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Shostakovich's
brave new world Nick
Kimberley By 20th-century standards, Shostakovich was a reasonably prolific opera composer: two full-scale operas (The Nose, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), an operetta (Moscow, Cheryomushki) and an incomplete torso (The Gamblers) constitute a significant body of operatic work. Nevertheless, as the director David Pountney complains, "We were cheated of the composer who could have been the Verdi of the 20th century." The reason lies in one of the few pieces of music journalism ever to have changed the course of musical history. In 1934, the 27-year-old Shostakovich saw his opera Lady Macbeth of Mstsensk given almost simultaneous premieres in Leningrad and Moscow. A year later, it had notched up 200 performances in Russia and elsewhere, but when Stalin attended one performance in December 1935, he did not like what he saw. Within weeks, the party newspaper Pravda denounced the work as "muddle not music": "can we not explain its success abroad by the fact that it tickles the perverted bourgeois fancy with its twitchy, screeching, neurotic music?" The opera was withdrawn; the cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet authorities that was thus begun would torment Shostakovich to the grave. A projected operatic cycle depicting the circumstances of women in the 20th century came to nothing, as later, did planned operas based on Tolstoy and Chekhov. We have the 15 symphonies and the same number of string quartets, but the only operatic work he completed after 1936 was Moscow, Cheryomushki (1958), a satirical operetta that benefited from the less censorious atmosphere of 1950s Russia. Hence David Pountney's suggestion that we have been cheated: "Whether he would have completed the trilogy that he planned, or whether he would have moved on to something different, we can't say. What we can say is that the symphonies and the operas show that he had the scale to write major theatrical works in a popular and accessible vein. That's where the comparison with Verdi lies. It's a terrible irony that while he was suppressed by the Soviet system, he was entirely serious about speaking to people with his music." Over the coming weeks Pountney is staging Moscow, Cheryomushki (retitled Paradise Moscow) for Opera North, before reviving his celebrated English National Opera production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Meanwhile, John Fulljames is mounting a touring production of The Nose for the Opera Group. This serendipitous survey will show what Shostakovich achieved, and perhaps remind us of what might have been. The supreme achievement remains Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, "undeniably a successful grand opera", says Pountney. "It invigorates the form in a totally 20th-century way, but it remains a grand opera, and there are very few of those after Puccini. Shostakovich has that ability call it Shakespearean or Verdian to combine deliberate musical vulgarity, with something as searing as Katerina's prison aria at the end of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and that is quite brilliant." By contrast, Paradise Moscow is "a hugely enjoyable squib," according to Pountney. This breathless comedy combines European operetta with the Broadway musical to produce a satire on corruption in the Soviet housing market. As Pountney suggests, "It's a universal theme: name me a big city that doesn't have its housing scandal. Shostakovich knew his Offenbach and his Lehár, and knew that to be able to write a short, witty song is a supreme test of a composer's skill. We've forgotten how important it is to the operatic repertoire to have light pieces, to have humour and wit." Four years ago, Pountney staged The Nose in Amsterdam; he calls it "probably the most experimental opera of the 20th century. It's violent, extreme and quite frightening: it pursues the idea of the grotesque into some very dark corners." This expression of the post-Revolutionary avant-garde, premiered in 1930, is based on the short story by Gogol. It tells of a civil servant who loses his nose in a shaving accident. He rushes all over St Petersburg to find the missing appendage, which meanwhile has taken on a life all its own. There are 78 sung roles, and the orchestra requires no fewer than 10 percussionists. John Fulljames's production does away with the chorus and, by way of multiple doublings, reduces the cast to eight and the orchestra to 16, producing what he calls "an ensemble of cameos and caricatures". Not that the work itself is reduced. "The problem is living up to the imagination of a composer who seems to have nothing constraining him," Fulljames explains. "How do you show a man without a nose? How do you show a nose changing into a state councillor? With a huge cast and chorus onstage, you have to try harder for the necessary exuberance, whereas there is already theatricality in having eight people haring around the stage doing everything. Musically, dramatically, physically, they will need flexibility, and that helps to create the world that the piece requires." Shostakovich insisted that, for all the opera's manic humour and energy, it was not a comic opera. "He was writing after the Revolution," Fulljames says, "but about pre-Revolutionary society, a bourgeois society so narcissistic that it becomes obsessed with the loss of a nose. It's a young man's experiment from a time when Russia was at the forefront of the avant-garde, but it only had five years on the Russian stage before 'Muddle not Music'. Then it disappeared for 40 years. But it remains an amazing piece." David Pountney sees Shostakovich's operas as an antidote to "the baleful intellectualism based on contempt for the audience" that has stifled so much new opera over the past 50 years. "What should be a vibrant artform has been turned into something that will eventually be taken over by the National Trust," Pountney says. "Dmitri Shostakovich could have been the counterweight that opera desperately needed in the second half of the 20th century, to stop it going up those blind alleys. He handled the whole apparatus of opera with incredible panache." Home | Back to contents | Top |
