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LOVE IS A GREAT TALENT

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth has the talent of being able to love

In his memoirs Dmitri Shostakovich wrote, "Lady Macbeth is a real treasure for a composer". Taking Nikolai Leskov's story Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as his starting-point Shostakovich and the young dramaturge Alexander Preiss from Leningrad wrote the libretto and planned Lady Macbeth as a "tragic and satirical opera". Shostakovich dedicated the work to his fiancée and future bride, therefore "it is obvious that the opera will also be about love".
Wolfgang Stähr writes about Shostakovich's opera (premiered in 1934 in Leningrad) and about his Fifth Symphony.

A Slating Review in Pravda

Dmitri Shostakovich described 28 January 1936 as perhaps the most memorable day in his life. He was on tour together with the cellist Viktor Kubatsky in Archangelsk and at the railway station there he bought the latest edition of Pravda. On page 3 he discovered a scathing article under the headline "Chaos instead of music" about his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - until then it had been performed in Leningrad and Moscow to great public acclaim and celebrated as the epitome of proletarian opera. Here was a devastating review that went even further and presented a fundamental reckoning with the "formalistic" direction and "leftist degeneration" in music. "The people expect beautiful songs and at the same time good instrumental works and operas", according to the article in Pravda. And what did Shostakovich impose on them? "Clattering, rattling and shrieking", "noise" and "neurotic music"; "if the composer occasionally finds himself going along the lines of a simple and understandable melody, he immediately - as if he were shocked about such a disaster - plunges into the labyrinth of musical chaos that in certain passages becomes cacophony." The ideals of socialist realism: "power of expression", "simplicity", and "good music's ability to stir the masses" were set against the deterrent example of Lady Macbeth. Shostakovich wrote in his memoirs - published by Solomon Volkov - "the article on page three of Pravda changed my whole way of life, once and for all. There was no signature at the bottom, in other words it was printed as an editorial. That means it pronounced the opinion of the party. In reality that of Stalin and that had significantly more weight."

Undisguised threats

"Chaos instead of music" was followed on 6 February 1936 by a second editorial in Pravda ("Distorted Ballet" was the headline of an article about Shostakovich's The Limpid Stream) and furthermore was the starting signal for an extensive press campaign. At a composers' congress held between 10 and 15 February 1936 other musicians as well as musicologists came into the firing line of the party.

Gérard Uféras, Opéra Comique, Paris, 1990 (section)

However, for Shostakovich the consequences were not limited merely to hostile articles and the disappearance of his Lady Macbeth from the repertoire of Soviet theatre. The article contained the ominous sentence, "This is a game with serious things that can come to a sorry end". What this phrase really meant is shown by the fate of the composer Nikolai Schiljajev, a close friend of Shostakovich, who was arbitrarily arrested, tortured and murdered. Shostakovich met him for the last time in 1937 and during this encounter he had played three movements of his Fifth Symphony to him. In the climate of Angst which was typical of life in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Shostakovich had to come to terms with the personal, day-to-day threat to his existence and with the agonising question whether he would still be alive the following week or the following month.
"Waiting for execution is one of the subjects that have tortured me throughout my life, Shostakovich admits in his memoirs. "Many pages of my music speak of this".

The Fifth Symphony as a Creative Response

In only three months, in the period from 18 April to 20 July 1937, Shostakovich composed his Fifth Symphony, op. 47. The first performance of the work took place on 21 November 1937 conducted by Yevgeni Mravinsky in Leningrad. In an official statement Shostakovich wrote that the score was a "creative response" to the criticism made against him. "If indeed I have succeeded in putting everything into my music that I have thought and felt after reading the critical articles in Pravda, I can be satisfied." For a long time these words were taken at face value in East and West - with satisfaction or with regret according to the location. For instance, Shostakovich's colleague Dmitri Kabalevsky claimed that "After hearing this work one can confidently assert that the composer, as a truly great Soviet artist, has eradicated his earlier mistakes and taken a new direction." Was and is this an accurate assessment? With his Fifth Symphony did Shostakovich present a symphony in the sense of socialist realism - monumental, popular and optimistic?
Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony begins with an energetic motif in the double-dotted rhythm of the French overture but already in the third movement its energy seems to wane, and the first violins play an extended melodic phrase, piano and elegiac in character, varied in form and with accentuated motifs: in any case not at all a "simple and understandable melody" according to the standard of Soviet musical doctrine. In general such solitary, often only barely accompanied "voices" permeate the exposition of the opening movement. And Shostakovich repeatedly gives them a fragile sound form, thus stressing their endangered status. And where is the monumentality? It does have its fair share of the movement but in what form! The delicate subject of the first violins just described is distorted and becomes a grotesque noisy march; and the ethereal singing of the second subject returns, resonantly played by the brass. In other words: the individuality of these themes is destroyed by the most terrible kind of violence, and if this movement celebrates monumentality, then as a brutal and crushing phenomenon. "Overwhelming" would be the appropriate, ambiguous expression. In the official statement Shostakovich explained that his symphony treats the "development of the personality". And indeed his music does give an unmistakeable reply to the question as to what happens to an individual, unprotected personality under the conditions of a dictatorship, whose claim to all-pervading power respects no limits of the private sphere.

This leaves us with the allegedly victorious and jubilant sounds of the finale which especially provoked the disapproval of western commentators. Did Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, like Beethoven's or Tchaikovsky's follow a bold per aspera ad astra dramatic concept? When Solomon Volkov published the Memoirs, already quoted from, this speculation also lost all founding. Shostakovich writes, "What happens in the Fifth Symphony should, in my opinion, be clear to everyone. As in Boris Godunov the jubilation is forced and comes about by threats. It is as if they were beating us with a cudgel and at the same time demanding, "You must rejoice, you must rejoice". In 1938 Shostakovich wrote, "If indeed I have succeeded in putting everything into my music that I have thought and felt after reading the critical articles in Pravda, then I can be satisfied." Should we not take him by his word after all?

Dmitri Schostakowitsch
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Original version from 1932,
sung in Russian with German and English supertitles

Conductor Valery Gergiev
Stage director Peter Mussbach
Stage design Klaus Kretschmer
Video installations BARCO
Costume design
Andrea Schmidt-Futterer
Lighting design
Konrad Lindenberg
Chorus master Andrei Petrenko

With Larissa Shevchenko, Vladimir Vaneev, Leonid Liubavin, Viktor Lutsiuk, Gennady Bezzubenkov and
soloists from the Marinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg

Vienna Philharmonic
Choir of the Marinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg

Grosses Festspielhaus

New production: 31 July 2001
4, 22, 25 and 30 August 2001
Performances start at 6.30 p.m.