This version may diverge from the version projected in
class. Revise, revise, revise is the mantral of the Humanities Core Course for
instructors and students alike.
Shostakovich and Comrade
Stalin: What did Dmitri get wrong (and why wasn't it a fatal error)?
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Announcement: UCI students in “Ubu Roi.” This was a
pre-World War I play that anticipated some of the qualities of the Dadaist
movement. It is being performed in the Little Theater in the UCI Arts complex.
February 21, 22, and 23 at 8PM, also Feb. 23 at 2 PM. Cost, only $5. Take
advantage of the really terrific theater that is available right here on
campus!
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THE LAST CHALLENGE!!! 5. Due 8:15 AM,
Wednesday, February 27. Identify a song that has a clear political message.
Type out or cut and paste the lyrics and send them to me with the title of
the song. That's the basic challenge. If you want to go farther, and if you
have the song as an mp3 file, tell me how I can get a copy (either you could
lend me a zip drive or burn it on a CD-Rom or email it). Or if the music is
downloadable somewhere on the web, send me the url. If the lyrics are
difficult to understand (or in a language other than English), please write
them out or provide a translation. 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. |
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Looking
ahead to Porgy and Bess. When you watch the DVD, hit libretto in the
set-up menu. This will give you subtitles. Even though it's in English, it's
sometimes hard to understand the words. |
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For
the final paper this quarter, remember: The articles from the New York
Times in the Library Discovery Task will help you with the paper. They
are primary sources that you can incorporate into your argument. The Discovery
Task asks you to find 3 articles. Two are reviews of the opera. One is a
response written by Gershwin. All three will be of use to you in writing the
final paper this quarter. |
When we last left our
star composer... (and check him out at the keyboard on YouTube)
Opening Night in
- January 1936, Stalin in the audience
- Shostakovich prepares his speech to accept
Stalin's praise, but instead...
What went wrong? Why did
he think he was singing with the Socialist Realist chorus?
- Success of the opera before it hits the
- But Shostakovich also thinks he got it
right: Why?
- Source of Shostakovich's story: Nikolai
Leskov (1831-95)
- (Want to read the short story? It's here as a .pdf file.)
- Leskov is realist knowledge: Reveal the
realities of harsh life in countryside in Imperial Russia; journalistic
background attunes him to (click here for a brief bio)
- Short story has a second life in 1920s;
this is the world the revolution has swept away
- It's not unusual for an opera composer to
turn to novels or plays for the basis of an opera
- Carmen (Bizet)
- Madama Butterfly (Puccini)
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But Shostakovich makes
some key changes in Leskov's drama: Getting on the same page with Socialist
Realism
Shostakovich: "As a
Soviet composer, I determined to preserve the strength of Leskov’s novel, and
yet, approaching it critically, to interpret its events from our modern point
of view.”
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Leskov |
Shostakovich |
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Set
in the middle of nowhere, merchant class at the center of backward agrarian
society |
Remains
the same |
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Not
much at all to like about Katerina, she's oppressed but she's completely
unsympathetic |
Katerina
as proto-feminist? Act I, scene in the bath-house: |
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Father-in-law
is eighty, brutal, but not lecherous |
Father-in-law
is younger and also lusts after Katerina |
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Katerina
and Sergei whack father-in-law |
Whacking
remains the same |
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Katerina
and Sergei whack Katerina's husband, Katerina splits his head open with a
candlestick |
Katerina
helps Sergei kill her husband but Sergei does the deed (the bloody spike heel
in the version you saw) |
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Katerina
is pregnant from Sergei |
No
pregnancy |
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Nephew
appears to lay claims to the business; Sergei and Katerina whack him |
No
nephew |
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They
go to |
No
child left behind (a subtle play on words for those who think about public
education, my joke, not Shostakovich's) |
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Katerina's
story is told by a narrator; we never hear her voice |
Katerina
is the only melodic voice in the opera, we see her in action, not mediated by
the narrator |
What differences do
these differences make?
- Katerina moves from oppressed woman who
becomes whacko murderess to woman seeking to escape the oppression of
backward Tsarist society
- Katerina clings to Sergei because in
Tsarist society, she has no other option
- Conscious choice to omit murder of nephew
- And she's not a "unnatural"
mother: Doesn't abandon a child to go
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Shostakovich
wants Katerina to be “clever, gifted and interesting. Set by fate in gloomy,
miserable surroundings, belonging to a merchant class which is hard, greedy
and ‘small,’ her life is sorrowful and pitiful.” |
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A
friend of Shostakovich who offers praise: "The opera should not be
called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District but either Juliet of
Mtsensk District or Desdemona of Mtsensk, since Lady Macbeth is an
energetic woman. But it's the other way around in your opera; this is a soft,
suffering woman who arouses no terror but sympathy, pity, kindly
feelings." |
Meaning conveyed not
just by the words but also by the music
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Shostakovich:
"Opera is above all a vocal production... in opera music should play the
principal and deciding role... [Katerina's] musical language is shaped
completely by my idea that she must by every means evoke sympathy. In her
music there are a tender and warm lyricism, a sincere, profound sorrow in
suffering, and also a joy in moments of happiness. The musical language given
to Ekaterina Lvovna has been designed for the one purpose of justifying this
criminal." |
- Act I, Scene 1, We meet Katerina, (CR, 135, "Oh, I don't feel
like sleep any more, but I'll try") and that night, before Sergei comes to her room (Act I, Scene III)
(CR, 144, "Time for bed. The day is over, time for bed, time for bed.
I've no one to talk to, oh, how boring it is, how boring."
- May not sound all
that melodic to you, but contrast it with the harshness, nervousness,
brutality of much of the rest of the music
- When the men appear, things get unruly, and
the music does too... Act I, Scene 2, in the bath house with Aksinya (CR, 139)
- Or when Sergei appears at Katerina's house, Act I, Scene III,
she loses her lyricism (Cr, 145, K: Yes? S: Time for bed?)
- Men are also clowns and fools(Act III,
Scene 7)--the jolly policemen (CR, 165, "The police were
formed, so we are told/when the Pharaohs ruled in days of old.."
Policemen: But for all our application/We receive but tribulation.")
- The one other place melody returns: The
soul of the Russian people (narod in Russian) Convict and Chorus in Act IV (Scene Nine, CR, 172,
"Verst after verst, one by one, creeps by in an endless procession...
Ah, rod, where the chains have been dragging/ where bones of the dead are
still lying/where blood and sweat have been flowing..")
- The message:
- Women are
oppressed under the old regime
- Even women who
recognize their oppression have few options
- Men are jerks:
- Wimps like Zinovy
- Lecherous like
Boris
- Abusive like
Sergei
- Fools like the
Peasant, the Priest, and the Policemen
- Half-baked
socialists (awaiting the coming of Lenin!) like the teacher
- Salvation lies in
the oppressed Narod (people in Russian), they too need forceful
leadership
- Leadership is on
its way--in 1917 (and in music like October and May, the symphonies
Shostakovich has composed)
- With the dawn of the Soviet era, things get
better and better... and everyone will get good music to sing.
- (Remember Stalin in 1935: "life has
become better, life has become more joyful.")
- Shostakovich thinks he's following the path
to the post-1932 Socialist Realist aesthetic
Why was Shostakovich
singing in the wrong key? What bugged Stalin? What did Shostakovich not
understand?
Answering this requires
hunting and gathering to establish the larger context (Remember hunting and
gathering?)
Important Context: Part
1
By mid-1930s, Stalin has
expressed clear opinions about the appropriate status of women
1917 Revolution promotes
female equality with men, but by late 1920s, Stalin moves in another direction
- What exists in the early 1920s:
- Alexandra
Kollontai, Zhenotedl, and Bolshevik programs to advance women's
emancipation
- 1917 law
introduces no fault divorce
- End of church
control of marriage
- International
Women's Day as annual holiday
- Greater access to
education and job training
- Provision of child
care
- Availability of
abortion
Much changes by the
early 1930s
Changes in definitions
of women's role under Stalin
- Women should carry the triple burden:
- Work outside
the home for wages
- Reproduction:
Giving birth to more comrades to build socialism
- Work inside the
home, raising children and creating domesticity
- The emphasis on motherhood
- 1936, new law
"On the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood"
- 1936 law
abolishing right to abortion
- Not about a
woman's right to choose
- Rather: Under
socialism, who would need an abortion? The collective will embrace and
care for all children.
Important Context: Part
2
Stalin also introduces
measures to "protect" Russians from western evils
- 1936 law denouncing pornography as
"western bourgeois decadence"
- In the
- In the West, sex
is perverted
- Intensified campaign against male
homosexuality (Another interesting parallel with National Socialism where
Paragraph 175 is made much stricter in 1935)
- Viewed as immoral
- Undermines drive
to increase population size
Important Context: Part
3
Shostakovich didn't get
the message on Socialist Realism
Maxim Gorky, First
All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934)
Soviet culture must
convey ideology and optimistic outlook of socialism
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More
information is a mouseclick away. I found this information on Socialist
Realism in "Seventeen Moments in Soviet History," an extremely
good website that is among those listed on the Web Resources page for the course. Here is part of what
an excellent historian of Soviet |
- It must be accessible; it must capture the
spirit of the people; and it must capture the spirit of the Communist
party
- Gorky: "Life, as asserted by socialist
realism, is deeds, creativeness, the aim of which is the uninterrupted
development of the priceless individual faculties of man, with a view to
his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and
longevity, for the supreme joy of living on an earth which, in conformity
with the steady growth of his requirements, he wishes to mould throughout
into a beautiful dwelling place for mankind, united into a single
family."
- The heroes of socialist realism are chaste,
patriotic, and loyal, and when they have sex it is heterosexual and
reproductive: (Remember the images we saw in the last lecture that you can
review here):
- And the women cheerfully bear the triple
burden: labor for wages, child-rearing, housework
Socialist Realism
presents the Soviet Woman
Probably none of these
women has whacked her husband and father-in-law and another woman and then
killed herself
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Pravda:
"A woman without children merits our pity, for she does not know the
full joy of life. Our Soviet women, full-bodied citizens of the freest
country in the world, have been given the bliss of motherhood." |
Filling in the context
helps us to understand Pravda's Denunciation of Lady Macbeth
Pravda's charges (and there's
much well-grounded speculation that Stalin has a direct hand in the article
that appears in the official party paper) (CR, 182-3):
- "the listener is shocked by deliberate
dissonance"
- "The singing on the stage is replaced
by shrieks."
- "If the composer chances to come upon
the path of a clear and simple moldy, he throws himself back into a
wilderness of musical chaos--in places becoming cacophony."
- "Passion is here supposed to be
expressed by noise."
- "Here is music turned deliberately
inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera,
or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular
musical language accessible to all."
- Music reflects same tendencies as
"'Leftist' Art' and "the most negative features of
'Meyerholdism'" (early Soviet theatrical director famous for innovative
approaches, you saw the stage set in the last lecture)
- "The power of good music to infect the
masses has been sacrificed to a petty bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to
create originality through cheap clowning."
- "Petty-bourgeois 'innovations' lead to
a break with real art, real science and real literature."
- Shostakovich "was forced to borrow
from jazz [=Western/decadent/bourgeois] its nervous, convulsive, and
spasmodic music in order to lend 'passion' to his characters."
- Not "socialist realism" but the
"coarsest kind of naturalism"
- "The predatory merchant woman who
scrambles into the possession of wealth through murder is pictured as some
kind of 'victim' of bourgeois society."
- "his music would reach only the effete
'formalists' [association of homosexuality and formalists] who had lost
all their wholesome taste"
- "He ignored the demand of Soviet
culture that all coarseness and savagery be abolished from every corner of
Soviet life."
- "The composer has tried, with all the
musical and dramatic means at his command, to arouse the sympathy of the
spectators for the coarse and vulgar inclinations and behavior of the
merchant woman Katerina Izmailov."
- "Lady Macbeth is having great success
with bourgeois audiences abroad. Is it not because the opera is non-political
and confusing that they praise it? Is it not explained by the fact that it
tickles the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic
music?"
And what really, really makes Stalin unhappy :
"And all of this is
coarse, primitive and vulgar. The music quacks, grunts, and growls, and
suffocates itself in order to express the love scenes as naturalistically as
possible. And 'love' is smeared al over the opera in the most vulgar manner.
The merchant's double bed occupies the central position on the stage. On this
bed all 'problems' are solved."
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Nazis have clear rules:
Communist, Jewish, African-American, pacifist, Socialist
For Stalin, a much more
arbitrary set of categories: Formalism is in the eyes of the beholder
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A parallel? The test for obscenity
is "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community
standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to
prurient interest." Roth v. … MR. JUSTICE STEWART
concluded that criminal obscenity laws are constitutionally limited under the
First and Fourteenth Amendments to "hard-core pornography."… I shall not today
attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced
within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in
intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture
involved in this case is not that. JACOBELLIS v. |
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Stalin knew it when he
saw it: With no clear road map, it's easy to go in the wrong direction
And for many of
Shostakovich's contemporaries, a wrong turn leads to show trials, purges from
Communist organizations, death or exile to the Gulag
Interlude:
Dramaturg: Helping a
Director Get the Meaning Right or Why my Lady Macbeth would not be
Martin Kušej's Lady Macbeth
- A thorough text/story analysis.
- Historical research of various sorts.
Applying what I learned
from thinking about Midsummer Night's Dream
- What do I want to convey?
- Why Shostakovich would think he'd written a
Socialist Realist opera and why Stalin disagreed
- Yes, it is about the music, yes, it is
about timeless emotions and human conflicts
- But it also is about Soviet Russia in the
1930s
- Some basic research we've already done. Now
let's compile a "visual glossary":
The
costume shop of the Mariinsky Theater in
From "The
Empire That Was" Exhibition at the Library of Congress
German ethnographic research from the late nineteenth century
My
Katerina
Russian
Merchant
Another take on the
father-in-law? (... just don't eat the mushrooms.) (This actually from another
production of Lady Macbeth. What doesn't work here for me is the
refrigerator. Why?)
The Milkman--but more
like the cart that would have carried Zinovy away
And
what if the guys in the village looked like this
or
this
And
the priest and the villagers like this
My steppe--not hell, but
birches (and it'll get cold soon so Sonyetka will want those stockings, there's
sure to be a river nearby too)
- Creating a visual glossary; creating
a sense of time and place
- Staging decisions communicate
interpretation and meaning
- My Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District is not timeless as it is for Kušej: How I stage it locates it
in time and space and gives it another set of meanings
- (Yes, yes, I know I'm an unimaginative
historian, but I confessed to that when I first hit the stage.)
Why did you watch one that doesn't tell the story I want to tell?
- Limited options (You've heard this before)
- Movie version,
innocent young Katerina, hottie Sergei, neither is singing (they're
dubbed), not on stage, and I wanted you to think about the possibilities
and limitations of a stage production. Also, the sex is x-rated. No
strobe light, you see way more than some people would want to see, and
you'd only talk about what you saw and little else.
- Staged version in
which the workmen appear in Communist Red Army uniforms. This version
tries to make the opera into an anti-Stalinist creation. It's Stalinism
that oppresses Katerina.
- This version:
Seeing a different interpretation helps me enormously to articulate my
own interpretation more clearly
- My version: Maybe a "challenge"
for next year's HCC students? Stage Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District?
Back to our boy, Dmitri:
The Last Act
How does he survive?
Fifth Symphony: As the
- Seventh Symphony, the "
- Stalin, you're great! Celebration of Stalin after
Second World War
But continued attempts
to use relaxation of cultural policies to address taboo topics, "Babi Yar" and Yevtushenko (some 33,000 Jews murdered
by Nazis, but Ukrainians are willing collaborators; tough topic for Soviets to
confront; Shostakovich tries in post-Stalin era; but it's still too much for
the Communist party and it's rarely performed) (This is the first movement)
A complex character:
Shostakovich, the dissident:
- The prison camp in Lady Macbeth =
the Gulag under Stalin; and even the Fifth and Seventh symphonies are
filled with a subversive musical irony
Shostakovich, the
spineless collaborator:
- He lives while his friends get
disappeared
- Stalin's purges
- The Tally
- 1,100 of 1,900 delegates to
Party Congress
- 110 of 139 Central Committee
members
- 60 of 65 corps commanders
- 91 of 101 other members of
high command
- Many non-Russians: Leaders in
- Victims in secret police
apparatus
- Those with contacts with
foreigners (people engaged in trade and the foreign office, this group
can also include artists, musicians, composers)
- Numbers are estimates:
100,000-900,000 in the GULAG; 2.5-5.5 million dead (low end estimate is 2
million)
- Shostakovich avoids this fate
Another interpretation?
Somewhere in between?
- Shostakovich as case study in the
challenges facing intellectuals who want to use their art to support a
better future but whose interpretation diverges from that of political
elites
- We miss much of that if we accept
Kušej's vision
- It's not easy to be an artist and a
revolutionary at the same time
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Looking ahead to Porgy
and Bess. When you watch the DVD, hit libretto in the set-up menu. This
will give you subtitles. Even though it's in English, it's sometimes hard to
understand the words. Listen to and watch Porgy and Bess before my
first lecture next Monday. Check out the music log for many different YouTube performances and
many different recordings of "Summertime." |
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