thallo wrote:I would very much like to delve deeper into Shostakovich. As with all composers who dedicated little to vocal music, I have had a partial and "textbook" approach. And even Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, I listened to it once; I was devastated but I never had the "courage" to return to it...
A while ago, I wrote about this opera and, if it can be useful, I am reposting it here.
Dmitri Shostakovich was the greatest Soviet composer. He joined the Communist Party with great conviction, but soon realized that the hopes born from that event sank in the hands of a handful of ruthless bureaucrats who, under another guise, sought to perpetuate that power—using the same means and systems—that had previously belonged to the Tsars.
His great attachment to his beloved Motherland meant that he did not decide to emigrate—as many others had done—but remained there, enduring countless hardships.
But at what moment did the great composer realize that things were heading in a different direction than the one desired?
It was when, after composing the beautiful opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Op. 29" between 1930 and 1932, and after it had been staged in 1934 with great success to the point of being revived for almost a year, the cultural apparatus of the Party lashed out against him, forcing him to withdraw his work.
In the opera in question, Shostakovich embraced the boldest experiences of European expressionism, and this was the reason that attracted the lightning bolts of the Soviet nomenclature: dictatorships—of whatever color they may be—are the greatest enemies of every instance of progress.
Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, responsible for Soviet culture, became the main architect of this attack and demanded from the musical theater mandatory optimistic conclusions, celebrations of positive heroes, and exaltation of the Soviet nation, all naturally accompanied by very melodic music far from the "degenerations of the bourgeois avant-garde."
And to think that this opera was born precisely to express the composer's anti-bourgeois sentiments. In fact, regarding this matter, he wrote: "Katerina is a beautiful and intelligent young woman who is suffocating in a world of vulgar merchants (...). She has a husband, but knows no joy at all (...). The murders she commits are not actual crimes, but rather a revolt against the environment, against the sordid and nauseating atmosphere in which the bourgeoisified merchants of the 19th century live (...)"
In Shostakovich's opera, there is above all the entire lesson of the theater of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, combined with the great symphonic lesson of Gustav Mahler, all amalgamated and made original by his own great, immense musical genius.
The second act seems exactly like one of those famous movements with a funeral march rhythm found in some of Mahler's symphonies. Katerina, together with her lover Sergei, commits a double murder: first her father-in-law and subsequently her husband; Shostakovich's mastery and ability to accompany the various moments of the story are great: the moods, the atmospheres, but also the smallest details, producing music that truly seems to speak.
Mussorgsky, on the other hand, emerges in the fourth act where, after the intimate character of the previous three, the opera becomes choral in type, just like the two wonderful operas: "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina." The two murdering lovers are together with many convicts deported to Siberia, and here another comparison is mandatory, but this time of a literary nature: Leo Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection." There too, the story concludes with a long march of the deportees toward Siberia and, in both cases, a woman is the protagonist... But the similarities, from this point of view, end there. If Katyusha—the protagonist of "Resurrection"—is indeed completely innocent and therefore a complete victim of all circumstances, Katerina is guilty. But the pity, the compassion, the solidarity that I feel for both these two Women is the same. Both are indeed victims of a wrong and corrupt world, both are victims of a society, of a deeply chauvinistic world, and both, finally, are part of that Humanity formed by the marginalized, the outcasts of the Earth.
In 1934, Shostakovich wanted to give Katerina—unlike the original character of Nikolay Semyonovich Leskov, from whom the drama is drawn—a much more human face to characterize her much more from a social point of view: Katerina is a victim of a system that places wealth at the center of its values and which leads many people to commit crimes in its name.
But what strikes me deeply is the diametrically opposite atmosphere that concludes these two works.
compared to two cornerstones of the theater from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
As already seen in Mussorgsky's theater, in Shostakovich the final message is one of terrible pessimism: a terrible triumph of darkness, of night, of gloom: Katerina throws herself into the river, taking with her the new lover of her beloved Sergej, but before doing this, she sings a beautiful song:
In the woods, where it is thickest, there is a lake:
Round and round and very deep,
The water is black.
Black as my conscience.
And when the wind blows in the woods,
Waves rise upon the lake,
great waves, and it is terrible:
In autumn there are always many of them.
Black water and great waves,
Black, great waves
The sense of darkness is already very profound and the opera concludes with a song by a forced laborer:
And he walks, walks without rest,
The chains clank in rhythm,
The verses are sadly counted
Raising dust with his feet!
To which the other forced laborers echo:
Oh, you, immeasurable steppes,
Endless days and nights
And inconsolable thoughts
And inhuman gendarmes.
Ah!...
After the experience of this opera, Shostakovich, apart from some symphonies very compliant with the dictates of power, decided to compose only chamber music so as not to fall again into the clutches of Soviet censorship. In 1943 he thought of breaking this attitude by setting a text by Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol: "The Gamblers", but he soon realized that once again the story and the music of this opera would not be accepted by the Soviet power, so, overcome by the deepest discouragement, he decided to abandon the endeavor.
It is a truly great pity because the first act of this opera composed by him is truly exceptional, and I will not hesitate to state that if it had been completed, it would probably be counted among the great masterpieces of 20th-century musical theater.
In the same year he composed "Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65". We are in the midst of the Second World War, shortly after Nazi troops were repelled from Soviet soil. Naturally, the power asked the composer for a symphony that would celebrate this victory. But, once again, the composer did not satisfy his rulers. He indeed composed a score marked by the most absolute melancholy and the greatest pain dictated by the atrocities of war.
In all this sadness, however, the finale stands out with intimate music, a sunny pastoral with folk elements. Interviewed on the philosophical meaning of the symphony and specifically on the meaning of that finale, the composer said that he had wanted to describe his "pain towards man's violence against man" but, despite all this, in the finale, he wanted to affirm that despite everything "life is a wonderful thing, life and beauty will triumph."
