I
FOR A nineteenth-century author, one surefire device for exposing social ills was to plant a sweet innocent amid injustice and corruption and condemn the environment by contrast. By Charlie Chaplin’s day a hackneyed formula that could be redeemed only by farce, in its prime it had motivated works of seriousness and consequence. (Where would Dickens have been without it?) And though it was usually accomplished by transparent contrivance, the technique fueled the whole movement known as “realism.”
The classic example of the maneuver in Russian literature was Alexander Ostrovsky’s drama The Storm, first performed in 1859 and published the next year in the pages of the Muscovite (Moskvityanin), one of those legendary “thick journals” at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and politics, around which the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia led its busy life of the mind. Several operas have been based on it in addition to the one by Kashperov discussed in chapter 10; the most famous of them is Janácek’s Kát’a Kabanová (1921).
Ostrovsky’s heroine Katerina Kabanova, the wife of a merchant in an unnamed Volga town, is a sensitive, poetic nature, stifled by the prisonlike atmosphere of her husband’s family and particularly by her formidable mother-in-law. She becomes infatuated with another man, succumbs to her passion during her husband’s absence on a business trip, is forced by conscience to confess, and is driven by her shame to suicide. Her plight is epitomized in the scene of her husband’s departure, when, humiliated by her mother-in-law’s insinuations and torn by her guilty forebodings, she insists upon swearing a hysterical oath of fidelity the audience knows she will be unable to keep. After this harrowing scene one can only sympathize with Ostrovsky’s unhappy adulteress, however one feels about her crime.
And if, like every educated Russian since 1860, one has read Nikolai Dob-rolyubov’s famous critique of Ostrovsky’s play, one cannot think of Katerina without recalling the essay’s title: “A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom.” The precocious Dobrolyubov (1836-61), deified in the Soviet Union as a protorevolutionary “radical democrat,” interpreted the plays of Ostrovsky as a sustained yet futile indictment of patriarchal merchant-class mores. He hailed The Storm for at last embodying, in Katerina’s suicide, a gesture of protest against the “dark kingdom’s” backward, oppressive structure, and a prophecy of its fall. For him, as for Soviet readers and writers, Katerina Kabanova was an early martyr of the revolution.
Of a wholly different order from “realistic” plays and novels, which embodied (or were seen to embody) themes of social protest, was another favorite nineteenth-century genre, the horror story. At the beginning of the century such tales generally concerned the supernatural. By century’s end their subject matter had shifted to the opposite extreme: to “naturalism,” to lurid yet minutely dispassionate descriptions of aberrant human behavior, crime and brutality viewed as if under the pathologist’s microscope. Though it was part of the naturalist’s technique to appear to take no sides, in fact the horror story tended tacitly to condemn those who upset the established order, natural (Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) or social (the novels of Zola). This genre had nothing—even less than nothing—to do with protest.
An early Russian classic of naturalism was Nikolai Leskov’s famous “sketch” of ungovernable passion and mayhem, first published in 1865 in Epokha, Dostoyevsky’s own thick journal, under the title “The Lady Macbeth of Our District.” On the work’s republication as a book, the district was specified—Mtsensk, in South-Central Russia (Oryol Province), about as close to the middle of nowhere as one could get in a country that had more “nowhere” than any other. The plot shares a number of striking surface features with Ostrovsky’s Storm. The title character is another childless merchant wife named Katerina, whose life is made miserable by a despotic in-law, and who is left behind when her husband takes a business trip. In the grip of boredom and frustration she too takes a lover.
But Katerina Izmailova does not confess. Rather, she is found out, and by none other than her carping father-in-law. To avoid punishment she murders him. Her husband returns. To avoid having to give up her lover, she murders again, this time with “an evil joy.” She marries her lover, Sergey (a clerk at the Izmailov mill), conceives his child, and inherits the family business. A complication arises when another heir to the Izmailov fortune unexpectedly surfaces in the person of her late husband’s nephew, a saintly little child. To avoid losing her inheritance she murders for a third time, “as though demons had broken loose from their chains.” She and Sergey are apprehended in flagrante by a crowd of villagers returning from church (not the subtlest way of contriving a collision with the moral order, but hair-raising in its execution). They are sentenced to hard labor. By now, “light and darkness, good and evil, joy and boredom did not exist” for Katerina. On the way to Siberia, Sergey takes up with another woman. In a paroxysm of despair at losing him Katerina murders yet again: she grabs her rival, Sonyetka, and jumps together with her off a ferry into the icy Volga, thus finally murdering herself.
The last glimpse we get of Leskov’s creation likens her to a rapacious animal: “Katerina Lvovna appeared out of another wave, rose almost to her waist above the water, hurled herself at Sonyetka like a big pike at a soft little perch and both of them went under.” And this had been the beginning: “In our part of the world one sometimes comes across people of such character that one cannot recall them without a shudder even when many years have elapsed since the last encounter.”1 One could hardly say that Leskov had portrayed the monstrous protagonist of his tight-lipped little shocker with “sympathy,” or sought to inspire anything of the kind in his reader.
II
And yet that is just what Dmitriy Dmitriyevich Shostakovich tried to do when, sixty-five years and an October Revolution later, he turned Leskov’s sketch into his second (and, as things turned out, his last) opera. In an essay published in the program book for the first production, which had its première at the Little State Opera Theater of Leningrad (Malïy Leningradskiy Gosu-darstvennïy Opernïy Teatr, or “Malegot”) on 22 January 1934, the twenty-seven-year-old composer made three startling assertions. First, “there is no work of Russian literature that more vividly or expressively characterizes the position of women in the old prerevolutionary time” than Leskov’s. But second, “Leskov, as a brilliant representative of prerevolutionary literature, could not correctly interpret the events that unfold in his story.” Therefore Shostakovich’s own task was clear: “in every way to justify Katerina so that she would impress the audience as a positive character.”2
All this was in stark contrast to Leskov, who assumed a calculated air of detachment, on one level parodying the manner of what in Russia is known as a “procurator,” an impartial court officer whose job it is to prepare summaries of evidence for criminal cases. Shostakovich passionately embraced the role of counsel for the defense. His strategy was to exonerate his heroine by indicting her surroundings, to turn her from sinner to martyr (or, in Shakespearian terms, from a Lady Macbeth into a Juliet or a Desdemona). Here is how he made his case to the public, addressing them exactly as an attorney might sum up before a jury: “Katerina is an intelligent, talented, and interesting woman. Owing to the nightmarish circumstances in which life has placed her, owing to the cruel, greedy, petty merchant environment that surrounds her, her life has become sad, dull, gloomy. She does not love her husband, she has no joys, no consolations. And all at once there appears the foreman, Sergey.”3
Intelligent, talented, interesting . . . this is no Katerina Leskov would have recognized. But Ostrovsky would have known her; and as we read Shostakovich’s essay and observe the events of her life as he portrays them, it gradually dawns that he has switched heroines on us. He has undertaken to turn Leskov’s naturalistic horror tale into a high-minded realist tract. “It would be fairest of all,” the composer wrote of his heroine, “to say that her crimes are a protest against the tenor of the life she is forced to live, against the dark and suffocating atmosphere of the merchant class in the last century.” This goes beyond Ostrovsky, all the way to Dobrolyubov. And sure enough, Shostakovich does not fail to call his Katerina “a ray of light in the dark kingdom.”4
In the opera itself, the Ostrovsky/Dobrolyubov subtext is again brought right to the surface, when the whole husband’s-departure episode from The Storm is transplanted into Leskov’s plot at the end of the first scene. As Shostakovich (with his co-librettist Alexander Preys) recast it, the scene is much less subtle than in Ostrovsky. Now it is the evil in-law, not the heroine herself, who insists on the oath. And since it comes before the love intrigue has even begun to unfold, it carries no foreboding. Instead of revealing the heroine’s fatal ambivalence, it merely intensifies what is already a heavy-handed portrayal of her oppression. Like everything else in the opera, it whitens Katerina by darkening the background.
But how white, finally, can she get? How dark must a kingdom be to turn a multiple murderess into a ray of light? How far can elementary moral principles be relativized? And how did Shostakovich hope to bring it off?
First, he eliminated whatever could not be rehabilitated in Leskov’s portrayal of his heroine’s behavior. This meant, above all, getting rid of the third of the original Katerina’s murders; for, as Shostakovich rather exquisitely put it in his program essay, “the murder of a child, no matter how it may be explained, always makes a bad impression.”5 What remained was freely altered to reserve the moral high ground for the heroine. Instead of being discovered by a group of religious villagers with an upstanding engineer from St. Petersburg at their head, the operatic Katerina’s crimes are detected by a “seedy lout” who stumbles upon the corpse of Katerina’s husband when he breaks into the Izmailov storeroom to steal some vodka. He eagerly runs off to the local constabulary with the news, singing what Shostakovich, in conversation with the now-exiled Soviet soprano Galina Vishnevskaya would characterize in later (post-Stalinist) years as “a hymn to all informers.”6
In the next scene the police are portrayed as a venal, degenerate lot who spend their days persecuting “nihilists” instead of protecting the rights of citizens, and who are overjoyed to have a pretext to avenge themselves on Katerina Izmailova for not inviting them to her wedding. In an especially odious interpolation (perhaps prompted by another Leskov story, “Kotin the He-Cow and Platonida”), Shostakovich precedes the father-in-law’s discovery of Katerina’s adultery with a lecherous soliloquy in which the detestable old man declares his intention of seducing her himself. The only other figure of potential moral authority in the opera, the priest who is summoned to minister to the poisoned father-in-law, is portrayed even more cartoonishly than the police.
Merely to recite these unsubtle devices is to expose them. In cold verbal summary they cannot make the case for Katerina as victim. Shostakovich knew this very well: “It would be fruitless to argue at length the ways I justify all these crimes, since the real justification is to be found in the musical material; for I consider that in an opera it is the music that plays the main, the leading, the decisive role.”7 Of course it does, but only when the composer is equal to the task. Few composers have been as well equipped for it as Shostakovich. In his second opera he shows himself authentic genius of the genre, fully able—like Verdi, like Wagner, like Musorgsky—to create a world in tone that carries complete conviction. And he used his awesome powers to perpetrate a colossal moral inversion. It could well be the most pernicious use to which music has ever been put, and it gives the eternal lie to formalists who would deny music the ethical and expressive powers of which the ancients speak. In the hands of a genius, Shostakovich’s accomplishment declares, the art of music is still the potent, dangerous thing about which Plato was the first to warn, and Tolstoy, perhaps, the most recent.
III
The composer maintains control over the emotional projection and reception of his opera’s gruesome subject matter in two ways. First there are the overt editorials, in the form of five interludes connecting all scenes not bounded by intermissions. This kind of unmediated author’s intervention was obviously something Shostakovich had learned from the third act of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (performed in Leningrad in 1927, long before its migration westward). Like Berg, Shostakovich intrudes despotically to instruct the audience (in Joseph Kerman’s words): “This is as he feels about the action, and this is as you too shall feel.”8
Thus one of Shostakovich’s interludes tells us, after we have witnessed Katerina’s little wrestling match with Sergey in scene 2, and before their lovemaking in scene 3, that her sexual drive has been mobilized, that it will liberate her, and that we are to rejoice at this. The interlude between the discovery of the corpse and the scene in the police station, a boorish if virtu-osically sustained circus cancan, tells us just how we are to feel about Katerina’s nemesis, the “seedy lout.” The most forcible directive of this kind, and the one most obviously reminiscent of Wozzeck, is the searing passacaglia between the two scenes of act 2—that is, between the two Izmailov murders—which bursts upon the farcical episode with the village priest like a howl of pain, and which seems to reenact the catharsis Katerina has inwardly experienced (but that her onstage deportment has concealed) upon dispatching her hated father-in-law to the next world.
Yet what is overt may be easily resisted. More insidious is Shostakovich’s other method. Evoking a wealth of familiar musical genres, deploying a bewilderingly eclectic range of styles, the composer makes sure that one character, and one character only, is perceived by his audience as a human being. From the very first page of the score, Katerina’s music is rhapsodic, soaring, and (most telling) imbued with the lyric intonations of Russian folk song. As the curtain rises to reveal Katerina alone, lamenting her fate, the clarinet plays a characteristic cadential phrase (a leap from the fourth degree to the tonic) that had been characterized as “the soul of Russian music” by Glinka, the first great Russian composer, a century earlier. Katerina’s music is the only music in the opera that has emotional “life,” as traditionally portrayed by composers in the heyday of romantic opera. Like the emotions themselves, it waxes and wanes; it has rhythmic and dynamic flexibility; it reaches climaxes.
In utter contrast, every other member of the cast is portrayed as subhuman. The police, the priest, the “seedy lout,” the other minor characters are all presented as repulsive caricatures, their music reeking of operetta, of the music hall, of military bands and circus parades. The orchestral ritornello that precedes each stanza of the “police station waltz” in act 3 is the most conspicuous reversion to the brash “wrong-note” vein so familiar from Shostakovich’s earlier music, like the notorious polka from the Age of Gold ballet, where it had caricatured top-hatted capitalists. The priest, officiating over the last rites for Katerina’s first victim, is too dim-witted even for wrong notes: he lapses into a polka of his own, all the more absurd because all its notes are “right.” When Katerina’s father-in-law—usually painted in the darkest orchestral hues and the ugliest, most distorted harmonies—muses lecherously right before discovering her adultery, he does so to the incongruous strains of a Viennese waltz. The seedy lout’s solo scene must be the most brazen piece of bordello trash ever authored by a “serious” composer.
Most effective of all, though, is Shostakovich’s way of accompanying the singing, and above all, the movements of all figures except Katerina with trudging or galloping ostinatos—inflexibly rigorous rhythmic pulsations that characterize them one and all as soulless, insensate automatons, comic-book creatures, incapable of experiencing or inspiring an emotional response of any kind. This applies even to the chorus, the “people,” who are represented in this opera as a cynical, apathetic and (in the last scene) downright heartless mob. It is sheer dehumanization.
The technique operates at its most insidious in the fifth scene of the opera, which portrays the murder of Zinoviy Borisovich, Katerina’s husband. Up to now his role in the opera had been a tiny one, confined to the first scene, and culminating in his departure. Shostakovich’s music for Zinoviy’s farewell to Katerina, which parodies the style of a sentimental salon romance, had portrayed him (in contrast to his despicable father) as well-enough intentioned if ineffectual. Katerina, to say nothing of the audience, is given scant reason to hate him. How then is his murder “justified”?
Strictly, as Shostakovich would say, by the “musical material.” The scene begins with Katerina and Sergey blissfully in bed, surrounded by the lushest, most lyrical orchestral music in the opera. Three times this mood is broken: first by Sergey himself (whose music gets more and more operettalike as the opera approaches its dénouement); next, by an apparition of Boris Timo-feyich, the first victim; and then by the offstage approach of Zinoviy, signaled by a typically “trudging” ostinato. Once he arrives onstage, the trudge gives way, literally, to a gallop—that is, to that maddest of all nineteenth-century ballroom dances, the “galop,” of which Shostakovich was the preeminent twentieth-century master. The whole scene of confrontation and murder is played against its unremitting oompah.
The American composer Elliott Carter saw The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Germany in 1960 and found this scene utterly baffling. “The relation of the music to the action is unaccountable,” he thought, unable to comprehend the reason why Shostakovich would have “the heroine and her lover strangle her husband on a large stage-sized four-poster bed to a lively dance tune.”9 But by now the reason should be clear enough: the dance tune is there to dehumanize the husband and mitigate the heroine’s crime to one of cruelty to animals at worst. What condemns Zinoviy is nothing more than his being a part of Katerina’s hated environment. He is dehumanized and dispatched not for anything he has done but for what he is. He is the beneficiary of the social system that oppressed his wife, and that is enough “objectively” to justify his liquidation. And all this is conveyed to us by the music alone. Carried away with that music, we cannot fail to be (at least momentarily) convinced.
IV
And now we know why Shostakovich’s opera was hailed by its earliest critics as such a praiseworthy advance over its literary source. As Adrian Piotrovsky, the Malegot dramaturg, put it in the program book, Leskov’s story had been “a defense of resignation, a defense of self-denial and human endurance” by “the ideologist of patriarchal petty-bourgeois humility.” Shostakovich and Preys had boldly exposed the “latent social truth” hidden within Leskov’s naturalistic treatment of his subject and made it “profoundly realistic.”10 Their Katerina was no mere ray of light but the full radiance of the Marxist sun.
Translating this into simpler Soviet language, Shostakovich had turned the tale into one of class warfare. Katerina’s victims were class enemies, creatures at a lower stage of historical development than she, and she had every right, according to the objective laws of historical materialism, to eliminate them. “Yes, she kills, and kills again,” wrote Piotrovsky, who a short time later would collaborate with Shostakovich on the ill-fated ballet The Limpid Stream, and afterward would perish in one of the early Stalin purges. Shostakovich, he maintained, “has created the seemingly paradoxical figure of the innocent murderess, a criminal of romantic purity. This he does not in a spirit of humanitarian forgiveness, but rather by means of a wide-ranging, acute analysis of the social reality that surrounds his Katerina.”11
It was this kind of “analysis” that was being advanced, even as Shostakovich was writing his opera, in defense of the lawless extermination of the “kulaks,” peasants who were resisting forced collectivization in the brutal period of the first Five Year Plan. It was a time of hideous moral inversions in all walks of Soviet life, when the high tide of Stalinism was coming in and the basest atrocities were being justified in the name of the loftiest humanitarian ideals. In the year Lady Macbeth was completed, little Pavlik Morozov, a well-indoctrinated “pioneer” from a farm near Sverdlovsk, denounced his parents to the secret police as “enemies of the people.” Lynched by an outraged mob of peasants, he became a Soviet saint, not to be decanonized until the days of Gorbachev. Shostakovich’s Katerina was a heroine of similar stripe. His opera is a faithful reflection of that abominable time, and a memento of it.
V
In one way only was Shostakovich entirely faithful to Leskov; and that was in his frank naturalistic portrayal of Katerina’s sexual passion. It is lust, pure and simple, that he portrays; ignited by rape, it turns Katerina into a love slave, quite belying the frequent claim that she is a liberated, aggressive woman in an age of feminine passivity, whose audacity further justifies her crimes. The theme of carnal violence is exaggerated in the opera beyond anything in Leskov. The salacious trombone glissandos that portray Sergey’s de-tumescence achieved instant world fame when the critic of the New York Sun, encountering Shostakovich’s opera in a concert performance at the old Metropolitan Opera House under Artur Rodzinski, dubbed them an exercise in “pornophony.”12
Even before the first overt encounter with Sergey, Shostakovich’s Katerina is shown to be obsessed with animal sex. Sitting by the window right before her future lover knocks on the door (his gambit—”Have you got anything to read?”—ranks with Siegfried’s “Das ist kein Mann” in the annals of unintended operatic humor), she sings:
The foal runs after the filly.
The tomcat 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 its 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 his passionate embraces.
These words were never sung on stage in Russia until 1996. Along with a few other crude or salty lines, they were censored from the libretto before the première and were also omitted from the score published in 1935. In their place Shostakovich and Preys inserted a hymn to the joys of maternity and conjugal domestic bliss. (The original text was imparted by Shostakovich years later to Vishnevskaya, who recorded the uncen-sored opera in London in 1979, with her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, conducting.)
Yet despite this precautionary self-censorship, there was more than enough left to scandalize a lapsed seminarian of the Georgian orthodox church who took in a performance of the chief ornament of the Soviet musical stage during the third year of its triumphant run. His reaction was the first step in the process through which Shostakovich, until then the brash genius of a brash young society, thriving in the din of its social upheavals and pampered by its artistic elite, was transformed into “pain personified,” as the post-Soviet composer Sofiya Gubaidulina now remembers him, “the epitome of the tragedy and terror of our times.”13
In January 1936, a festival of Soviet music was held in Moscow. The Male-got lent its two most successful productions for the occasion. One was Quiet Flows the Don, a corny “song opera” composed (with Shostakovich’s help, it was rumored) by a hack named Ivan Ivanovich Dzerzhinsky after Mikhail Sholokhov’s famous novel of the postrevolutionary Civil War. The other was Lady Macbeth.
On the evening of the 17th, Stalin and Molotov attended a performance of Dzerzhinsky’s opera and, according to a Tass dispatch, called the composer, the conductor, and the director to the royal box, where they “gave a positive assessment of the theater’s efforts on behalf of Soviet opera and noted the considerable ideological and political merits of the production.”14 On the 26th, the same leaders—together with Soviet culture czar Andrey Zhdanov, and Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan—went to see Lady Macbeth in its eighty-fourth performance at the Bolshoy Theater’s affiliated theater, the Moscow equivalent of the Malegot. Shostakovich, alerted by a telegram, was in the audience. He left the theater perturbed (as he wrote to his friend Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky) about “what happened to your namesake [Dzerzhin-sky], and what didn’t happen to me.”15 For Stalin and company had left without comment before the end.
Two days later, what soon became known as the Historic Document appeared in Pravda, the infamous unsigned editorial of 28 January 1936, “Muddle instead of Music” (Sumbur vmesto muzïki), which remains one of the great paradigmatic documents of the buffeting the arts have suffered in modern totalitarian states. At a time when newspaper campaigns were rife against the “left deviationism” of old Bolsheviks, and soon-to-be-carried-out calls for their annihilation were rampant, the same merciless rhetoric of political denunciation was directed, for the first time anywhere, at an artist.
The first target was the opera’s obscenity:
The music croaks and hoots and snorts and pants in order to represent love scenes as naturally as possible. And “love” in its most vulgar form is daubed all over the opera. The merchant’s double bed is the central point on the stage. On it all the “problems” are solved. . . . This glorification of merchant-class lasciviousness has been described by some critics as a satire. But there can be no question of satire here. The author uses all the means at his disposal and his power of musical and dramatic expression to attract the sympathy of the spectators for the coarse and vulgar aims and actions of the merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova. Lady Macbeth is popular among bourgeois audiences abroad. Is it not because the opera is so confused and so entirely free of political bias [!] that it is praised by bourgeois critics? Is it not perhaps because it titillates the depraved tastes of bourgeois audiences with its witching, clamorous, neurasthenic music?
Criticism next turned to the opera’s modernistic style, the real “muddle instead of music.” This can be a hard point for a listener of today to grasp, especially a listener who knows Wozzeck or Lulu or Moses und Aron, or even Shostakovich’s own earlier opera The Nose. Compared with these, Lady Macbeth can seem downright tame—”more consonant, more ‘melodic,’ and more openly tonal,” as Robert P. Morgan has put it.16 The curiously squeamish last phrase suggests that Western critics may even be inclined to regard tonality as something a self-respecting twentieth-century composer keeps under wraps. And if so, it may not be entirely because of “progressivist” stylistic prejudices but also because of the way in which consonant, melodic, “openly tonal” styles have been enforced by bloody twentieth-century dictatorships.
But in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the frame of reference was different. Music, like everything else, was monitored for its political implications. “Positive heroes” were defined lyrically. Negative characters were defined by dissonance. In Lady Macbeth, as we have seen, the only lyricism in evidence is that given the disrupter of the social order. Otherwise the music is indiscriminately caricatural, purposely deforming not only her victims but also, and particularly, her possible judges—the priest, the police, even “the people.”
“The composer,” Pravda ranted, “seems to have deliberately encoded his music, twisted all its sounds so that it would appeal only to aesthetes and formalists who have lost all healthy tastes.” And now the threat: “Left devia-tionism in opera grows out of the same source as left deviationism in painting, in poetry, in pedagogy, in science.” In a phrase that must have scared the poor composer half to death, the official organ of Soviet power denounced him for “trifling with difficult matters” and hinted that “it might end very badly.”
VI
Dmitriy Shostakovich, until then perhaps Soviet Russia’s most loyal musical son, and certainly her most talented one, had been made a sacrificial lamb. Though his opera had no doubt given the Leader and Teacher a genuine pain, it had surely been marked for denunciation and suppression before Stalin ever visited the theater. It was a target precisely by reason of its unprecedented success, and Shostakovich was a target by reason of his preeminence among Soviet artists of his generation, the first to be educated under Soviet power.
However much Katerina’s deeds might be justified on an “objective” vulgar-Marxist basis, moreover, her anarchic behavior posed an unacceptable implicit threat to totalitarian discipline. Shostakovich and Preys had failed to grasp that totalitarian power, by whatever means entrenched, is reactionary, terrified of the sort of ungovernable “revolutionary” turbulence the opera appeared to endorse. Stalinist violence, as Shostakovich would discover, was (like everything else Stalinist), planned, orderly, and thoroughly determined in its calculated randomness.
The real purpose of the Pravda editorial, then, was to demonstrate how directly the arts were to be subject to Party controls in the wake of what the unsuspecting Shostakovich himself had hailed in the program book as “the historic April resolution.” This was an action the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party had taken on 23 April 1932, in accordance with which all existing Soviet arts associations were dissolved and replaced with “unions” (of writers, artists, composers, and cinematographers) that were directly answerable to the Party bureaucracy. At first it was greeted by serious artists as a positive move, for it removed from contention with them the clamorous “proletarian” associations that during the twenties had been aggressively denouncing the elite culture.17
In fact, the resolution had removed all barriers that might have protected the arts from the naked exercise of Stalin’s arbitrary rule. Shostakovich, through his opera, was one of the first victims of the new dispensation; and if, as things turned out, he was spared the ultimate Stalinist fate, he had to live for the next seventeen years and more with the constant threat of “a bad end.”18 That this unhappy man nevertheless continued to function as an artist and a citizen has lent his career a heroic luster no Western counterpart can hope—or wish—to attain.
It is inevitably in that heroic light, a light made garish by the books of Volkov and MacDonald, by the films of Tony Palmer, and by literature of the cold war and of glasnosf, that we now view The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. We know it as the work through which the Soviet Union’s great composer was disgraced; a work whose suppression was an incalculable loss, for it spelled the end of what would surely have been one of the great operatic careers; and, finally, a work that had to endure a twenty-seven-year ban before it was cautiously let back onstage, retitled Katerina Izmailova, in a bowdlerized version sans pornophony, and with an expanded final scene of convicts en route to Siberia that is fraught with a new and bitter subtext relating to its author’s tribulations.
So ineluctably has the opera come to symbolize pertinacious resistance to inhumanity that it is virtually impossible now to see it as an embodiment of that very inhumanity. The fate of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk opened Shostakovich’s eyes to the nature of the regime under which he was condemned to live. It could be argued that its martyrdom humanized its creator. And yet it remains a profoundly inhumane work of art. Its technique of dehumanizing victims is the perennial method of those who would perpetrate and justify genocide, whether of kulaks in the Ukraine, Jews in Greater Germany, or aborigines in Tasmania.
So, one must admit, if ever an opera deserved to be banned it was this one, and matters are not changed by the fact that its actual ban was for wrong and hateful reasons. In the liberal West we are opposed in principle to banning works of art, and do not believe that an opera can deserve such a fate. Yet if that is so because we believe that an opera cannot threaten life and morals, then we are perhaps more vulnerable than we imagine to the dehumanizing message of this opera, one of our ghastly century’s greatest and ghastliest. If it is because we believe that ethics can have no bearing on aesthetics, then our own dehumanization is already far advanced. If for the sake of its inspired music and its dramatic power The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is to hold the stage today, it should be seen and heard with an awareness of history, with open eyes and ears, and with hearts on guard.
1 “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda,” in Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov, Povesti i Rasskazi (L’vov: “Kamenyar,” 1986), pp. 110, 150.
2 “Moyo ponimaniye ‘Ledi Makbet,’“ in Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda: Opera D. D. Shos-takovicha (Leningrad: Gosudarstvenniy Akademicheskiy Malïy Opernïy Teatr, 1934), p. 6.
3 Ibid., p. 6.
4 Ibid., p. 8.
5 Ibid., p. 6.
6 Vishnevskaya, Galina, trans. Guy Daniels (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 355.
7 Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda: Opera D. D. Shostakovicha, p. 7.
8 J. Kerman, “Terror and Self-Pity: Alban Berg’s Wozzeck,“ Hudson Review 5 (1952): 417.
9 E. Carter, “Current Chronicle: Germany, 1960,” Musical Quarterly 46, no. 3 (July 1960); reprinted in The Writings of Elliott Carter, ed. Else Stone and Kurt Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 213.
10 “Ot povesti Leskova k opere Shostakovicha i k spektaklyu Malogo opernogo teatra,” in Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda: Opera D. D. Shostakovicha, pp. 14, 16.
11 Ibid., pp. 14-15.
12 The word gained national recognition and eventual immortality when it was picked up by Time magazine: “The Murders of Mtsensk” (unsigned review), 11 February 1935, p. 35.
13 Recorded interview, transcribed and published in Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 307.
14 “Beseda tovarishchey STALINA i MOLOTOVA S avtorami opernogo spektaklya ‘Tikhiy Don,’“ Sovetskaya muzïka 4, no. 2 (1936): 3.
15 Lyudmila Mikheyeva, “Istoriya odnoy druzhbï,” ibid., vol. 55, no. 9 (1987): 79 (letter posted from Arkhangelsk, 28 January 1936).
16 Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 246.
17 On Shostakovich’s early support for the decree, see Galina, pp. 205-6.
18 According to the composer Venyamin Basner, a close friend, Shostakovich narrowly escaped arrest in the aftermath of the Red Army purge of 1937, when his patron, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was condemned (recorded interview, transcribed and published in Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, pp. 123-25).