MUSIC
NEWLIN, DIKA
ON MUSIC By Dika Newlin A Russian Tragedy The spping season of the New York City Opera brought us a number of interesting works. Besides the productions of the now "classic" 20th-century operas...
...The music quacks, grunts, growls, strangles itself in order to represent the amatory scenes as naturalistically as possible...
...Lady Macbeth enjoys great success with the bourgeois audiences abroad...
...But again there were obstacles...
...Here Shostakovich could have learned from a work to which his own might usefully be compared: Berg's Wozzeck...
...Both composers chose subjects dealing with the sordid tragedies of inadequate individuals in a frustrating environment...
...During his absence on an urgent trip, she enters into a violent love affair with one of his workers, Sergei...
...Many scenes which could be powerful fail of maximum effect because the composer simply did not know when to stop...
...But Shostakovich did not, because he could not, enter into the freer realms of harmony available to Berg...
...The controversies stirred by this work in the '30s evoke painful memories...
...Zinovy, who returns from his journey too soon and surprises the couple in the conjugal bedchamber, is clubbed to death by Sergei and chucked into the winecellar His body is discovered on Katerina's and Sergei's wedding day...
...On this, the final curtain falls...
...He also did not permit himself to express deeper human sympathy, as Berg does so unforgettably in the final interlude after Wozzeck's death...
...He was a popular composer in his own land, a man completely identified with the Soviet way of life, satisfied with his creative existence in Russia...
...Against Bourgeois Esthetes and Formalists...
...Suddenly he found himself castigated as an enemy of his country's best interests...
...Setting to work on his Fourth SYmphony, he had it ready to be put into rehearsal by the Leningrad Philharmonic in December 1936...
...which she serves him in a dish of mushrooms...
...nor had he Berg's gift of utmost concision, of saying just what needed to be said and no more...
...Alexei Tolstoy waxed lyrical in Izvestia: "The powerful rousing sounds of the Finale stirred the audience...
...He makes use of any and every style that comes to hand -grand opera parodies, distorted waltzes, martial tunes...
...Our listener is organically unreceptive to decadent, gloomy, pessimistic art, but he responds enthusiastically to an art that is clear, bright, joyful, optimistic, viable...
...Sergei looks down, shrugs his shoulders apathetically, and trudges on with the rest of the convict band...
...The Fifth Symphony has indeed proved "viable,' for it is a standard repertory work today not only in Russia, but in Western Europe and America as well...
...The beautiful Katerina Lvovna Ismailova is caught in a loveless marriage with the wealthy merchant Zinovy Borisich Ismailov, over 30 years her senior...
...On it all 'problems' are solved...
...To make things even worse, this initial assault was followed by another hostile article-in the same paper, and also unsigned--on February 6, ] 936...
...Completed in December 1932, and first performed on January 22, 1934 in Leningrad, it was a phenomenal success in its native country and further performances of it soon followed in Western Europe and America...
...Shostakovich based his libretto on the tale Lady Macbeth oi Mzensk by Nicholas Leskov (1831-1895), who has been called "the most Russian of the Russian writers...
...His activities as a journalist were misunderstood by the radicals, who effectively boycotted his work...
...Sergei now scorns Katerina and has eyes only for the pert Sonyetka, another prisoner...
...After a further period of silence, he finally succeeded in making his public "act of contrition.' His Fifth Symphony, written in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Republic, was premiered in Leningrad on November 21, 1937...
...Now that the work is again being heard-with some (not extensive) revisions by the composer-we may ask ourselves: What was the fuss all about...
...Both used the instrumental interludes between scenes as a means of furthering the psychological drama...
...According to an editorial at the time in The Worker and the Theater, Shostakovich had accomplished the unlikely feat of becoming "the foremost representative of the two tendencies extremely dangerous to Soviet art: pathological naturalism, eroticism and formalistic perversion, as demonstrated in Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, and primitivistic schematicism, as in The Limpid Stream...
...Well-like so many of his countrymen-he would have to confess his sins and try to do "better...
...Shostakovich might well have smiled ironically, had he thought to compare Leskovs career and his own...
...We can admire Shostakovich's youthful ebullience and brilliant eclecticism...
...On the stage, singing is replaced by screaming...
...It tickles the perverted tastes of the bourgeois audiences with its fidgeting, screaming neurasthenic music...
...We cannot but trust the Soviet listener...
...In the struggle, both fall into an icy lake and are drowned...
...But no: Poor Shostakovich was now accused of treating a Soviet theme far too lightly and frivolously...
...The orchestra proved recalcitrant and Shostakovich had to withdraw the work from performance...
...Her father-in-law, who catches Sergei in a furtive sortie from Katerina's room, is summarily dispatched with rat poison...
...What is often lacking is a sense of proportion...
...An anonymous critic in Pravda (believed by some to be Zhdanov himself, later responsible for the infamous "Decree on Music" promulgated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party on February 10, 1936) wrote: "The listener is from the very /irst bewildered by a stream of deliberately discordant sounds...
...What course was he to follow...
...All this, though unpleasant enough, will hardly shock a modern audience inured to much worse, 11O'r does the music, though often brutal, strike the contemporary ear as unbearably dissonant...
...Fragments of melody, beginnings of a musical phrase appear on the surface, are submerged, then emerge again and disappear once more in the roar...
...Leskov underwent a typical Russian experience: Political considerations often played an adverse role in his career...
...This time the critic let fly at Shostakovich's ballet The Limpid Stream...
...If the composer happens to hit on a simple and understandable melody, he, as if frightened by such a calamity, flees into the jungle of musical confusion, at times reaching complete cacophony...
...The merchant's bed occupies the central place on the stage...
...When, in later years, he began to publish in mildly Leftist periodicals, a satirical story concerning life among the priests caused him to lose his government position...
...But suddenly, on January 28, 1936, a shattering blow fell on Shostakovich...
...Leskov's story (modified somewhat by Shostakovich and his collaborator Preis: I summarize here its operatic form) is a simple and sordid one...
...At last, it seemed, Shostakovich had pushed the right button, and the well-disciplined Soviet critics responded with the proper conditioned reflexes...
...Besides the productions of the now "classic" 20th-century operas (The Ballad of Baby Doe, Porgy and Bess, Die Dreigroschenoper), and one world premiere (Jack Beeson's Lizzie Borden), there was a revival of special importance: that of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, now retitled Katerina lsmailova...
...Sonyetka taunts Katerina until the latter, no longer able to bear it, turns on her tormentor...
...This destiny-far more than the predictable fate of Leskov's vain, bored heroine-is the deeper cause for grief...
...The effect of all this upon Shostakovich can be imagined...
...Such a frontal attack in the official Soviet newspaper was a serious matter, to say the least...
...His reaction to music is a just verdict...
...All rose to their feet, infused with joy and happiness, streaming from the orchestra like a spring breeze...
...Against the Advocates of Musical Perversion...
...A grotesque one-legged drunk-a truly Moussorgskian character-literally dances on Zinovy's grave, coming upon the corpse when he breaks into the cellar for more liquor...
...Both made biting use of musical parody and satire (ct .• the mock sermon in Wozzeck...
...Love' is smeared all over the opera in the most vulgar manner...
...In fact, today it seems rather conservative...
...He wheedles Katerina into giving him her red woolen stockings, which he then presents to his new love...
...The guilty couple are condemned to Siberia...
...Since its theme was politically and morally pure, and its music far less complex than that of Lady Macbeth, one might have expected the Soviet critics to greet it with whoops of joy...
...Headlines like these were rife in the Soviet press: "Against Formalist Perversion of Art...
...That work depicted the life on a Soviet collective farm...
...Thus, Katerina Ismailova remains a flawed tragedy-and, ultimately, a symbol of the tragedy of its composer's career: the fate of a great talent debarred by cruel circumstance from free and full development...
...For Music that Millions Need...
...Lady Macbeth, however, disappeared ignominiously from the stage...
...He turned away from opera and back to the field of his early suecesses, the symphony...
Vol. 48 • April 1965 • No. 8
