Word: shostakoviches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...When Shostakovich revised the opera in 1956, he toned down the eroticism of both the music and the text (based on Nikolai Leskov's 1865 story). It was essentially the same work that had fallen afoul of Pravda, but noticeably missing were the trombone slides, the most literal music depiction of sexual intercourse since the famous interrupted climax in Act II of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and the lusty horn whoops in the prelude to Der Rosenkavalier...
There is no doubt that some of Shostakovich's revisions-the smoothing out of the occasionally jagged vocal lines, the more polished transitions between scenes, the improved thematic development-represent the mature second thoughts of a composer who had already completed ten of the 15 symphonies he was eventually to write. But as a rule, first impulses tend to be more vital and visceral: Hindemith's first version of Cardillac, for example, or Verdi's original Don Carlos. The same is true of Lady Macbeth. As staged by the enterprising San Francisco Opera, which gave Katerina Ismailova...
...Shostakovich, only 27 at the time of the opera's premiere, set his text with stunning effectiveness, the music by turns tragic and sardonic. Often, as in the seduction scene, the score simply overwhelms the listener with its irresistible force. At other tunes it beguiles, charms and saddens, as in Katerina's aria lamenting the lack of love in her life just before Sergei steals into her bedroom. The police station scene in Act III is a crazily comic interlude evoking some of the more manic moments in The Nose, providing a needed respite and placing the final...
...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