Word: macbeths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Bass Dimiter Petkov, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich conductor, Angel; 3 LPs). Soviet critics thought they heard a masterpiece when this, Shostakovich's second opera, was premiered in 1934. Then Stalin walked out of a performance and they listened again. This time they heard "din, gnash and screech" (Pravda). The work was withdrawn, and Shostakovich pursued more orthodox ways. A sanitized version, unveiled in 1963, found its way to the West on records, but this is the first recording of the original score. Harsh, erotic...
...modern dress dates from the productions of Sir Barry Jackson, starting with his Hamlet of 1925. The earliest modern-dress Caesar apparently was the anti-Fascist one with which Orson Welles, at age 22, inaugurated his Mercury Theatre in 1937 (the previous year he had mounted an all-Negro Macbeth set in the voodoo world of Haiti). In 1939 Henry Cass put the play in Mussolini's Italy. Donald Wolfit, Minos Volanakis, Michael Croft and others have since updated this drama...
...first edition in 37 years not edited by Martha Foley, who died in 1977. The final selections were made by Solotaroff. It is an outstanding collection with at least two stories that continue to reverberate: Leslie Epstein's Skaters on Wood, a startling tale about Polish Jews staging Macbeth before being rounded up by the Nazis; and Gilbert Sorrentino's Decades, a piece of superbly controlled drollery about a blue-collar New Yorker on the fringes of literary culture...
...university, 200 American high school students were sitting in a lecture hall awaiting another lecture on British politics. Past lectures given by members of different political parties, cabinet ministries and interest groups had been nowhere near as exciting as the non academic hours the students had spent exploring Macbeth's Glamis castle and the romantic lochs. But the students quickly realized that this lecture would be different...
...Vita Sackville-West's own mother, a "pure undiluted peasant," whose tantrums made austere Knole echo like some Andalusian marketplace. Victoria, wrote her daughter, was "a powerful dynamo generating nothing," an imperious, high-strung woman given to firing her servants on a whim and more turbulent than Lady Macbeth. "I think perhaps you do not realise," Victoria complained to Lord Kitchener in the midst of World War I, "that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen, and you are taking them all from us!" Victoria was so beset with lawsuits...