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Home , Betrothal in a Monastery, Russian opera, The Gambler (Prokofiev), The Idiot (opera), Valentino Bucchi, Vladimir Rebikov

DRAMATIC MUSICAL VERSIONS OF DOSTOEVSKY: SERGEI PROKOPEV'S

by Vladimir Seduro *

I The Russian Sergei Sergeevich Prokof'ev (1891-1953) stands as a pioneer in the creation of large operatic works based on Dostoevsky. The composer Nikolai Iakovlevich Miaskovskii (1881-1950) also dreamed of an based on Dostoevsky. While working on his operatic version of , Miaskovskii even considered to whom he would assign the roles of Nastas'ia Filip- povna and Aglaia. He first conceived the part of Nastas'ia for the actress V. N. Petrova-Zvantseva, and he had the singer E. V. Kono- sova-Derzhanovskaia in mind for the role of Aglaia Epanchina. But his constant directorial and teaching duties and the distraction of his symphonic work absorbed his attention and his energies in other musical activities. But the idea of basing an opera on Dostoevsky's The Gambler was realized before the Revolution in . It is true that before Prokof'ev there was a based on Dostoevsky's story «The Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree.» The opera The Christmas Tree [«Yolka»] by was produced in 1903 at the Moscow «Aquarium» Theatre nm by M. E. Medvedev, and in 1906 it saw the footlights of theaters in , Brno, and . But the contents of The Christmas Tree were only indirectly linked to Dostoevsky's story. Rebikov's one act, three scene opera joined the theme of Dostoevsky's story to the plot of 's story «The Girl with the * Dr. Vladimir Seduro, Professor of Russian at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is the author of several books, the most recent of which are Dostoevski's Image in Russia Today (Nordland, 1975) and Dostoevski in Russian Emigre Criticism (Nordland, 1975). This article is a chapter from his recently completed book Dostoevski in Russian and World Theater. 118 Matches,» and as a result the hero was turned into a girl. The Christmas Tree was done in the traditional genre of the sentimental melodramatic Christmas pageant and laid no claims to being a genuine musical version of Dostoevsky's story. The prize for first place in this endeavor undoubtedly belongs to Prokof'ev and his opera The Gambler. Prokof'ev conceived his opera The Gambler at his conservatory desk. After he finished the conservatory and directing courses in 1914, during his stay abroad Prokof'ev set out his intentions to compose an opera based on The Gambler for the famous Russian theater figure Sergei Diagilev. But Diagilev replied that the opera was rather outmoded as a form, and that the future belonged to the .' Prokof'ev's agreement with Diagilev's suggestion that he compose a ballet for the latter's troupe distracted the musician from his operatic plans. But the composer did not abandon his idea and set about realizing it at the first chance he got. Prokof'ev was inspired in this work by the director of the Mariinskaia Opera in Petersburg, , whose father was English and whose mother was Russian. He was not frightened by innovation and, sensing the inclination to musical invention in the young composer and approving of his temperamental and willful character, he said to Prokof'ev, «Write your Gambler, and we will produce it.»2 Sergei Sergeevich decided not to miss so lucky a chance. He reread the novel, wrote the himself rather quickly, and in the autumn of 1915 began to compose the music starting with the words from the middle of the first act, «virtuous father.» His ac- quaintance with S. V. Rakhmaninov provided a new stimulus to his work — the reknowned composer offered him a friendly helping hand and approved his work on the opera. Working from the mid- dle of November, the composer finished the first act by December 1, 1915. By February of 1916 the second act was ready, and the third act was completed in March of the same year. Complications slowed the work on the fourth act. The roulette scene had no general plan. The writer B. N. Demchinskii tried to help the com- poser, added something that was not in the story, and the fourth act was done in May of 1916. Thus the work on the opera was completed in five and a half months. The young musician tried to make the language of his music leftish, standing for the advanced elements of the day, i.e. marked by

1 S. S. Prokof'ev. Materialy, dokumenty, vospominaniia [S. S. Prokof'ev. Materials, documents, and Reminiscences], Second edition, enlarged (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal'noe izdatel'stvo, 1961), p. 150. 2 Ibid., p. 153. 119 youthful energy, the joy of life, and a fresh enthusiasm and charm that would strike the conservative musical world as an extravagant distortion of melody. The musical criticism of V. Karatygin, which was more sensitive to innovation, characterized Prokof'ev's music during the period of his work on The Gambler as follows:

He remains true to «grotesque metricalism» even in pieces which bear no specific name. If you were to take his Etudes, Opus 2, his excellent Second Sonata d-moll, the colorful Symphonetta, the mar- velous Ballad, or the Piano — they all have the same striving for extreme characterization, for stormy dynamics, for a sharp and pointed rhythm, for precisely and rigorously modeled but unusually whimsical melody, for the combination of a creature of musical thought so ultra-fantastic that the matter comes to a point, caricature, to almost unreal figures that do not interfere with the psyches of mere mortals — this he combined with such clearness and vitality in showing all these strange things to an audience of listeners that it almost turns into an audience of viewers which sees and feels the sounds pouring out before it as though the auditory nerves were accidentally crossed with other brain centers. A remarkable art! It bites, nips, stings, stabs and pinches with its pointed «sarcasm,» it subjects you to the tortures of living — with horns and tails — infernal demons and «delusions,» and you become a part of the spiritual «underground» and enjoy your «torments» instead of despising your pitiful position. What is the meaning of this paradox? Of course it lies in the magical power of true art. Reading Dostoevsky or Рое or looking at the nightmarish etchings of Goya, we derive a particularly acute and profound pleasure from recognizing the unlimited power of art over the human soul. If all these abysses of woe, torments, tears, despair, and horrors about which Dostoevsky, Рое, and Goya tell us are turned into the purest pearls of poetry by the power of art, then where are the borders for the imaginative powers of a genius? I will not compare Prokof'ev's talent to the intensity of the creative forces of Dostoevsky, Рое, and Goya since the diseased quality that belongs at least to the first two artists I named, simply does not exist in Prokof'ev. Yet something of the «cruelty» of these world famous talents does lie in the soul of Prokof'ev. In his Sarcasm and The there is an obvious spiritual affinity with the grotesque elements of the famous American. And can we really consider it a coincidence that it is precisely Prokof'ev who first conceived the idea of an opera based on Dostoevsky? Unflagging strength, enormous temperament, very rich thematic fantasy, remarkable harmonic imagination, sharply expressive ar- tistic individuality which for some time has been working on the grounds of a broadening of classical tradition and only quite re- cently has seemed to move toward a break with tradition, an ex- traordinary corpus of musical and artistic ideas, the striving for the characteristic and grotesque — these are the fundamental contours of Prokof'ev's art. Joining elegance and simplicity, a com- plex whole with schematization and simplification of the parts, writing in broad strokes with a careful avoidance of any details that might blur lines and colors of the whole, a somewhat Straussian «decorative counterpoint» that consists of a bold joining of many themes only approximately matched to one another without articulat- ing a detailed «purity» of voice development — these are the pro- perties of Prokof'ev's composition. In sum, his music often achieves

120 a striking power, scope, bright color, colossal energy, and grandiose eruptions which alternate with blinding flashes of humor that is either bright and gay or gloomy and sinister. Prokof'ev's gifts are particularly evident in such monumental works as both his Cohcerti, the Second Sonata, in the biting Sarcasm, the magnificent and elementally powerful Scythian Suite, The Gambler, certain scenes of which, for example in the gambling house, approach in their feverish and convulsive impetuosity the psychology of the work of that brilliant «cruel talent» of .3 We owe some respect to the penetrating criticism of V. Karatygin as well as to that of N. Miaskovskii and B. Asaf'ev who perceived the spiritual soundness of the young Prokof'ev's music and his independent talent which was quite equal to the task of a musical adaptation of Dostoevsky. Prokof'ev actually sought and was ca- pable of finding a strong language for expressing strong emotions. He succeeded in finding a musical equivalent for the very Russian image of «Babulen'ka» in the plot of The Gambler. The composer paid particular attention to the stage flexibility of his work avoiding the conventions of existing that made the genre immobile and, in the opinions of several musicians of the time, particularly I. Stravinskii and S. Diagilev, ripe for degeneration. Working on the libretto, Prokof'ev found that at the end of Dostoevsky's novel the dramatic action significantly diminished thanks to the author's initially prevailing interest in psychological experience. The result of this tendency could mean weakening the impression of the concluding scene and of the whole opera. Therefore the librettist thought it better to end the opera with the scene in which Polina leaves Aleksei Ivanovich. Thus the action in The Gambler constant- ly grows as we near the finale, and the central scene becomes the gambling house in the next to last act. The composer put no chorus into this scene because it would be inflexible and would not fit the setting. Nevertheless the scene required a large number of performers — gamblers, croupiers, and observers with a sharply defined character. Still the scene needed rapid pace to organize this complex mass which could be distributed on the stage only by a highly imaginative approach to production. In a conversation with a correspondent of a newspaper concerning the finale of The Gambler, the composer stated, «I permit myself to imagine that the gambling house scene is completely new in opera literature both in its conception and its execution. And it seems to me that I have managed to realize in this scene what I had intended.» *

3 Viacheslav G. Karatygin, «Tvorchestvo Prokof'eva» [Prokof'ev's Work], Iskusstvo, No. 1, 1917, pp. 10-11. 4 «Ob 'Igroke'» [About The Gambler], Vechernie Birzhevye vedomosti [Evening Exchange News], May 12, 1916. 121 In creating the music for The Gambler, the composer strove to overcome the custom of writing singsong opera music to the rhymed text of the libretto. The Wagnerian operatic tradition struck him as particularly harmful since it led to the atrophy of the opera genre. The young opera reformer decided to make a shining and powerful opera based on a concept of the stage that did not exclude plasticity, freedom, and the expresiveness of declamation. The dialogues from the captivating Dostoevsky novel provided unlimited possibilities for constructing the whole opera in the declamatory style. The abundance of dialogues in the novel permitted the au- thor of the libretto and music to preserve the style of Dostoevsky's language, that prose which, in the composer's opinion, was «bright- er, more vivid, and more convincing than any poetry.»5 Dostoev- sky's prosaic but expressive language dictated the transparent or- chestration of The Gambler. The composer did not burden the singers with complex combinations so that they could concentrate on the dramatic side of the work and communicate to the audience a clear, transparent, and beautiful text of the background of the musical accompaniment. The music here only deepened the artistic content of the opera and never assumed the dominant role during the declamatory singing. This was the only way that music could, or should be made to fit a Dostoevsky work. Prokof'ev's Gambler gave a clear and instructive lesson for all operatic and . In view of the innovative nature of The Gambler and in order not to elicit the objections of the more conservatively inclined members of the commission of review for operatic novelties for the repertoire of the Imperial Mariinskii Opera Theater in Pe- tersburg, the director Coates intentionally did not mention the opera to Ts. Kiui and A. Glazunov in order to arrange a private hearing for the work in the home of the director of the Imperial Theaters, V. Teliakovskii. This private audience took place on April 7,1916 at the Teliakovskii house and was attended by Prokof'ev, A. Ziloti, A. Coates, the directors N. Mal'ko, A. Aslanov, D. Pokhito- nov, and the head director of the theater, I. Tartakov. And although Teliakovskii himself was disturbed by Prokof'ev's unconventional music, the praise of the young theater directors and the others decided the matter. Teliakovski resolved to take the risk and signed a contract for the opera with the author. Then came a pleasant advance and one hundred numbers of a lithograph of the opera's score. Prokof'ev spent the whole summer of 1916 work-

s Ibid.

122 ing on the orchestration, but the Mariinskii production of the Op- era lagged, and all the work on the score, dozens of pages a day and sometimes even more, proved inconclusive for a time. Then came the Revolution. The Mariinskii theater replaced Teliakovskii as director with A. Ziloti who could not deal with the and singers who were not keen on getting into the «complexities,» from their point of view, of the modernistic opera The Gambler. In March of 1918 the Kusevitskii Publishing House in Moscow ad- vanced 6,000 rubles for the publication rights to The Scythian Suite, The Jester, and The Gambler. This aided Prokof'ev's journey abroad, but for a long time it stopped any plans to produce The Gambler in the composer's native land. When in 1927 Prokof'ev first visited the USSR after his long absence, a project to produce The Gambler appeared in Leningrad. Toward this end the compos- er again set to work on the opera in order to review it and cleanse it of all futurist extremism which now, the years after its creation, were even more obvious on the background of the truly valuable music. Everything doubtful from the point of view of the mature composer at the full flower of his powers was removed by the author and replaced by new, successfully rebuilt passages. More- over the composer set himself the general task of adjusting the vocal scores and orchestration. In Leningrad Prokof'ev received the old score and immediately got to work on a new edition of The Gambler. The new version actually turned out to be a complete rewrite although he kept the main material and plan of the opera. The composer wrote to his friend Miaskovskii on April 5, 1928, «The New Gambler is quite a different thing than before.»4 But again the composer's departure abroad put a stop to any plans for producing The Gambler in Leningrad. And it was only abroad, in Belgium on April 29, 1929 at the Theatre de that a French translation of the work titled Le Joueur was finally pro- duced so long after the creation of the opera based on Dostoevsky. The fact that The Gambler did not leave the theater posters for two years testifies to the success of the work. Prokof'ev himself recalled with gratitude this first production at a modest, but outstanding European theater. The performance was done carefully and tastefully. It maintained the chief element for the composer — the dramatic tension, which grew taut in the story and opera and which did not stop mounting in the musical

* Arkhiv S. S. Prokof'eva [S. S. Prokof'ev Archive] (Moscow: Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstwa), Reserve No. 2040. Here cited from S. S. Prokof'ev. Materials, p. 654. 123 work until the very end. Prokof'ev cited with special pleasure in his memoirs the statements of one of the critics: «Hearing The Gambler one experiences a pleasure analogous, though in modern forms, to that which one derives from the music of Mozart.»7 In 1957 The Gambler was staged at the Darmstadt Theater in Germany. But Sergei Prokof'ev always wanted to see this opera about the twistings of the Russian soul limned by Dostoevsky per- formed on a Russian stage for a Russian audience to whom the sufferings of the characters would not be «some incomprehensible folly of the Slavic soul,» but a true reflection of modern man's spiritual dialectics. In 1930 the Russian Musical Publishers issued the second edition of The Gambler, but during the composer's lifetime there was no production of the work in his native land. In Paris Prokof'ev considered a symphonic suite based on The Gambler. The difficulties here lay in the fact that the music for the opera was born of a close musical tracing of language. The symphonic music had to be found in the gaps and intervals between speech in the opera. Creating portraits of the characters instead of a suite was also far from easy given the dispersion of characterization throughout the whole opera. The composer remembered that he reduced his work by undoing the piano score of the opera, taking out everything about a specific character, and putting all this in a separate group of materials. Then, having condensed them into episodes, he began to join them on the basis of similarity. Such groupings were much easier to manage musically and to put into harmonious musical portraits of Aleksei Ivanovich, Polina, the general, and Babulen'ka. After he had added a «Denouement,» the composer reorchestrated the work and finished it in 1931. On March 12, 1932 there was a Parisian performance of the Portraits. The experience of creating an independent symphonic suite based on Dostoevsky also proved useful, as the author stated to Miaskov- skii on March 18, 1932.8 Later the composer created symphonies based on the themes of his other operas. In the Vsevolod Meierkhol'd constantly pressed for a production of Prokof'ev's Gambler, but he always met with op- position to the shocking novelty of this unconventional «leftist» opera. Only in Pilzen, Czechoslovakia, and Paris could it be occasionally produced. But could it really sound authentic in a foreign translation? A national composition needs above all a national interpretation. The dynamism and irony of Dostoevsky's

» Ibid., p. 183. » Ibid., p. 656. 124 prose was happily united in the opera with the dramatic inclination of the composer himself. However, the long awaited miracle, which the author did not live to see, did take place after half a century. Following the suc- cessful productions of Prokof'ev's operas , Semen Kotko, and Love for Three Oranges, and the new plans for a pro- duction of The Burning Angel and the early ballet The Jester, not to mention the , Romeo and Juliet, and Tales of a Stone Flower, and the operas and Story of a Real Man, the turn finally came for The Gambler. In 1963 the All-Union Radio initiated a production of the opera directed by Gennadi Rozhdestvenskii. With his inspired guidance a huge cast of performers completed an enormous effort to prepare this production for the Moscow Columned Hall, a rather unusual setting for an opera. Rozhdestvenskii placed the orchestra in the first rows of the stalls, thus freeing the stage for action. However in this semitheater the high artistic merits of Prokof'ev's work, which were undervalued by earlier generations, were displayed with complete conviction. The producer V. Shlezinger and the designer A. Averbakh did everything possible to make the performance simultaneusly full of life and theatricality. The living word in of dynamic theatrical action, supported by the characteristic orchestra which harmonized precisely with every nuance of drama onstage, proved more natural and accessible than one would have supposed possible. Prokof'ev's original music in no way interfered with the perception of comprehension of the . The ac- curacy of tone in the pointed, vital, and emotional Russian speech dominated in the opera over grotesque exaggeration. In the group scenes many portrait characteristics simply reflected their persua- siveness and correspondence to the figures in the novel. One was surprised and struck by the artistry of characterization within the very fine nuances of spiritual life and the shifts of warring passions. In the orchestra one could hear either the outbursts of despair, confusion, and pitiful babble, or bitter laughter and the cold triumph of «cold cash» — the invisible and terrible hero of this whole play of passions. The orchestra's inclination to sharp regis- ters reflected the tormented bitterness and nervous excitement of the characters. The tense high of the orchestra expressed the torture and confusion of Aleksei Ivanovich and Polina and foretold that Russian musical impressionism which is so evident in Prokof'ev's The Burning Angel and is continued in the music of D. Shostakovich. Rozhdestvenskii sensed the nervous pulse of Prokof'ev's music 125 and its very acute dynamism. The running dialogue of bunches of characters in engagement, for example Babulen'ka and the as- tounded general, the marquis and Blanche, sounded excellent. In the gambling house scene the music specifically captured the intense dynamics, the constant increase, the wild excitement of the music of roulette and the feverish conversations of the gamblers caught by the stupefying power of money. The orchestra beautifully rendered the loss through gambling of the human part of a man maddened by the lust for gain. The innovative essence of the stage aspect of The Gambler, which rejected the canons of the old romantic «opera style,» was however not always displayed by the performers. They proved to be far better singers than actors. But Prokof'ev's opera demand- ed equal mastery of singing and acting, since the players had to be able not only to sing well but to give speeches well in order to meet the level of Prokof'ev's declamatory style. Meierkhol'd pointed this out in his day. More successful in this regard was the singer N. Poliakova who played Polina. She managed to combine the freedom of vocal play with musical scope and dramatic expressiveness. Also musical was the performance of V. Makhov as Aleksei Ivanovich. He accurately sensed the tension of the dramatic atmosphere, but was somewhat monotonous and lacked the necessary youthful uninhibitedness and rebellious mischief, the independence and fervency of feelings. T. Antipova expressively sang the part of Babulen'ka, but she could hardly portray the rich image of a Russian noble lady of the manor in all its power. G. Troitskii as the general and A. So- kolov as the marquis, despite all their freedom and temperament in behavior on stage and the dramatism of their singing, could not capture the sense of the ironic subcurrent. However, many episodic roles made a deep impression on the audience's memory despite the miniature nature of these parts. For example G. Abramov's comically sober Englishman, M. Budrin's wildly babbling servant Potapych, and A. Korolev's self-assured roulette director were all well done. The high esthetic value of the music clearly dominated in this performance. The audience in the Columned Hall and on the radio derived enormous esthetic pleasure from iti The critics reacted favorably to the work and gave it their professional ap- proval.9 Finally, on September 26, 1970 the opera was produced

9 I. Nestev's, VIgrok' S. Prokof'eva» [S. Prokof'ev's The Gambler], So- vetskaya Muzyka [Soviet Music], No. 4, 1964, pp. 100-102. D. Zhitomirskii, «Prokof'ev, Dostoevskii i radio» [Prokof'ev, Dostoevsky, and Radiol, Teatr, No. 10, 1967, pp. 1920. S. Shlifshtein, «'Igrok'i Opera S. Prokof'eva v kon- 126 at the «Vanemuine» Theater, the Estonian State Theater for Dra- ma, Opera, , and Ballet in Tartu. The Gambler, which began its career on the concert stage, the radio and television, saw the light of the stage in a theater whose very name in Estonian means «god of song.» Since 1974, this opera has been also on unfailing success on the stage in Moscow. This dazzling new staging of a fascinating opera was presented for the first time in the US, in June and July 1975. Thus The Gambler proved its right to a long stage life in Russian and world theaters.

II Prokov'ev's example in writing operas based on Dostoevsky has not remained unique. Following Prokof'ev's lead the outstanding Czech composer Leos Jandcek created an opera based on Notes from the House of the Dead10 in 1928 was first performed in 1930 at Brno. Besides such Western European , there has been work on Dostoevsky based operas in the USSR. Thus, for example, the Leningrad composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovskii is working on a new opera, Nastas'ia Filippovna, based on The Idiot. " Others are working on different operatic projects based on Dostoev- sky. But the path is difficult for an operatic work, particularly one that follows Dostoevsky. None of these composers is in any hurry to reveal his plans. Occasionally a short note on the subject turns up in a paper and then there is silence again. Even so the world opera theater can still count in its active file Prokof'ev's Gambler, Jandcek's From the House of the Dead, Otakar Jeremi&s's Czech opera The Brothers Karamazov, an based on Crime and Punishment by Arrigo Pedrollo, a Raskol'nikov by the Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister which was produced in in 1942 and in Sweden in 1948 at the Svenska Kungliga Operan [The Swedish Royal Opera] in Stockholm, and Italian sertnom ispolnenii» [The Gambler. S. Prokof'ev's Opera in a Concert Per- formance], Muzykal'naya zhizn' [Musical Life], No. 2, 1964, pp. 8-9. E. Mnatsa- kanova, «Vtoroe rozhdenie opery» [The Second Birth of an Opera], Kom- somol'skaia pravda, April 3, 1964. Also a set of 3 records: Gambler, opera by S. Prokofiev, Stereo, «Melodia» (Moscow, 1972). 10 Leos Jan&cek, Z mrtviho domu. Opera о trech dfijstvich na text skla- dateliu podle Zapisku z mrtviho domu F. M. Dostojevskeho. [From the House of the Dead. An Opera in three acts based on a text adapted from F. M. Dosto- evsky's Notes From the House of the Dead] (Prague, Opera Nirodniho Di- vadla, 1955). 11 «Opera po romanu Dostoevskogo» [An Opera Based on a Dostoevsky Novel], Leningradskaia pravda, February 11, 1964. 127 Grand Inquisitor by Renzo Rossellini. There is even a ballet based on The Idiot by the German composer Hans Henze which was put on in Berlin in 1952. In Hungary Emil Petrovics proved his talent as an operatic composer with his musical masterpiece, a 1969 version of Crime and Punishment. A German composer living in Prague, Hans Krasa, created an opera based on «Uncle's Dream» entitled Betrothal in a Dream which was produced in 1933. Using the story «A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree,» Renzo Rossellini created a 1947 ballet titled Winter's Tale. Also known is Lutze's ballet Raskol'nikov from 1964. Boris Blacher composed a dramatic oratorio, Der Grossinquisitor, in 1948. In 1964 a scene for' , , and symphony orchestra was written by Giselher Klebe under the title Raskol'nikov's Dream [Raskolnikows Traum]. Also using the name Raskol'nikov in 1925 and 1929, the Austrian com- poser Emil N. von Reznicek wrote two for a symphony orchestra. The Czech composer V. Sommer also produced a vocal symphony from a Dostoevsky text. Quite recently, in 1970, two Italian composers turned to Dostoev- sky for inspiration. Luciano Shai composed a musical drama based on The Idiot which was produced in , and Valentino Bucchi created a grotesque opera based on «The Crocodile» which was put on in Florence in May of 1970. Thus the musical assimilation of Dostoevsky's works is constantly gaining breadth and power. Although in the symphony and oratorio works based on Dostoev- sky themes by various authors the expressionistic approach is dominant and the operas and ballets taken from the same sources reflect the Wagnerian and veristic traditions which stress emotion, pointed dramatic situations, and lyrical culminations, all of these works fall far short of a true embodiment of the great writer's philosophical problems. The tendency to melodrama and superfi- cial illustration, as well as a devotion to one-sided melodized are an obstacle to the creation of musical equivalents of the famous novels. Less guilty of these errors are the operatic versions of Crime and Punishment by Heinrich Sutermeister and Emil Petrovics. Although their works shared the title Raskol'nikov, their operas are different in composition and character. Both had in common a concern for the spiritual tragedy of Rodion Raskol'ni- kov, and Sutermeister did not neglect other themes and characters in the novel. While Sutermeister's opera did leave out Dunia, Svidrigailov, and Porfirii and the Marmeladovs were turned into the owners of the apartment house, the composer and • the librettist (P. Sutermeister, the composer's brother) did attempt to produce some Russian color by introducing a scene with a bear at the Hay-

128 market which dances to the sound of a flute and singing. From the part one could hear the music of modern dances. In the course of the action it turns out that the guilty party is actually the money lender who set Sonia Marmeladova on the path of sin. The murder of the pawn broker, therefore, proves to be an act of revenge for Soma's suffering. The melodramatic treatment of mo- tivation here is really a continuation of the old-fashioned tradition of the French and German adaptations of Dostoevsky's novels made at the end of the last century. They certainly do not reach the philosophical content of the novels. Yet Sutermeister did reach a peak in his use of recitative and speech without musical accompaniment as well as independent symphonic acts to set the mood and psychological background for the action. Sutermeister's work provides a new solution to the problem of depicting the main character's split personality. Along with a Raskol'nikov, the opera put forward a second repre- sentation of the hero — a Raskol'nikov who suggests to the first the idea of affirming his personality through crime, just as Goethe's Mephistopheles promises wealth, power, and greatness to those who break the law. The central operative motif of the work is then Raskol'nikov's struggle with this phantom. Sonia Marmeladova, the personification of the hero's conscience, helps him overcome the urgings of his second «self» — the idea of killing himself. To strengthen the religious aspect of Sonia the play introduced a special scene in a church. The triumph over temp- tation is expressed in stage action and the music — the first «self» becomes more audible while the second grows silent. The strong experimental current in Sutermeister's music here served the sym- phonic expression of elements of the subconscious and the illumi- nation of a person through the good offices of human love. Compared to Sutermeister's opera, in which some new forms of expressing the symphonic and polyphonic sides of Dostoevsky's novel were found, Emil Petrovics's opera was dominated by a gigantic monologue by Raskol'nikov on the background of the stage events. The opera's rapid changes of scene, use of dodecaphonic and electronic music, and its voices sounded, both in live per- formance and on tapes, like depictions of the subconcious and the battle of the contradictions in it. However Raskol'nikov's inner world was portrayed by Petrovics without any sign of new dis- coveries in the realm of Dostoevsky research or the Bakhtin de- finition of this writer's novel as polyphonic. Thus the newest student of the theme of «Dostoevsky and Music,» Abram Gozenpud, comes to the conclusion that Petrovics's opera «does not communi- 129 9 cate all the wealth and variety of the brilliant book.» 12 It is true that Petrovics is not guilty of such a simplification of the philoso- phical and social issues as marks the most recent attempts at creat- ing a musical drama based on Dostoevsky in . This fault ap- plies to the composer Luciano Shai and his opera The Idiot which reduces the whole complexity of the characters to a «love triangle.» 13 Petrovic's work belongs among the positive efforts of modern musi- cal composition derived from Dostoevsky. In this regard Petrovics might be called a continuer of the best initiatives in this area made by the Czech composers of the twenties, Leos Jan&cek and Otakar Jeremi^s. In their Dostoevsky operas, Notes From the House of the Dead and The Brothers Karamazov found their finest embodi- ment to this day. In his opera Brothers Karamazov Jeremiai concentrated his creative energies on the characters of Dmitrii and Grushen'ka, and he showed how suffering purified their souls and love improved them morally. At Mokroe they accept each other in a moment of shattering catastrophe. Their monologues and dialogues express their deep yearning for a better life. The la- conicism and brevity of the text also promoted the expressiveness of the musical devices and the development of the main dramatic scenes like Dmitrii's confession, his stormy scene with his father, the Mokroe scene, the court scene, and the prison hospital scene. Similarly expressive in the opera was the elder Karamazov. Jeremi&s's striving for universal meaning was evident in a certain diminution of the Russian national coloration, the absence of which was noted by the same critic Gozenpud.14 Jan&cek's From the House of the Dead was built around the story of the political exile Aleksandr Gorianchikov, the narrator of the novel Notes from the House of the Dead, and his conflicts with force, embodied in the Drill-Major, the commandant of the prison in Omsk. The composer sucessfully used the active principle of the story and lent the musical expression a shattering embodiment. Jan^cek's high dramatism was organically combined with a power- ful lyric current in the opera. He also made good use of the wounded eagle which the prisoners set free to make a parallel with the release of Gorianchikov as well as with each man who longs for freedom but is deprived of it in the prison. On the basis of Russian songs Jan&cek created completely independent melodies for the prisoners without any reference to actual fragments of

12 A. Gozenpud, Dostoevskii i muzyka [Dostoevsky and Music] (Lenin- grad, Izdatel'stvo «Muzyka», 1971), p. 169. » Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 164. 130 Russian folklore. Jandcek's recitative expressively rendered tones of speech. Despite the absence of developed and normal numbers Jan&cek's recitative was the fundamental device for transmiting the opera's contents. If one adds to the obvious skill and merits of Jandcek's music the great love for an unfortunate man, and the justification of the expression of genuine dramatism, then it will be quite obvious why contemporary musical criticism gave such high praise to Jan£cek's opera. In our day the music scholar A. Gozenpud gives both Jandcek's From the House of the Dead and Prokof'ev's Gambler «one of the first places in the ranks of Musical versions of Dostoevsky.» 15 Musical adaptations of Dostoevsky's novels touch one of the most difficult aspects of staging his works. This explains a certain backwardness in the musical adaptation of his work as compared to the dramatic reworking of the novels. Even composers suited to Dostoevsky in spirit, like Modest Musorgskii and Dmitrii Shosta- kovich, did not attempt to reproduce his characters. Of course an interest in the mysteries of human nature, revelation of inescapable tragedy and sensitivity to suffering, and the depiction of the tor- mented conscience of does make Musorgskii rather close to the creator of Raskol'nikov. One can also see Dostoevsky's influence in Kuter'ma with his painful conscience in N. A. Rimskii- Korsakov's Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh. There is also some similarity in the feverish excitement of the action and the passionate dramatism of the characters in the operatic works of Tsezar Kiui, and Angelo. The mounting insanity of the hero in P. I. Chaikovskii's Queen of Spades, and his idea of gaining wealth are like Dolgorukii in A Raw Youth and the «fixed idea» of Raskol'nikov. The struggle of the bright, elevated, and noble forces of the human spirit with the powers of evil in the symphonies and operas of Shostakovich link him to the author of Crime and Punish- ment. In Shostakovich's opera and particularly in his Katerina Izmailova the Dostoevskian elements are the bitter humor, the ominous atmosphere, parody and grotesque as the basis of the musical language of the first work, and, in the second opera, the psychological complexity which goes far beyond N. S. Leskov's story «Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.» As in Dmitrii Ka- ramazov, there is a «devil struggling with God» in Katerina Iz- mailov's heart, and she is ready both for self-denial and for triple murder. Shostakovich's music communicated the true tragic ca- tharsis and is full of a sense of catastrophe and the idea of moral

ls Ibid., p. 166. 131 purification. Gozenpud wrote, «In Russian and world music there are no pages as congenial to Dostoevsky as the last act of Shostako- vich's opera.» ,4 Dostoevsky's influence touched the operatic actors F. I. Stravin- skii, father of the composer Igor Stravinskii, I. Ershov, Fedor Chaliapin, and many others. Chaliapin was almost Dostoevsky's equal in the enormous depth and power of his voice which often represented on the stage a human soul embittered by sin and decline. His performance as the suffering Boris Godunov incor- porated a great deal from the rich artistic experience of Dostoevsky. Operatic works based on Dostoevsky and musical representations of his characters in general have a great deal in common, since music is able to communicate much that is iost in the process of dramatic adaptation of the novels. Music can portray the inner essence, that spiritual atmosphere which becomes far more apparent in any conversion of the novel into drama or libretto. Music depicts that depth which, to a great degree, is lost in the transfer of a novel to the stage. And in this regard opera and ballet pre- sent a great future. For the musical theater, adaptation of Dosto- evsky's novels opens unheard of prospects and promises many new discoveries and attainments. This is a result of the fact that Dostoevsky's works are rich in episodes constructed on the principle of musical and theatrical dramaturgy which mix the contrasts of piano and forte (silence and sound), choral, ensemble, and solo scenes, as well as events that cry out for operatic treatment, like the duels of Nastas'ia Filippovna and or Aglaia, Mysh- kin and Rogozhin, and many other scenes in Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. Here the main contribution lies in the future for the composers of the world. The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Dostoevsky's birth which came in October of 1971 was marked by an international symposium in Bad Ems and the creation of a World Society of Dostoevsky Scholars. Of course it was also widely celebrated in the USSR by scholarly conferences and a renewal of scholarly re- search and publishing activities devoted to Dostoevsky. All of this activity holds out new prospects for a theater of Dostoevsky. The musical interpretation of Dostoevsky's works, begun so successfully by Sergei Prokof'ev and continued by a whole pleiad of musicians around the world, promises many new achievements and discoveries which will be a new contribution to world culture and the good of all mankind.

i« Ibid., p. 155.

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