Saturday afternoon's presentation at the Met of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was the first opportunity I'd had to see this masterpiece by Shostakovich in performance. I have to admit I'd wanted to attend as much for the opera's historical background as for its music; it was this piece, of course, that was the cause of the first denunciation against the composer in 1936 at the very beginning of the Stalin's "Great Purge." In the years that followed, Shostakovich was to see many of his closest friends imprisoned or executed and his own life put at risk.
The opera itself had been written in 1934 and had initially received excellent reviews and enjoyed great popularity in the two years following its Leningrad premiere. There were several foreign productions including an American tour that featured a sold out appearance at the Met in 1935. The real trouble began in Moscow when Stalin himself chose to attend a Bolshoi Theater performance at which the composer was also present. The Wikipedia article references biographer Elizabeth Wilson as its source in describing the scene:
"When he [Shostakovich] arrived, he saw that Joseph Stalin and the Politburo were there. In letters written to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky, Shostakovich recounted the horror with which he watched as Stalin shuddered every time the brass and percussion played too loudly. Equally horrifying was the way Stalin and his companions laughed at the love-making scene between Sergei and Katerina. Eyewitness accounts testify that Shostakovich was 'white as a sheet' when he went to take his bow after the third act."
Two days later an article appeared in the official party organ Pravda entitled "Muddle Instead of Music" which violently attacked Shostakovich for, among other failings, his sympathetic treatment of the murderess Katerina. For some time thereafter, the composer lived in very real fear of losing his life. He was forced to withdraw his Fourth Symphony, deeply influenced by Mahler's music, before its premiere and instead spent the next several months composing film music, a "safe" genre that carried with it no political implications. It was not until the 1937 premiere of his Fifth Symphony that Shostakovich once again regained official favor and could breathe more easily.
With so much history behind it, the opera was difficult to evaluate it on its own merits. The libretto by Alexander Preis, based on a novel of the same name by Nikolai Leskov, is certainly lurid enough to put any Italian verismo work to shame. Almost all the characters are thoroughly corrupt; the protagonist Katerina is the double murderer of both her father-in-law and her husband. To that extent the work is as deeply imbued with naturalism as any Zola novel, and its bleak outlook is reminiscent of the tone of Gorky's play The Lower Depths. The vulgarity that so disturbed Stalin is definitely present here and was in fact so deliberately emphasized by the composer that a New York Sun review described the music played during the violent lovemaking between Katerina and Sergei as "pornophony." In this particular production the effect is heightened by such grotesque trappings as the disco ball used in the Act III wedding scene. At the same time, though, the composer displayed a great deal of sympathy for his characters. Most notably, Shostakovich broke with Leskov in his portrayal of Katerina and made her a much more sympathetic character than the novel's coldhearted monster. She is here as much victim as criminal and possesses a humanity that raises her death to the level of tragedy.
The star of the show was Eva-Maria Westbroek in the role of Katerina, but Brandon Jovanovich also handed in a great performance as Sergei while James Conlon did a fine job conducting. I think Shostakovich would have been pleased by the excesses of Graham Vick's production which captured very well the spirit of the piece.
The beginning of the opera was delayed almost a quarter hour by a problem in the orchestra pit. The stage manager eventually came out and asked for patience. By way of explanation, he told the audience that the score was "difficult to light." As I had never imagined that musical scores printed on paper could differ that much from one another, I found this truly bizarre.
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