Word: mtsensk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...point is debatable. Cowed by the official castigation of his 1930-32 masterpiece, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich never completed another opera, to the world's inestimable loss. Who knows what other great works went unwritten while Shostakovich was living a double life? "Tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears," he said. Moreover, at 157 minutes the film is itself guilty of some of Shostakovich's own sins, including bombast and repetitiveness...
...most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming of a bedroom scene...
Although the 15 symphonies are his best-known works, it is likely that a truer portrait of the composer is to be found in the quartets. After Shostakovich's daring opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in the pages of Pravda as "muddle instead of music," he apologized with the Fifth Symphony (1937), a "creative reply to just criticism." Censured by a Communist Party resolution of 1948 for "formalistic distortions and antidemocratic tendencies," Shostakovich wrote two of his next three symphonies about the Russian Revolution. But these works were for official consumption; spiritually, Shostakovich went underground to express...
...another candidate must be added to that list: Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which resurfaced last week in San Francisco. The composer's second and last opera - his first was the bitingly satirical The Nose (1928), based on a story by Gogol - has had a checkered history. Completed in 1932, hailed as a major achievement at its premiere in 1934, condemned by Stalin in 1936 and sanitized 20 years later as Katerina Ismailova, the opera electrified its first audiences in both Russia and the West with its sexual frankness. One early critic, referring to the lascivious...
...sexual obsession; Katerina Ismailova, by comparison, is merely about crime and punishment. The restoration of the third act of Lulu two years ago ensured that the truncated version-which was the way the opera was presented until 1979-would not be heard again. So now will Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk become the standard version of Shostakovich's masterpiece, and Katerina will fade into obscurity, an object for musicological study, not for performance. There is no longer any need to settle for the substitute when one can have the original. -By Michael Walsh