The case of Dmitri Shostakovitch, por Nicolas Nabokov (4 de 6)

(Cuarta parte del artículo sobre Shostakovich escrito por Nicolas Nabokov en 1943 para la revista Harpers).

The musical production of Dmitri Shostakovitch can be conveniently divided into two periods. The first began in 1927, following his graduation from the Conservatory, and lasted until 1936 or, more precisely, January 28, 1936, when the now famous incident concerning his opera, “Lady Macbeth from the District of Mzensk,” occurred. Then came a lapse of almost two years when Shostakovitch disappeared from the horizon of Russian artistic life. During these two years he wrote two new symphonies, his Fourth and Fifth, and the latter opened the door back to public favor, and marked the beginning of the second period, when, “reformed” and “rehabilitated,” he gradually climbed to his present pinnacle of leadership.

The incident of “Lady Macbeth” has therefore a considerable significance and, although it has already been mentioned in the American press, it cannot be avoided here. Briefly this is what happened. During the years 1930-1932 Shostakovitch wrote an opera on a story by a Russian writer of the nineteenth century, Lesskov, called “Lady Macbeth from the District of Mzensk.” It is a naturalistic and lurid story about a provincial, middle-class woman whose lust and boredom drive her to a series of cold-blooded murders and finally land her and her unfaithful lover in Siberia. Shostakovitch tried to give the story a Marxian twist by making the “heroine” a victim of the “decadent and foul bourgeois milieu.”

The music of the opera is neither daring nor particularly new. It sounds very much like many naturalistic Russian operas written in the eighties and now happily forgotten. True enough, it is more lively; it has some (not too successful) attempts at bitter “class satire” and “class tragedy”; it has also a few attractively lyrical melodies both in the choruses and in the arias; but on the whole it is old-fashioned, provincial, and unimaginative. The musical language in which it is written is simple enough, but somehow not quite coherent and totally lacking in unity. Pieces of various styles are strung together rather loosely, and the whole opera gives the impression of hasty and somewhat careless workmanship. Thus, for instance, the satirical passages and some of the polyphonic developments are full of the most obnoxious tricks of the style moderne of the twenties (dissonant superimposition of chords, “dislocated joints” in the melodic line, and “rhythmical paranoia,” or senseless repetition of a metrical figure–all unhappy products of the “modern” musical mind), while the lyrical arias and choruses reflect either Tchaikovsky or Mussorgsky. The realism or naturalism of the piece goes too far and at times it is plainly vulgar and pornographic. Most of the “class satire” is as unconvincing as the “Wooden Soldiers” of the late “Chauve-Souris.”

The opera was duly produced in both Russian capitals in 1934 and was hailed as a “great masterpiece,” the “work of a genius,” “the first monumental work of Soviet musical culture.” As such it was exported abroad and produced in the United States under Artur Rodzinski in Cleveland and New York. In New York it created a minor scandal and stirred up a great deal of discussion (chiefly because of the excessive musical realism of a bedroom love scene) which, coupled with the previous success of the First Symphony, “made” Shostakovitch.

For a time it looked as if the gods were favorably inclined to the young composer. But suddenly the storm broke loose. Messrs. Stalin and Molotov visited a performance of “Lady Macbeth” in Moscow in the middle of January, 1937. As a result of this visit a vitriolic article appeared in the Pravda on January 28, 1937, condemning Shostakovitch’s opera as “disorder instead of music” and arguing that “mad rhythms” and a “confused flow of sound” competed to produce a baffling effect upon the innocent audience. Shostakovitch was said to be “misled by decadent bourgeois tendencies,” and although a “gifted composer,” was accused of “intentionally turning everything upside down” and writing “neurotic, hysterical, epileptic music influenced by American jazz.” This first attack on Shostakovitch was followed by a second one, which appeared in the same paper a few days later and in which his new ballet, “The Limpid Brook,” was taken to task in the same way.

In terms of Russian life all this sounded like an artistic death warrant; and such it was taken to be by the obliging critics and gentlemen of the Soviet press (often the same ones who had previously praised Shostakovitch as the great Russian genius). The slander of Shostakovitch in the press actually became so thick that the same official powers which had ordered the condemnation of his opera had to give a “hands off Shostakovitch” order. Shostakovitch was declared to have been “misled,” “corrupted by Western bourgeois tendencies,” but to be “gifted enough” to rehabilitate himself in the future and thus “not past hope.” Two years later the “reformed” composer was returned to the Russian public as an officially changed man, one who had seen his faults and corrected them.

The whole story seems quite unreal now, particularly in view of the present circumstances. Yet it throws an interesting light upon the birth pangs of Soviet Russian art, and is especially significant for the development of Shostakovitch as a musician. These two painful years of banishment from public life were years of “inner self-criticism” (as the Soviet press calls it) during which he simplified his art still farther and all of his original musical thinking was definitely swallowed up by the “service to the cause.”