The katorga (labor camp) scene is a direct musical embodiment of certain pages from Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead. For Shostakovich the convicts are neschastnen'kie, or "poor little wretches," and judges at the same time. Katerina suffers from her conscience and her intonations coincide, almost blend, with the melodies of the prisoners'
chorus; that is, the individual and sinful dissolves into the general, the ethical. This concept of redemption and cleansing is cardinal in Dostoevsky; in I.Ady Macbeth it is expressed with almost melodramatic frankness. Shostakovich does not hide his sermonizing intentions.
The road traveled by Shostakovich from The Nose to I.Ady Macbeth is the distance between a young man of great promise and a widely known composer. I.Ady Macbeth was an enormous-and unparalleled-success for a contemporary work. It was given thirty-six times in the five months after its premiere in Leningrad in 1934, and in Moscow it had ninety-four performances in two seasons. It was presented almost immediately in Stockholm, Prague, London, Zurich, and Copenhagen; Toscanini added fragments from it to his repertoire. The American premiere under Artur Rodzinski created great interest; Virgil Thomson's article in Modem Music (1935) was titled "Socialism at the Metropolitan."
Shostakovich was hailed as a genius.
Then calamity. Stalin came to see I.Ady Macbeth and left the theater in a rage. On January 28, 1936, the devastating editorial "Mud-xx viii
die Instead of Music" appeared in the official Party organ, Pravda, dictated in fact by Stalin. "The listener is flabbergasted from the first moment of the opera by an intentionally ungainly, muddled flood of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases, drown, escape, and drown once more in crashing, gnashing, and screeching. Following this 'music' is difficult, remembering it is impossible."
This was a time when terror raged across the land. Purges took on immense proportions. A new country was growing within the country-the "Gulag Archipelago." Within this context, Stalin's warning to Shostakovich in Pravda-"This is playing at abstruse things, which could end very badly" -was clearly and directly threatening. And one week later a second editorial appeared in Pravda, this time berating Shostakovich's music for a ballet produced by the Bolshoi Theater.
The composer and everyone around him were certain that he would be arrested. His friends maintained their distance. Like many other people at that time, he kept a small suitcase packed and ready. They usually came for their victims at night. Shostakovich did not sleep. He lay listening, waiting in the dark.
The newspapers of the period were filled with letters and articles demanding death for "terrorists, spies, and conspirators." They were signed by almost everyone who hoped to survive; but whatever the risk, Shostakovich would not sign such a letter.
Stalin had made a private decision concerning Shostakovich that would never be rescinded; Shostakovich was not to be arrested, despite his closeness to such "enemies of the people" ruthlessly destroyed by Stalin as Meyerhold and Marshal Tukhachevsky. In the framework of Russian culture the extraordinary relationship between Stalin and Shostakovich was profoundly traditionaclass="underline" the ambivalent "dialogue"
between tsar and yurodivy, and between tsar and poet playing the role of yurodivy in order to survive, takes on a tragic incandescence.
A wave of Stalin's hand created and destroyed entire cultural movements, not to mention individual reputations. The article in Pravda was the start of a vicious campaign against Shostakovich and his confreres. The epithet used was "formalism," which was shifted from an aesthetic lexicon to a political one.
In the history of Soviet literature and art there is not a single even slightly significant figure who has not been at one time or another xxix
branded a "formalist. " It was an entirely arbitrary accusation. Many of those accused of it perished. After the "Muddle" article, Shostakovich was in despair, near suicidal. The constant anticipation of arrest affecte.d his mind. For nearly four decades, until his death, he would see himself as a hostage, a condemned man. The fear might increase or decrease, but it never disappeared. The entire country had become an enormous prison from which there was no escape.
(In many respects, much of Shostakovich's hostility toward and mistrust of the West comes from this period, when the West was doing its best not to notice the Gulag. Shostakovich never did have friendly contacts with a foreigner, with the possible exception of the composer Benjamin Britten. It was no accident that he dedicated to Britten his Fourteenth Symphony, for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, in which the protagonist, thrown into jail, cries out in prostration: "Here above me is the crypt, here I am dead to all.") A premonition of reprisal made Shostakovich postpone the premiere of the Fourth Symphony, which he had finished in 1936; he was afraid to tempt fate anew.* In 1932, after a stormy courtship, the composer had married Nina Varzar, a beautiful and energetic young woman and a gifted physicist. In 1936 their daughter, Galya, was born, and in 1938, their son, Maxim. So Shostakovich was now responsible not only for himself but for his family as well.
The situation was becoming increasingly dangerous. All dictators try to create an apparatus for managing "their" art; the one that Stalin built is stil.l the most effective the world had ever known. He secured from Soviet creative figures an unprecedented degree of submissiveness in the service of his continuingly shifting propaganda goals. Stalin strengthened and perfected the system of "creative unions." Within the framework of this system, the right to work (and therefore to live as an artist) comes only to those officially registered and approved. The creative unions of,writers, composers, artists, et al. were formed, begin-1
•The premiere took place over a quarter century later. For all those years the composer patiently listened to press reports that he was keeping the symphony under wraps because he was dissatisfied with it; he even encouraged this nonsense. Y ct when the symphony was finally rehearsed once more, he didn't change a single note. The conductor, who had suggested a few cuts, was refused categorically: "Let them cat it," Shostakovich said. "Let them cat it." The Fourth Symphony was a resounding success, as were revivals of other works long forbidden. His music stood the test of time:.
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ning in 1932, as bureaucratic organizations with strictly defined ranks and with equally strong accountability and constant cross-checking.
Every organization had a branch of "security services," or secret police, as well as innumerable unofficial informers. The practice continues to this day. Any attempt to circumvent one's union ended badly: various forms of pressure and repression were always ready. Moreover, obedience was rewarded. Behind this well-oiled and smoothly running mechanism stood the figure of Stalin, an inevitable presence that often gave events a grotesque, tragicomic coloration.
In Shostakovich's life and work his relationship with Stalin was a decisive factor. In a country in which the ruler has total sovereignty over the fate of his subjects, Stalin inflicted severe trials and public humiliations on Shostakovich; yet almost simultaneously he rewarded him with the highest titles and honors. Paradoxically, the honors and defamations both produced unparalleled fame for the composer.