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Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Aftermath Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Aftermath 2 Introduction 27 Fourth Symphony: composition 3 Recap Lady Macbeth and Muddle instead of Music 28 Fourth Symphony: first performance 5 Muddle instead of Music: immediate aftermath 29 Fourth Symphony: reception 8 Muddle instead of Music: historical / ideological context 31 Fourth Symphony: context of the Soviet Symphony 9 Muddle instead of Music: Shostakovich’s reaction 33 Fourth Symphony: gigantism 11 Muddle instead of Music: recent research 35 Fourth Symphony: analysis 13 Shostakovich redeems himself: 1936-41 38 LISTENING NOTES: Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43 14 Shostakovich redeems himself: Fourth Symphony 41 Fifth Symphony: The Great Terror 15 Shostakovich redeems himself: Fifth Symphony 42 Tukhachevsky 16 Shostakovich redeems himself: Sixth Symphony 44 Comparing Fifth Symphony and Fourth Symphony 17 Shostakovich redeems himself: Piano Quintet 46 Fifth Symphony: Leningrad premiere 18 Shostakovich redeems himself: list of works 1936-41 47 Fifth Symphony: Between Leningrad & Moscow premiere 19 Struggle to rehabilitate Lady Macbeth 48 Fifth Symphony: Soviet Music Review 21 Rehabilitation: State Commission – 1956 51 Fifth Symphony: Cold War reinterpretation 22 Katerina Izmailova approved 53 Fifth Symphony: Concealed messages 24 Born again Katerina 54 Fifth Symphony: Concealed messages… Carmen 56 LISTENING NOTES: Symphony No. 5 in D minor, op 47 © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 2 Introduction This session will examine the aftermath to Pravda’s devastating attack on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; the Muddle instead of Music article. Overnight Shostakovich was a pariah. Within five years Shostakovich had rebuilt his reputation as the Soviet Union’s leading composer. This recovery is demonstrated by Pravda’s use of his photograph in 1941; Shostakovich as poster boy for the first batch of Stalin Prize winners. The exploration of reputational recovery in the late 1930s will focus on two major works: Fourth Symphony Fifth Symphony. Rehabilitation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk took much longer. Shostakovich started a campaign to bring his opera back to the stage during the Khrushchev Thaw. After 27 years of silence Katerina Izmailova was heard again. © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 3 Recap Lady Macbeth and Muddle instead of Music A quick recap on the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Shostakovich started to write Lady Macbeth in October 1930, less than a year after his opera Nose was premiered in Leningrad. By December 1932 Lady Macbeth was complete. It was first performed January 1934 at Maly opera Leningrad, and two days later a second production opened, at Nemirovich-Danchenko theatre, Moscow. For two years Lady Macbeth performed to full houses in the Soviet Union, and there were productions abroad in: Cleveland, Philadelphia, Zurich, Buenos Aires, New York, London, Prague, Stockholm… On 26 January 1936, Stalin went to see the new Bolshoi production of Lady Macbeth. He didn’t like it. Two days later, Pravda carried a devastating review – Muddle instead of Music. Unsigned… indicating it was an official Party perspective. © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 4 Recap Lady Macbeth and Muddle instead of Music /2 Pravda’s article Muddle instead of Music says: Lady Macbeth isn’t proper Soviet music… It’s discordant. Difficult to follow – impossible to remember. Appeals to western bourgeoisie. Perverted bourgeois taste…“formalist”. Lady Macbeth misrepresents Leskov [the author of the 1865 story, used as the basis for the opera]. His story has had a new significance imposed on it. Our critics swear by the name of socialist realism… but via Shostakovich’s opera we’ve been served up the coarsest kind of naturalism. Naturalism is not the same as realism… love scenes where the music quacks, grunts, growls, and gasps. Clowning… complexity… Meyerholdism! This is not genuine t ART. This is a Leftist deviation. A game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly. Shostakovich is a talented young composer let down by the musical establishment. Effective criticism could help his future development. © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 5 Muddle instead of Music: immediate aftermath Union of Soviet Composers groups met and discussed Muddle instead of Music. This level of Party intervention in music was unprecedented. At first some music professionals naively assumed a Pravda editorial was open to challenge; Leningrad critics were quickly brought in line! On 6 February 1936 Pravda published a review of Shostakovich’s ballet, Limpid Stream. The story line… a troupe of dances visits a collective farm. On paper this sounds like an ideal subject for a sincere socialist realist ballet. Pravda’s title for the review is ominous: Balletic Falsity. The review conceded that Limpid Stream is less dissonant and less contrived than Lady Macbeth; but reported major flaws: unrealistic, uninformed portrait of life on a collective farm arrogant avoidance of folk songs and folk dances (nothing anchored the music to its location, Kuban on the Black Sea coast). Perhaps these flaws are because this “collective farm” music was largely recycled from an “industrial” ballet – Bolt? [Fay p 85] © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 6 Muddle instead of Music: immediate aftermath /2 On 14 February 1936 Pravda fired a broadside at the arts in general. It is with surprise that we note that Literary Journal treated the editorials in Pravda as an affair apart from literature, and even uninteresting. The journal has not carried a word of comment... The other newspapers are in the same blissful state of ignorance. Izvestia is silent. Komsomolskaya Pravda is in the same position. Is it possible that these papers have nothing to say? [quoted from Victor Seroff] Pravda… in effect the Party… was making a big deal out of the Lady Macbeth affair. All over the Soviet Union workers found themselves pulled into work place discussions about the arts, and bourgeois formalism. Composers hurriedly acknowledged their own earlier misgivings about the direction of Shostakovich’s work, critiqued their own misguided scores, and made clear their intentions to ensure future works met Party expectations. © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 7 Muddle instead of Music: immediate aftermath /3 A few brave souls defended Shostakovich, as a great talent capable of reform: Sollertinsky – his closest friend Asafiev – leading musicologist Neuhaus – director of Moscow Conservatoire who declared Shostakovich “one of the finest composers in the whole of Europe”. [Mikkonen, p 234] Knipper threw a lifeline “Don’t drive nails in Shostakovich’s coffin… let’s help him straighten himself out”. [Hakobian, p 99] (Knipper’s generosity might have surprised Shostakovich. The previous year Shostakovich had publically criticised Knipper’s Fourth Symphony as vulgar, trite and inorganic) Maxim Gorky, head of the Writers Union, sent a letter to Stalin in March 1936: The Pravda article hit [Shostakovich] just like a brick on the head, the chap is utterly crushed.… “Muddle,” but why? What does this so-called “muddle” consist of? Critics should give a technical assessment of Shostakovich’s music. But what the Pravda article did was to authorize hundreds of talentless people, hacks of all kinds, to persecute Shostakovich. And that is what they are doing. There’s no recorded response from Stalin to Gorky on this issue. [Fay p 91] © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 8 Muddle instead of Music: historical / ideological context Let’s just pause and put Muddle instead of Music in a historical ideological context. This episode precedes the Great Terror. Kirov had been killed in 1934. The Party was preparing the case for the first Show Trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, which would take place in August 1936. The Great Terror was primarily an internal party squabble until summer 1937. Muddle instead of Music is the first time that the Party made a cultural pronouncement, and invited everyone to express their approval of it. Perhaps because this was a new experience, opera houses were slow to react. Lady Macbeth’s final performance in Moscow was 7 March… 39 days after Muddle instead of Music was published! This was at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre, where the opera played as Katerina Izmailova. [Fay p 305] © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 9 Muddle instead of Music: Shostakovich’s reaction Shostakovich read Muddle instead of Music in Arkhangelsk – 1,300 km north of Moscow. He was in Arkhangelsk for a concert with cellist Viktor Kubatsky. He contacted his friend, Isaak Glikman, and asked him to organise a “subscription at the post office to get all the relevant press cuttings”. [Glikman p xviii] By 23 February 1936 the cuttings filled the first 78 page scrapbook. [Fay p 87] Glikman says Shostakovich “read the daily avalanche of cuttings with extraordinary self-control and restraint… There were plenty of false friends to shake their heads dolefully and bleat about the decline and fall of the composer… but he, the least self-important or complacent person imaginable, held fast to his belief in his own creative powers”. [Glikman p xviii – p xix] © 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422 Soviet Music: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Session 5 Page 10 Muddle instead of Music: Shostakovich’s reaction /2 At his own request, Shostakovich met Platon Kerzhentsev, Chairman of the Committee for Artistic Affairs, on his return from Arkhangelsk.
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