be awful, and it is not always benign. But the malignest neglect cannot equal the sort of attention that was paid to this opera. It was peremptorily banned after two years of dizzying success around the world, and the prodigally gifted composer, not yet 30, was mortally threatened in the press. This was the first step in the process by which Shostakovich, until then the brash genius of a brash young society, thriving in the din of its social upheavals and pampered by its artistic elite, was transformed into "pain personified," as the post-Soviet composer Sofia Gubaidulina now remembers him, "the epitome of the tragedy and terror of our times." In January 1936, a festival of Soviet music was held in Moscow. The Little Opera Theater of Leningrad -- called by its Russian acronym, Malegot -- lent its two most successful productions for the occasion. One was "Quiet Flows the Don," a corny "song opera" by a hack named Ivan Dzerzhinsky after Mikhail Sholokhov's famous novel of the postrevolutionary civil war. The other was "Lady Macbeth," of which the Malegot had given the premiere. On the evening of the 17th, Stalin and Molotov attended a performance of Dzerzhinsky's opera and, according to a Tass dispatch, called the composer, the conductor and the director to the royal box, where they "gave a positive assessment of the theater's efforts on behalf of Soviet opera and noted the considerable ideological and political merits of the production." On the 26th, the same leaders -- together with Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet culture czar, and Anastas Mikoyan, another member of the Politburo -- went to see "Lady Macbeth." Shostakovich, alerted by a telegram, was in the audience. He left the theater perturbed (as he wrote to a friend) about "what had happened to Dzerzhinsky, and what didn't happen to me." For Stalin and company had left without comment before the end. Two days later, what soon became known as the Historic Document appeared in Pravda. It was an unsigned editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music," and a historic document it certainly was. At a time when newspaper campaigns were rife against the "left deviationism" of old Bolsheviks, and soon-to-be-heeded calls for their annihilation were rampant, the same merciless rhetoric of political denunciation was directed, for the first time anywhere, at an artist. The opera's subject and style were both excoriated. The subject had been borrowed from a famous horror story by the 19th-century writer Nikolai Leskov. It concerned Katerina Izmailova, a merchant's wife in the middle of the great Russian nowhere, who rebels against her patriarchal surroundings by murdering her husband, her father-in-law and her husband's saintly nephew. She and her lover, Sergei, are discovered in the act of killing the little boy and sentenced to exile in Siberia. On the way there, Sergei takes a shine to another woman, whom Katerina duly murders by jumping with her into a freezing river in which both of them drown. Shostakovich and his librettist, Aleksandr Preys, tried to turn this creepy tale into a Soviet morality play. The objective conditions under which Katerina was forced to live, they argued, justified her acts of violence. They were presented not as crimes but as acts of liberation. (Still, the third murder had to be eliminated, because, as Shostakovich put it in a program note, "killing a child always makes a bad impression.") By emphasizing Katerina's awakened libido as her motivation, moreover, Shostakovich and Preys purported to make her a feminist icon. In effect, they were melding Leskov's heroine with another Katerina: Katerina Kabanova in Aleksandr Ostrovsky's drama "The Storm," another frustrated merchant's wife who takes a secret lover, and who later kills herself in shame. A whole scene from Ostrovsky's play (Katerina's oath of fidelity) is inserted into the libretto to make the point; and Shostakovich referred to his heroine with the same famous epithet -- "a ray of light in the Dark Kingdom" -- by which a 19th-century radical writer had honored Ostrovsky's gentle heroine 60 years before. Shostakovich and Preys (and Adrian Piotrovsky, the Malegot director, an early victim of the Stalinist purges) described the difference between Ostrovsky's meek heroine and their rampageous one as that between the mild protests of a czarist writer and the triumphant achievements of Socialist Realism. Their Katerina, they proudly announced, was no mere ray of light but the full radiance of the Marxist sun. What a dismal surprise awaited them! How completely they had misunderstood the nature of Stalinism. Totalitarian power, by whatever means entrenched, is reactionary, terrified of the sort of anarchic violence the opera endorsed. Stalinist violence, as Shostakovich would discover, was (like everything else Stalinist) planned, orderly and deterministic. And the lapsed Georgian seminarian at the top, the only Soviet critic who counted, was little disposed to celebrate the unleashing of anyone's libido, least of all a woman's. (Not that the "feminism" of "Lady Macbeth" is anything but muddled: Katerina's passions, aroused by a rape, turn her into a love slave.) So it is in retrospect hardly surprising that the primary thrust of "Muddle Instead of Music" was puritanical. "The music croaks and hoots and snorts and pants in order to represent love scenes as naturally as possible," Pravda fumed, "and 'love' in its most vulgar form is daubed all over the opera." That is why the opera had enjoyed its sensational international success. It was a capitulation to "the depraved tastes of bourgeois audiences," whom it titillated with "witching, clamorous neurasthenic music." Here Pravda had a point. The opera certainly is titillating. Just listen to the trombone in the rape scene, palpably mimicking Sergei's climax and detumescence. This was indubitably a selling point, at least in the West, and especially after the critic of The New York Sun (who heard it at the old Met in 1935 in a concert performance under Artur Rodzinski) labeled it "pornophony." Then the Pravda diatribe attacked the opera's modernistic style. This is a harder point for today's listener to grasp, especially a listener who knows "Wozzeck" or "Lulu" or "Moses and Aaron," or even Shostakovich's own earlier opera "The Nose" (after Gogol). By comparison, "Lady Macbeth" can seem downright tame -- "more consonant, more 'melodic,' and more openly tonal," in the words of the music theorist Robert P. Morgan. As Mr. Morgan's curiously squeamish phrase suggests, Westerners may even be inclined to regard tonality as something a self-respecting 20th-century composer keeps under wraps. And if so, it is because of the way "openly tonal" styles were enforced by bloody 20th-century dictatorships. But in the Soviet Union of the 1930's, the frame of reference was different. Musical style, like everything else, was politically-charged. "Positive heroes" were defined lyrically. Negative ones were defined by dissonance. In "Lady Macbeth," the only lyricism in evidence is that given to the murderess. Otherwise the music is indiscriminately caricatural, purposed deforming not only her victims but also her possible judges: a priest, the police, even (horror of horrors) "the people." "The composer," Pravda ranted, "seems to have deliberately encoded his music, twisted all its sounds so that it would appeal only to esthetes and formalists who have lost all healthy tastes." And now came the threat: "Left deviationism in opera," which to a Soviet reader meant Trotskyism, "grows out of the same source as left deviationism in painting, in poetry, in pedagogy, in science." In a phrase that must have scared the poor composer half to death, the chief organ of Soviet power denounced him for "trifling with difficult matters," and hinted that "it might end very badly." Dmitri Shostakovich, till then perhaps Soviet Russia's most loyal musical son and certainly her most talented one, had been made a sacrificial lamb. Though his opera had no doubt given the Leader and Teacher of the Peoples a genuine pain, it had surely been marked for suppression before Stalin ever visited the theater. It was a target precisely by reason of its unprecedented success, and Shostakovich was a target by reason of his pre-eminence among Soviet artists of his generation, the first to be educated under Soviet power. The real purpose of the Pravda editorial was to demonstrate how directly the arts were to be subject to Party controls in the wake of recent administrative reforms that had created the "unions" of writers, artists, composers and cinematographers that lasted until 1991. Shostakovich, through his opera, was the first victim of the new dispensation; and if, as things turned out, he was spared the ultimate Stalinist fate, he had to live for some 17 years with the constant threat of "a bad end." (According to a story in Elizabeth Wilson's magnificent new oral history -- "Shostakovich A Life Remembered," the one indispensable book about the composer -- Shostakovich narrowly escaped arrest in the aftermath of the Red Army purge of 1937, when his patron Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was condemned.) That this unhappy man nevertheless continued to function as an artist and a citizen has lent his career a heroic luster no benignly neglected Western counterpart can ever hope to achieve. It is inevitably in that heroic light -- a light made garish by sensationalistic publications like "Testimony," Solomon Volkov's spurious book of Shostakovich "memoirs," or "The New Shostakovich," Ian MacDonald's worthless ventriloquist's act on the music -- that we now view "Lady Macbeth." We know it as the work through which the Soviet Union's great composer was disgraced; a work whose loss was tragic, since it spelled the end of a hugely promising operatic career, and, finally, a work that had to endure a 27-year ban before it was cautiously let back on stage, retitled "Katerina Izmailova," in a bowdlerized version sans pornophony, and with an expanded final scene of convicts en route to Siberia that is fraught with a new and bitter subtext relating to its creator's tribulations. So ineluctably has the opera come to symbolize pertinacity in the face of inhumanity that it is virtually impossible now to see it as an embodiment of that very inhumanity. The fate of "Lady Macbeth" opened Shostakovich's eyes to the nature of the regime under which he was condemned to live. Its martyrdom humanized its creator. Yet it remains, at the profoundest musical level, a profoundly inhumane work of art, forever giving the lie (whatever Pravda may have thought) to formalists and esthetes who would deny music the ethical and expressive powers of which the ancients speak -- and warn. Evoking a wealth of familiar musical genres, deploying a bewilderingly eclectic range of styles with amazing virtuosity, the composer sees to it that one character, and one character only, is perceived as a human being. Katerina's is the only music in the opera that has emotional "life." Like the emotions themselves, it waxes and wanes, it has rhythmic and dynamic flexibility; it reaches climaxes. All the other characters are portrayed as subhuman. Their singing and, above all, their movements are accompanied by trudging or galloping ostinatos -- inflexible rhythmic pulsations that characterize them one and all as soulless, insensate automatons, comic-strip creatures, incapable of experiencing or evoking an emotional response of any kind. The technique of dehumanizing victims operates at its most insidious in the fifth scene of the opera, which depicts the murder of Zinovy Borisovich, Katerina's husband, a well-meaning wimp. The scene opens with Katerina in bed with Sergei, surrounded by the opera's lushest, most lyrical orchestral music. The mood lasts until Zinovy's offstage approach, signaled by a typical "trudging" ostinato. Once he arrives on stage, the trudge gives way, literally, to a "galop," the maddest of all 19th-century ballroom dances, of which Shostakovich was the 20th-century master. The whole scene of confrontation and murder is played against its unremitting oompah. The American composer Elliott Carter saw "Lady Macbeth" in Germany in 1960 and found this scene utterly baffling. "The relation of the music to the action is unaccountable," he wrote, unable to comprehend why Shostakovich would have "the heroine and her lover strangle her husband on a large stage-sized four-poster bed to a lively dance tune." By now the reason should be clear enough: the dance tune is there to dehumanize the husband and mitigate the heroine's crime to one of cruelty to animals at worst. What condemns Zinovy is nothing more than his being part of Katerina's hated environment. He is dehumanized and dispatched not for anything he has done but for what he is: a beneficiary of the social system that oppressed his wife. That is enough "objectively" to justify his liquidation. (And all of this is conveyed, as in any great opera, by the music alone.) But precisely this kind of "objective" analysis was being advanced, even as Shostakovich was writing his opera, in defense of the lawless extermination of the kulaks, peasants who were resisting forced collectivization in the brutal period of the first Five Year Plan. It was a time of hideous moral inversions in all walks of Soviet life, when the high tide of Stalinism was rolling in and the basest atrocities were being justified in the name of the loftiest humanitarian ideals. In the year "Lady Macbeth" was completed, little Pavlik Morozov, a well-indoctrinated "pioneer" from a farm near Sverdlovsk, denounced his parents to the secret police as enemies of the people. Lynched by an outraged mob of peasants, he became a Soviet saint, not to be decanonized till the days of Mikhail Gorbachev. Shostakovich's Katerina was a heroine of a similar stripe, alas. His opera is a faithful reflection of an abominable time, and a memento of it. If for the sake of its inspired music and its dramatic power it is to hold the stage today, it should be seen and heard with an awareness of history and with hearts on guard.
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