Reminder: Review Susan Morse, "Analyzing Music" in Core Course Guide and Writer's Handbook, 127-31

 

"Designers, the challenges are getting tougher."

Challenge 4. Due 8:15AM, Wednesday, February 20. Write a song that is relevant to the presidential campaign of 2008. Either take a popular song and set words to it; or if you are really musically talented, you can compose your own song. Send me the music or a link to a music download (or the name of the song you are using, I may well not know it, but I can post the name of the song with the words and surely others will know the song) and the words. So the format would be:

  1. Title of your song
  2. Music to which its sung (name of the song from which you are taking the music, with or without a link to the music or an mp3 file
  3. Lyrics you've written.

IMPORTANT: If you send me a Word file, do not send a .docx file. You have a more recent version of Word than I do, and I won't be able to open it. Save your file in a .doc format.

For some example, check out the YouTube videos of the Capitol Steps.And more from the Capitol Steps with references to the current political campaign.
Tom Lehrer writes his own music, but he is another good example of light, cabaret-like political music

 

Today, we go to the opera. If you are interested in this quite amazing multi-media art form, considering seeing a simulcast production, live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, this winter or spring. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is pretty bleak. The action and the music can be violent. See what else there is out there. For more information, to go Got Opera?

 

Important Note: I emphasized that historians often need to know languages other than English. They do. But you don't in order to write a really good research paper in the spring on places where people don't speak English. You will find that there are TONS of translated primary sources and secondary sources in English, and there will be much for you to work with. If you wanted to go on to study a specific country at the post-graduate level, then you'd need the language. For the project you'll do in the spring, you can absolutely, positively work with materials in translation. I don't know Russian, but I based my lecture on the scholarship of people who do.

 

Screenings of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District:


Tue, Feb 12, 3:00-6:00 HH 254 (max cap 50)
Tue, Feb 12, 7:30-10:20pm HH 254 (max cap 50)
Wed, Feb 13, 2:00-5:00, HSLH 100A (max cap 343)
Thu, Feb 14, 2:00-5:00, HH 108 (max cap 25) (Make a date for Valentine's Day!)
Fri, Feb 15, 2:00-5:00, HSLH 100A (max cap 343)

This week, we shift gears. We move to the Soviet Union and opera. In preparation, BEFORE you see the production video of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District:

1. Download the study questions and read them carefully.
2. Read the libretto--in the CR--BEFORE you go to see the film. Get a mental picture of the opera's action in your mind BEFORE you see how the director presents it in the production you'll see.
3. Apply the skills you've acquired with the Midsummer Night's Dream assignment and think critically about the staging decisions the director has made. What works? What doesn't? What would you do differently?
4. If you have never seen an opera before, don't make this your first and last. I have chosen Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District because it raises very interesting questions about whether makers are always doers. But both the brutality of the story and the music that accompanies it are exceptional. If Shostakovich isn't your cup of tea, make sure to give opera a second chance. And I'll follow Shostakovich with Gerorge Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, pure "ear candy" after Shostakovich.

 

I said all this in the first lecture this week. I'm not going to repeat it here, but if you missed the lecture, read this. It is importanbt.

Some professorial (not parental) warnings about Shostakovich and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District :

1. If Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had an MPAA Rating, it would probably be R. There are scenes of violence and sexuality that may be disturbing to some viewers. When you watch the film of the staged production, consider the questions I've asked above. In addition, ask yourself why Shostakovich would choose to portray such violence and sexuality. What aesthetic choices did Shostakovich make? Why do you think he made them?

(Sex is hardly new in the course: What was Bottom dreaming about? What of Chloris into Flora and all of that hot air? What of Venus as the union of sea and sky and that bubbling foam (I won't be forgetting that soon)? How about the repressed sex in Jane Austen? Or how about Toni Morrisson? And what of the "desexualized sensuality" of the Nazi aesthetic. The Core Course has asked you more than once to think about how to represent sex and sexuality. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is one more example.)

2. And apply the skills you've acquired. The production video of the opera you will see is one interpretation of what Shostakovich "made." I had three options (real world constraints of what's available on video):

  • Opera as movie with a much younger Katerina (dubbed), hottie Sergei (also dubbed), not a staged production. I wanted you to see a staged production so you could think about the differences between what you can do in a film and what you can do on a stage.
  • Opera on stage, but set in Soviet Russia under Stalin's rule, villagers in Red Army uniforms, a staging intended to make Shostakovich's opera a critique of Stalinism (an interpretation I think is hard to substantiate).
  • Opera set on stage but in no specific time or place. This is the one you'll see.

You have thought a lot about staging decisions in your papers on Midsummer Night's Dream. What decisions has Martin Kušej, the director, made? What interpretation does he present?

NOTE: I would stage it very, very differently. By thinking critically about Kušej's interpretation, I was better formulate and articulate my own interpretation. And in my second lecture on Shostakovich, I'll take you through the steps that get me to that interpretation. Take Kušej as a point of reference. You may love his decisions, but you don't have to. And arguing with him will allow you to reach your own conclusions about what Shostakovich sought to achieve. (And in the second year of this HCC cycle, I'm asking for a budget of $8 Million to produce Lady Macbeth the right way.)

 

 

Note: Once again, I was true to the Core Course mantra: Revise, Revise, Revise. The version on the screen will diverge some from the version in the printer-friendly version on the webpage.

 

Finding the Right Pitch under Stalin

Two big moves this week:

  • Eastward, from Germany to the Soviet Union
  • From art to music (forms of cultural expression, the novel, the play, art, the cabaret song, the illustrated press, film, now we're adding one more)
  • So why Shostakovich?
    • Connections: How do Communists make art? What are the possibilities and limitations of makers who want to contribute to revolution?
    • Shostakovich is a big deal: One of the most famous Russian composers. HCC hits some high points (Austen, Morrison, Shakespeare, Botticelli, Brecht, and yes, Shostakovich and Gershwin)
    • Another artist as maker/doer

But some continuities: Shostakovich is another maker who believes he is also a doer

Monday/Tuesday: What constituted a National Socialist aesthetic?

Wednesday/Thursday: What constitutes a Soviet Communist aesthetic

Why opera?

  • My life and times with opera: You don't have to be born with it in your cradle to love it.
  • Slow progression: Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Wagner (in shrink wrap for 3 months), Handel, Monteverdi, Delibes, Massenet, Purcell, Britten, Shostakovich, Mussorsgsky, Prokofive, Tchaikovsky, and the list goes on and on...
  • So if you're new to this, I'm taking you from 0 to 75 in two lectures
  • Take time to go back, try other things, give opera a chance!

And a very brief history of opera

  • Opera as a social institution in late nineteenth/early twentieth century Europe
    • From monopoly of the court (16th-18th centuries) to a bourgeois cultural institution (19th century)
      • Nineteenth century as the triumph of the middle-class
      • New measures of social status, wealth, not birth
      • Self-assertion takes place in culture as well as economy and politics
      • Why is it the Claire Trevor School of the Arts? Why does the big Orange County performing arts complex have a Segestrom Hall? Why is there a Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the LA County Museum of Art?
      • Creating an ostensibly public space, open to all (who can pay)

Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg (opened in 1860)

    • The opera is a social space
    • Project Runway? The red carpet on Oscar night?
    • Huge central staircases provide more places to see and be seen
    • Interior set up so that you can see other people in the audience as much as what's on stage
    • And do the business of the middle class
    • Opera as a language of nationalism
      • Giuseppe Verdi in Italy
      • Richard Wagner and music for a German nation
      • Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Russia

Any of these composers--and there are many, many more, or one of the operas they composed would be a great focus for a research project. You could also look at the problem of adaptation. Verdi composes an opera based on Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth. Carmen is based on a page-turning popular novel. Puccini's Madama Butterfly is based on a novel that becomes a play. Or what of musical comedies? South Pacific comes from a collection of short stories. Or what of a musical that comes from an opera? Did you know that Rent was stolen from Puccini's La Bohčme.

  • You don't have to go to opera to know about opera:The money's in sales of the score and libretti
  • But opera is also an international language of the middle class
  • And opera is business: Commodification of culture ("We don't have the Medicis, we only have the bottom line." Quote from record producer executive at the Grammy Awards.)
  • It’s in this form that opera has extraordinarily wide circulation, people who can’t afford the ticket price can afford the sheet music.
  • More people hum the tunes than sit in big opera houses
  • Not all operas are like Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenstk District
  • Give opera a chance (he said a second time)!
  • You know more opera than you may think:

Verdi's Rigoletto

Bizet's Carmen

Delibes' Lakme

Wagner's Valkyrie

And other forms of popular culture that draw on opera: Jonathan Larson's Rent is an adaptation of Puccini's La Bohčme

  • Opera often draws on good stories: Verdi does a Macbeth and an Otello, Benjamin Britten (British) does a Midsummer Night's Dream, Purcell does a Dido and Aeneas
  • Other standard stories: Two pairs of lovers; love triangles; love, betrayal abandonment; lovers have fun and games
    • Usually a bass/baritone and a tenor, a soprano and a mezzo
    • The lead woman either gets married or murdered (or dies of turberculosis)

Opera Between the First and Second World Wars

  • Remember Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box? Also an opera: Alban Berg's Lulu
  • Remember Arnold Schoenberg's Variations? He is also a composer of opera in the 1920s
  • And remember how the Nazis hate that American culture that comes into Germany? Austrian born Ernst Krenek composes a jazz opera called Johnny spielt auf (Johnny really plays)
  • All of these operas will be on the list of "degenerate music"
  • Experimentation with atonality, intentional dissonance, modernity in music means pushing the envelope of what comes out of the nineteenth century
  • This is also part of the background for Shostakovich

Opera is an extraordinarily extravagant art form

  • Talk about your mixed media?
  • Singers who can act
  • Actors who can sing
  • Voices that are not miked and make it to the top of the third balcony
  • Complicated sets and costumes
  • A full orchestra
  • It's more about the music than the words: Try setting Theseus and Hippolyta's exchange on the meaning of theater to music. Good poetry may not make a great libretto, even if Shakespeare can be the basis for good opera.
  • Everything is sung. In musical theater, the "book" is the play or story of the drama. It includes the spoken lines. The lyrics are what is sung. In musical theater, when spoken words can no longer express the emotion, you sing and/or dance. In opera, you sing all the time.
  • Opera as a really interesting form of cultural expression

[A note on disciplines: I am an historian, not a musicologist. I don't know a diminished seventh from a hole in the ground. What does a historian do with music? Stay tuned...]

No wonder the makers of the Russian Revolution take opera seriously, but can there be an opera that works for Communism?

Shostakovich provides an answer, but first... a little context

Remember the Bolshevik Revolution that so inspired the Spartacists? Remember the KPD's ties to Communism in the Soviet Union?

(I'll give you the context I think is essential for understanding where Shostakovich fits in, but by now, you know the Britannica on line would tell you much more. If you want to see those entries, I've made your life easier by attaching one for the Revolution and one for Stalin. You could skim to find out those topics about which you want to know more.)

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

Revolution in October 1918

This photograph was taken by an American photographer,Donald Thomson. This shot is from the February Revolution (the Russians were on a different calendar until the Bolshevik Revolution, thus Thomson's dates the events in March).

Lenin returns in April, Bolshevik Revolution is in October. The depiction of Lenin below is a good example of Socialist Realism, the aesthetic framework in which Shostakovich will create his opera.

Rule of the Communist party

My thanks to the student who called my attention to this image. She too has a sense of humor. Socialis Realist art? NOT.

Creation of Third International/Communist International

This is the one to which German Communist party belongs

Remember the hammer from the first lecture?

V.I. Lenin dead in 1924; struggle over succession. Lenin's tomb in Red Square in Moscow. Note the flat roof!

The commodification of memory: Lenin as postcard, or "My parents went to Moscow and all I got was this crummy postcard."

Josef Stalin emerges victorious (more Socialist Realism)

 

  • End of belief in international revolution, first "Socialism in One Country"
  • Rapid industrialization at the expense of the countryside
  • Collectivization of agriculture
  • Stalin's regime based on repression
  • But just as in Hitler's Germany, carrots accompany sticks
  • Stalin in 1935: "life has become better, life has become more joyful"
  • Measured how?
  • Eliminating class privilege
  • Expanded opportunities for working-class people
  • Expanded opportunities in particular for women

Period of experimentation in the arts in early 1920s, again in late 1920s

  • Research alert: What kind of experimentation? How does innovative art in the Soviet Union compare with art in Germany? Was there mutual influence?

In 1920s, cultural experimentation. Remember Tatlin?

Tatlin's Model for a Monument to the Third International

El (Eliezer Markovich) Lissitzky, Red Wedge Drives out the Whites

Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, Ferdinand Crommelynk's The Magnanimous Cuckold

(and for more on Meyerhold's "constructivist theater")

Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet director (I've already said that Eisenstein would be a really interesting subject for a spring resarch paper. He makes many important movies in the 1920s and 1930s.)

 

(This is a joke)

 

Lyubov Popova: A revolutionary Project Runway? (Lyubov, you will have immunity for the next challenge.)

"Down with Domestic Slavery"

"Shockworker" (like the winners of the pins) who does more than s/he has to (note photomontage technique)

  • And in the late 1920s,"Shock Workers of Culture" and a "Cultural Revolution"
  • Everyone an artist
  • Agitprop Brigades, telling it like it is
  • Disdain for bourgeois cultural forms
  • Celebration of "folk" traditions
  • Critique of western influences

But by early 1930s, move to Socialist Realism

  • Clear, accessible, didactic aesthetic
  • Parallels in case of German Communist party and its critique of Grosz
  • Don't muddy the message
  • Uplifting, positive images, celebration of Soviet accomplishment
  • Socialist Realism in the Arts
  • Targeted appeals to workers
  • Targeted appeals to women (and keep these images in mind while you're watching Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Do you think any of these women killed their father-in-law? helped kill their husband? killed another woman? committed suicide?)
  • Training professional artists
  • And making the "classics" available to everyone
  • Why shouldn't workers hear Tchaikovsky?
  • The right sort of music

Ivan Dzerzhinsky. Quiet Flows the Don

"Border to Border"

From border unto border
From ocean unto ocean
Arise, triumphant, the laboring folk
The brave Russian folk

Yes, ready for sorrow
And ready to suffer
Yes, ready to fight ‘til death

A fine lot these young fellows
Life as they desire
They build anew
Will be worthwhile
They’re real people
Worthwhile people in all ways

From Border unto Border
They go,
They go,
They go

($10 or a really cool Soviet pin to anyone who can find such a hummable tune in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District)

And Paul Robeson singing the Soviet National Anthem
And in Russian

So where does Shostakovich fit into this story?

  • Born in 1906: Not even a teenager at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution
  • (Self-production: I was there in April 1917!)
  • Studies piano and composition in Petrograd (aka St. Petersburg, Leningrad)
  • Graduation piece when he is twenty
  • Symphony 1, Second Movement

(Want to see a young Shostakovich tickling the ivories? I think this clip is not correctly dated, but that's the problem with YouTube, an interesting but unreliable source.)

  • During the Russian "Civil War," tours to perform for the troops in the Red Army
  • Symphonies dedicated to October and May 1 (October, as in October or Bolshevik Revolution, May 1, as in international day of the working class)
  • Symphony 2, October
  • Shostakovich knows which way the wind is blowing and he supports the revolution
  • Hero of the "Cultural Revolution"
  • Works on comical/political theatrical/musical production: "Mr Beat-the-Bourgeois"
  • "Song of the Counterplan": Music for movie about workers who come up with a better way to fulfill the Five Year Plan (everybody's singing it!)
  • But the winds are shifting: Away from the "Cultural Revolution" toward "Socialism Realism"
  • Shostakovich is no fool, and he is also at the top of his game

Goes for an opera--a classical form--that will be appropriate to the glorious new day of Soviet Communism!

Making the best of high culture accessible to the masses

Red Guards at the Czar's Winter Palace in 1917: Shouldn't workers who make a revolution also get to sit in the opera house?

Fine art should not be the privilege of the ruling elite

His answer: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

  • Premiers in 1934 in Moscow (but in a theater that was not an opera house) and Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Petrograd in World War I, Leningrad, St. Petersburg today)
  • Hailed as a "triumph of musical theater"
  • By late 1935, 94 performances in Moscow, more than 80 in Leningrad (this is huge for an opera)
  • Dmitri is ready for an opera house in Moscow.... If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere!

So why did Comrade Stalin think that Shostakovich was singing the wrong tune?

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