Music A brief analysis of musical organization
Politics Why did the Stalinist regime violently criticize Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is the story of a house wife who yearns for happiness and love but ends up rejected and utterly alone. The libretto for this four Act nine Scene monolithic opera is based on a short story by Nikolai Leskov (1831-1891) entitled "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district". Shostakovich himself in a conversation with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko ,one of the first producers of the opera, characterized it as a tragedy satire. The work falls in line with Russian ideals of realism in art and insofar as this is true, the characters are "real people" and the situations ,though profoundly depressing and occasionally even grotesque, are true to life.
Lady Macbeth is decidedly a Music Drama composed as a single continuous piece from beginning to end. What is more difficult to determine is the function of the orchestra. Does it spin a complex web of leitmotivs ,making the action in the pit nearly or equally as important as the action on stage, or does it simply provide an accompaniment background to the action on stage? At first hearing the orchestra gives the impression of being a powerful and extremely impassioned accompaniment, but not more. However, on closer examination the use of leitmotivs , or theme-images if you will, becomes more apparent and audible. It seems though that Shostakovich did not make a determined effort to exploit the effect of the leitmotiv technique as did Wagner and Strauss. Perhaps he wanted to keep the focus of the listener on the development of the plot.
The musical idioms and harmonic orientation of the opera is in a neo-tonal style. A sense of restlessness and impending doom pervade much of the opera ;however, Shostakovich does not achieve this through the spontaneous atonality of a composer like Berg or the rigorous serialism of Shoenberg, both of whom had written operas within about fifteen years of Lady Macbeth, but rather by a complex myriad of tense counterpoint, dissonant harmonies and the exquisite use of orchestral textures.
The score to Lady Macbeth is intimidating to say the least, and even a semi-complete analysis is far beyond the scope of this paper. This being said; however, we can investigate in a more broad sense how Shostakovich (from now on abbreviated as D.S.) uses the orchestra to elucidate the drama.
As mentioned in the introduction there is no determined attempt to use leitmotivs as a structural device in the piece. D.S. himself said that, "The music of Lady Macbeth contains no so-called leitmotifs; nevertheless each character has its own musical characteristics." The following motifs are a few examples of what David Fanning ,author of the liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording, describes as, "germ-cells of sufficient prominence and semantic consistency to warrant provisional labeling." He goes on to add, "On the whole the extramusical reference is to a mood or state of mind associated with a character rather than to a character as such," After repeated listening to the opera one would tend to agree with his assessment of the so-called germ-cells. The examples that follow are taken from the liner notes of the previously mentioned recording. They are as follows: (Sorry, coming soon.)
After listening to the opera one is struck with a sense of awe at D.S.'s amazing talent for orchestration. It is through these remarkably vivid orchestrations that he parodies and mocks many of the characters throughout the work. Take for instance Boris Timofeyevich's being parodied by a perverse rendition of a Viennese waltz in Scene four. Boris's character is also colored by the somewhat odd combination of Trombone and Bassoon. The rape scene of the house cook ,Akinsya, is almost comicaly colored by Trombone glissandos, which apparently were sufficiently offensive to be removed in a later revision. What is perhaps more interesting is the remarkable pace at which much of this opera takes place. Perhaps this was in part due to his youth. He was only 25 years old when he wrote it. Or perhaps his tendencies towards lightening speeds were a holdover from his days as a cinema-pianist, which was one of the ways in which he supported himself in the early years of his career.
Shostakovich's use of the orchestra to elucidate the drama and color our view of the characters is quite simply remarkable. In few pieces does the audience get treated to such a wide range of emotional content. Take for instance the almost cartoonish galloping music that accompanies the police and compare it to Katerina's arias, or the impassioned entr'actes which separate the scenes and hold the work together as a musical whole. And who could ever forget the tragic climax of the final chorus? Shostakovich's musical setting of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is powerful and engrossing to the highest standards of "art" music yet managed to upset some of the power structure of the Soviet government as we shall see in the next section.
Perhaps equally difficult as analyzing the music of Lady Macbeth, is analyzing the controversy that surrounded it and continues to surround it to this day. The opera was completed in December of 1932and was premiered on January 22, 1934 at Leningrad's Maly opera house under the name of its main character, "Katerina Izmailova."(1)
So who is this "mysterious" man that there continues to be controversy about whether he was or was not a closet-dissident? If we are to beleive Solomon Volkov, editor of "Testimony-the memoirs of Dimitir Shostakovich", then we would view Shostakovich as an artist who loathed the State its dogmatic ideaologies under which he labored. However; there is much controversy as to the validity of the so-called memoirs. According to Shostakovich's wife, Nina Varzar, he only met with Volkov on three or four occasions, not enough in her opinion to generate Testimony. Also of note is the fact that Testimony somehow manages to not include a single living person that might come forward and contest its authenticity. Furthermore, Mr. Volkov continues to refuse the submission of materials that he claims would prove his case conclusively, and if this is not bad enough, it has been shown that many of Shostakovich's signatures at the heads of chapters in Testimony were lifted directly from relatively uncontroversial articles that Shostakovich himself wrote while in the Soviet Union. Despite the damning evidence against Volkov, unreformed cold-warriors continue to stand atop his suspicious scholarship and proclaim that Shostakovich was not only a great composer but a hero because he even though he hated 'those damn commie-pinkos' he wrote some really great music. The truth is probabbly a little more complicated than that.
Regardless of what many anti-communist people in the West would like to believe, the facts reamin that Shostakovich chose to stay in Russia after the October revolution when Prokofiev and Stravinsky left the country to find shelter in Paris. His second and third symphonies are in celebration of the October revolution and the first of May respectively. He wrote music to a play called "The Bedbug", which was written by a hard-line Soviet poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. He wrote the majority of his Leningrad symphony while working in a fire brigade in the besieged city. A few years later he wrote "The Song of the Forests" in praise of Stalin's 1949 reforestation plan and his Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies are musical depictions of 1905 and 1917 respectively. These are indisputable facts, but how do we interpret them? Did he write these pieces out of love or fear of the communist party?
Irina Molostova ,currently director of the Kiev Opera and Ballet, knew Shostakovich in the early days of Lady Macbeth and claims that either view, be it Shostakovich as a kind of court composer to the communist party or as a carefully rebellious closet dissident is wrong. "They're too political," Molostova explains, "Shostakovich was not a political man, he was a frightened man. He was a father, and was afraid of what might happen to his children."
At this point it may prove to be very enlightening to look at an excerpt of "Shostakovich and the 1948 Congress of Composers."(2)
The excerpt is quite long but one may find it brimming with insights into the nature of musical controversy in Stalinist Russia. It will also demonstrate that the criticism Shostakovich received for his lady Macbeth was not an isolated incident but rather only part of a much wider "cultural revolution" that touched every corner of Soviet intellectual life and had particularly dire consequences for the world of music.
The three characters are the CHAIRMAN, KHRENNIKOV (a favorable composer of Soviet music) and SHOSTAKOVICH.
CHAIRMAN We would all like to congratulate Commissar of Moscow, Comrade Zhdanov, on a masterly exposition of central cultural objectives of our great leader and teacher Comrade Stalin. And for his warnings against deviation towards decadent western obsession with 'form for form's sake'. I now call Comrade Krennikov, Chairman of USSR Composers' Union.
KHRENIKOV Comrades, Honored Guests. Composers's Union has every reason to thank the Central Committee of All-Union Communist Party 'Bolsheviks' for its attention to cultural health of our great revolutionary movement! All Soviet composers were encouraged, heartened by sincere and perceptive criticism of our great leader and teacher after the disgraceful production of D Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk before The Great Patriotic War. Without doubt, this was the worst example of anti-democratic music - mere repitition of empty and discredited devices. In prophetic manner, at that time Central Committee criticized most sharply 'form for form's sake' - the elitist and anti-socialist tendencies of music found in Comrades Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky and others. They publicly warned Soviet Music not to follow such harmful, reactionary trends. On these instructions Pravda printed some express wishes from the Soviet people to their composers. Despite many clear warnings no re-orientation or improvement of any kind has been noted in recent works by these composers. And Central Committee finds it altogether intolerable that now even leading critics are deceived by this false teaching - instead of praising the serious realistic music of Comrades Kalifati, Koreschenko and Ivanov, they now hail every new work by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Shebalin as 'a new victory for Soviet Music'. They are traitors and enemies to the State. They glorify precisely those elements that should have been subjected to the most severe criticism. These so-called critics have ceased to heed the voice of the Soviet People and have become mouthpieces for corrupting influences of contemporary decadent European and American music. In particular, the rejection of vocal forms, melody, and emotional clarity in music. They replace it instead with obsessive rhythms and bizarre orchestral effects, such as Comrade Khachaturian's Syphonie-Poeme which calls for 26 trumpets, 8 harps, 4 pianos and 16 double-basses to the exclusion of all other strings. Ridiculous! Other works such as Comrade Muradeli's opera Great Friendship are full of intentional perversity that offends its audience and harmonies to set everyone's teeth on edge. Chief among the works that have hurled these insults at the Soviet People in place of music are Khachaturian's Syphonie-Poeme as I said, Poem of the Fatherland by Shostakovich, Prokofiev's 6th Symphony, cantata by Miaskovsky Kremlin at Night - and others I will not offend you by mentioning. In the music of these composers we note over-emphasis on pure abstract instrumental forms, not found in Russian classical tradition, and a lack of interest in program music on accessible subjects familiar to ordinary Soviet people! Exaggerated attention is given to chamber music written for just a handful of connoisseurs, there is example in Comrade Prokofiev's 6th Violin Sonata: the piano is transformed from a pleasant-sounding instrument to grating and percussive one, while the violin is forced to leave its natural emotion and melody for a kind of grunting and scraping. Proper harmony is rendered into 'sonority' and 'texture' as if a beautiful handwritten page had been sprayed with ink from a faulty pen. In work of Comrade Shostakovich too we find all sorts of pictures and emotions alien to realistic tradition of Soviet art - expressionistic tenseness, neuroticism, escapism, abnormal, repulsive pathology - especially in this composer's 8th and 9th symphonies. Another example of this spitting in the face of our noble proletariat is to be found in the so-called neo-classical music of Shostakovich in which a number of antiquated polyphonic devices are translated mechanically from music of Bach, Haydn, and so forth, or -worse- tricked out with contrived harmonic distortions to seem modern. In these works the great tradition of Russian folksong and popular taste has been deliberately ignored. Delivered as a calculated statement cultivation of mere form as a goal in art leads directly away from the wishes and needs of Soviet People! And even when these composers have used genuine folksong they have arrange them in an over-complex and decadent style alien to the spirit of the melodies, and inspired by 'form for form's sake'. As comrade Zhadanov has valuably pointed out, the background to these views is subjective idealism. The artist dares to imagine himself the appraiser and final judge of his art. He turns his back on his audience and retreats into a private world. All Soviet art must be written to be understood! If a composer fails in this goal then he fails totally. And that man should spare no effort in working out how and why he has failed to please the people. The theory and practice of 'form for form's sake' is a complete negation of the democratic aspirations of classical Russian composers who addressed their art to a contemporary audience, not to some people in a far distant time.l Chime amongst culprits who have seduced our best composers is that ideologist of self-indulgent capitalism and traitor to the fatherland, Sergei Diaghilev. His influence on every branch of art has been extremely harmful, and nowhere more than in music, as Comrade Prokofiev now acknowledges. 'Modernism' - that delusive illusion that Diaghilev so relentlessly followed - is typical of the capricious pursuit of mere fashion that infects and degrades the whole capitalist world, which is in any case morally and aesthetically bankrupt. One cannot name a single capitalist composer whose music has not been corrupted by this 'form for form's sake' virus. That high priest of reactionary music Igor Stravinsky turns his hand to a Mass in the same affected style he employs for writing circus music. Olivier Messaien, latest 'genius' from France, is a cacophonous apologist for Roman Catholic medievalism. The contemporary operas of Alban Berg, Menotti and the Englishman Britten shamelessly glorify individualism and sexual perversion with their willful distortions of 'natural' melody. Though we should not like to think that any of our countrymen were tempted to follow such immoral paths, Central Committee has been disturbed to note imitation of these negative traits in the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Their infatuation with decadent themes such as mysticism and other anti-progressive subjects has now become almost routine. Worse, such formalistic distortions are strongly reflected in the education of young composers in some conservatories, particularly Moscow where Comrades Shostakovich and Miaskovsky are Professors and the Director is Comrade Shebalin! The Central Committee notes an equally intolerable situation in musical criticism. Our critics have lost the most important quality of progressive analysis, and have ceased to exhort composers to strive for the highest ideals of realistic democratic art. Soviet composers must reject as useless and harmful garbage all the relics of bourgeois 'form for form's sake' musical art. They must understand that creation of only high-quality works in the domain of opera, symphonic music, song-writing, choral and dance music is only made possible by following the principles of Socialist realism. Our duty is to mobilize all our creative strength and to give a worthy response, in shortest possible time, to this appeal of our Party, and to appeal of our great leader Comrade Stalin!!
CHAIRMAN With these important truths ringing in our ears, let us now hear what Comrade Shostakovich has to say. I ask you, Comrades, to hear him without vocal expressions of that anger you may justifiably feel at his excesses.
SHOSTAKOVICH I thank you Comrade Chairman, fellow Comrades, Honored Guests. As we look back on the short history of New Soviet Art it is obvious that every time the Party assists a creative artist by pointing out where he has deviated there is a beneficial result not only for the individual but for all other artists, who are thereby obliged to pay heed to their own aberrations. All of us recognize that the Central Committee's directives are inspired solely by a desire to enhance the quality and relevance of Soviet socialist art. [At this point in the broadcast transcription the speech fades out to be replaced by an internal monologue. I have not included it here because it is speculation that deviates from the course of the actual meeting. The essence of the monologue ;however, is that much of Shostakovich's troubles are related to the fact that his work overshadows that of his comrades who are more in line with party dogma and who are more connected to the power structure of Stalinist Russia.]
Shostakovich continues after the internal monologue: In 1936 when Pravda severely criticized my opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and pointed out the errors of 'form for form's sake' I was deeply affected, and devoted a great deal of thought to studying what the Soviet people required of me. In the years that followed I supposed that I had been successful in striving to provide an expression for the great aspirations of our whole country and its people. I considered that I had been successful in eradicating the grossest errors mentioned in the Pravda article - the over-complex idiom and 'form for form's sake' elaboration of motifs. Although that criticism was severe I acknowledged its justice, and was therefore all the more determined to study our musical heritage, and took particular pleasure and interest in editing and re-orchestrating Boris Godunov Since Lady Macbeth I thought that I had succeeded in developing a personal idiom which adhered to the wise directives of the voice of the Soviet people, and which would have earned me their acclaim. In reviewing my compositional method I see now that I was mistaken and had clearly underestimated my need for artistic correction. There were negative characteristics in my musical processes which have increasingly manifested themselves in recent compositions inspired by 'form for form's sake' alone, and the more this was the case the more incomprehensible I became to the Soviet people. So now, heeding the condemnation of my music issued by the Party through the Central Committee, which itself represents the authentic voice of our nation, I acknowledge rightness of the Party's judgment and its concern for my musical welfare and that of all Soviet art. In particular, I acknowledge the lamentable absence of genuine folk art in many of my works. Although in my Poem of the Fatherland I was attempting to follow the Party's advice, I readily acknowledge that it was not successful. I am now therefore more than ever determined to work on the musical depiction of images of the heroic Soviet peoples, from the correct ideological standpoint, and am presently engaged in writing music for the film Young Guard. I hope also to make an opera on the same subject worthy of the acceptance of all the nation. I may perhaps mention that some of my songs have attained a certain popularity, but now equipped with the guidance of the Central Committee I shall renew my efforts to create really good sons for massed singing. I have no doubt that Soviet music is on the threshold of a tremendous upswing as a result of the just and wise directives of the Central Committee, and I appeal to all my fellow composers to redouble their efforts to realize this noteworthy resolution.
CHAIRMAN I am sure we all accept the spontaneous sincerity and good faith of Comrade Shostakovich's declaration. I would now like to ask him and Comrades Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Miaskovsky to read the resolution drawn up by Committee of Composers Union before we vote on it. At this point the aforementioned persons recite in unison the resolution of the Central Committee to be good little composers of nice music for the Soviet people.
Perhaps it would help us to understand the controversy specifically surrounding Lady Macbeth by taking a look at the literary source from which the libretto was adapted and briefly analyze the ways in which it was altered as well as reviewing the finished libretto itself to see what may have been so offensive. As mentioned in the introduction, Lady Macbeth (actually the full title was "The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District") was a short story written by Nikolai Leskov. It was first published in an 1865 edition of Dostoevskys's literary journal Epokha. In short, the story is of a young woman, Katerina, who comes from an impoverished family to be married to a wealthy member of the merchant class. This marriage; however, is an unhappy one and after a series of tragic incidents she ends up jumping off a bridge in Siberia to drown herself in an icy river.
The alterations that D.S. , with the collaboration of the Leningrad playwright Alexander Preis, took from the original story to create the libretto are interesting because they can be viewed in a variety of ways. Apparently the intention of D.S. was primarily to avoid portraying Katerina as "positive personality", as someone we should feel sorry for but rather someone we feel ambivalence toward. Interestingly enough this is in direct conflict with one of the things that he was accused of by the Communist Party, which was portraying Katerina as a courageous heroines who takes action against her oppressors by murdering them. The following is a list of changes made to the original story from which the libretto came: (3)
In addition to these alterations, D.S. includes incidences with a "drunken peasant informer", "an idle and corrupt police force", "a lecherous priest and bibulous wedding guests". D.S. himself explained part of the alterations with the following statement:
In Lady Macbeth I wanted to unmask reality and to arouse a feeling of hatred for the tyrannical and humiliating atmosphere in a Russian merchant's household...Through Sergei's handsome, gallant exterior the future kulak (4) healthy old man, a boss and kulak. ... Zinovi Borisovich on the other hand is a pitiful man, rather like the frog that "imagines itself puffed up to the size of an ox."
The idea of using various forms of art to reveal or unmask certain personality types that are considered an enemy of the people was common in Stalin's Russia. This technique of "unmasking" (razoblachine) was particularly common in Soviet film of the 20s and it may be interesting to note that D.S. found a 1927 film production of Lady Macbeth to be "vivid and engrossing." However it is very difficult if not impossible to determine exactly what D.S.'s intentions were. Was he supporting and promoting Communist party policies and the extermination of the kulaks as a class? As odd as this view may seem some people notably Richard Taruskin in his article "The Opera and the Dictator: the peculiar martyrdom of Dimitri Shostakovich," (The New Republic, March 20th 1989, pp. 34-40) propose that the opera is "a profoundly inhumane work of art through which by various means he dehumanizes his heroine's persecutors and victims so as to perpetrate the colossal moral inversion of legitimizing her murders." Taruskin goes on to add, "Lady Macbeth is a politically-motivated travesty which presents all of its cast except Katerina as 'class enemies' to be despised and destroyed. Its chilling treatment of the victims amounts to a justification of genocide." Is that really possible, or was he using Lady Macbeth as a cover to symbolize the dehumanizing consequences of oppression? We may never really know exactly what his intentions were since one could readily interpret the evidence to support either view.
Whatever his intentions were, the resulting libretto is blunt and even occasionally grotesque. I for one was actually a little shocked the first time I read through the libretto by its almost comical directness .Take for instance Boris's "explanation" in Scene four of what he would do to Katerina if he were only ten years younger. BORIS-There's a light in the window...Seems she can't sleep; of course, she's a young woman; hot-blooded too, and there's no one to console her...Ah! Now if I were younger, just ten years or so, what I'd do! She'd have it hot from me; hot, yes, by God, so hot, it'd even be good enough for her! A healthy woman like that, and no man around, no man: it's dull for a woman without a man. I'll go and see her, yes, I will! Boris's rantings are preceded a scene earlierby Katerina's passionate aria of thinly veiled carnal desires.
KATERINA -The foal runs after the filly, the tom-cat seeks the female, the dove hastens to his mate, but no one hurries to me. The wind caresses the birch tree and the sun warms it with his heat, for everyone there's a smile from somewhere, but no one will come to me, no one will put his hand round my waist, no one will press his lips to mine, no one will stroke my white breast, no one will tire me out with passionate embraces... It is at this point that Sergei visits Katerina under the false pretext of wanting to borrow some books for reading. Needless to say he has other designs in mind and given Katerina's state of mind as evidenced by her aria she quickly succumbs to the opportunity of reckless passion with the handsome young house servant.
It is quite easy to imagine that such textually graphic scenes would easily offend the "sensibilities" of "our great leader and teacher" (Stalin) to the point of him walking out of a 1936 Bolshoy production of the opera. Of course it was mere coincidence that the following day (January 28, 1936) Pravda printed the now infamous article, "Chaos instead of music," in which the opera was outright condemned. Shostakovich's growing fame in the West worked against him profoundly because the opera "tickled the perverted tastes of the bourgeois audience by its jittery, noisy and neurotic music." He was further criticized for turning a murderess into a heroine and for promoting a "neutral and confused political ideology."
The summary of a work whose structural complexities are equaled only by the intricacies of the political controversy surrounding its existence is daunting. Nevertheless after careful consideration, a few basic propositions can be put forth. Lady Macbeth is one of the all time masterpieces of the Twentieth Century repertoire, and not just in the world of opera but as a stand-alone symphonic work of tremendous emotional depth. It is accessible to those of us who find the expressionistic works of a man like Schoenberg too stark and distant yet remains interesting and fresh to those of us who require a regular good kick in the pants. As far as politics are concerned, it appears as though Shostakovich has suffered at the hands of historical revisionism. Based on everything that he canbe proven to have ever said or written, Shostakovich was a lifelong Socialist who joined the Communist party in 1960 (long after the friction that arouse from Lady Macbeth.) He admired Lenin and the principals of the Revolution. He hated Stalin and harbored no great love for bureaucrats either. Many of his works including symphonies 2,3,7,11, and 12 out of a total of 15 are dedicated to the heroic accomplishments of the Soviet people and despite a few brief run-ins with the powers that be, he was by far the most often, and most highly, officially honored member of the Soviet musical establishment. Finally ,and perhaps most importantly, if it is true that Shostakovich was discouraged to write any further operas because of his official political castigation, one can only imagine what masterpieces were summarily put to death along with the millions of people who died in Stalin's purges.