Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Pauline Fairclough.
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
New York: Oxford University Press
128pp (Ills, table).
Hb. ISBN: 9780197534939. $99
Pb. ISBN: 9780197534946. $18.99
Also available as an e-book.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is inarguably one of Shostakovich’s key works, both musically and biographically but, Pauline Fairclough argues, that importance combined with factors including Cold War musical politics has muddied the water, and too often people have been happy to accept received wisdom. Here, she begins the process of clarifying the often much-simplified history of the opera and to add nuance to our understanding of it—particularly its sexual politics—both as a piece of 1930s Soviet art and how we might approach it today.

The common understanding is that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was a roaring success until Stalin saw it and instigated Pravda’s condemnatory article “Muddle Instead of Music,” leading to the opera’s disappearance until the 1963 premiere of Katerina Izmailova, for which Shostakovich toned down the text and removed the more provocative music to create a Party-approved version. In the 1970s the “original” was discovered, meaning there was little need for Shostakovich’s “compromised” second version. Fairclough teases out that history to show the levels of misunderstanding, mis- and disinformation, and simple absence of evidence. Not only were the revisions less extensive and more targeted than is often implied, but she points out the wrinkles and holes in the story of Rostropovich’s “discovery” of the “original version,” and how this and the near-simultaneous publication of Testimony helped set in place the widely accepted narrative.¹

Fairclough begins by quoting Taruskin’s condemnation of the opera as “a profoundly inhumane work of art” and a “proto-Stalinist celebration of the liquidation of socially undesirable elements.”² As she doesn’t present a counter-argument, she presumably takes the currently accepted narrative as fulfilling that role. But in any case, much of her focus is on the equally troubling sexual politics.

For the West, the opera’s suppression led to a tacit “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”: if the Soviets didn’t like Lady Macbeth, then we should. As that attitude solidified, the original version became almost beyond criticism and was marshalled as evidence of the martyring of the composer—cue references to his opera career’s dead stop; e.g. David Pountney’s “We were cheated of the composer who could have been the Verdi of the twentieth century.”³ That left the “inferior” Katerina Izmailova as a curiosity.

But as Fairclough points out, all the evidence points to Shostakovich’s sincerity in the revision—he worked on it for many years, expressed his preference both publicly and privately, made several attempts to get it accepted, and forbade performances of the original. Of course, whatever Lady Macbeth’s proponents may imply, to argue for the revision is not to agree with Stalin. Despite his advocacy for the “original,” Rostropovich had earlier lobbied for a third version, combining parts of the two existing ones, though he never detailed his ideas. In a 2002 interview with the DSCH Journal, Maxim said the revision was not forced on his father, but that he, too would like to create “a mixed version—some original and some revision.”⁴

In the UK, Pountney’s 1987 English National Opera production, together with its marketing and a broadcast on BBC TV, hammered some powerful nails into the revision’s coffin. ENO’s programme book was replete with unqualified quotes from Testimony and, again coincidentally, Tony Palmer’s film was released a few months later, reproducing the Rostropovich/Volkov double whammy.

But what actually is “the original”? As invaluable as they are, textological study, and “librettology”⁵ do not, alas, set audiences alight; they are satisfied to think there are two versions and they are hearing the original. If only it were so simple.

Early productions (at the Maly, produced by Nikolai Smolich and conducted by Samosud; at the Nemirovich-Danchenko by Mordvinov and Stoliarov; plus the third at the Bolshoi) were not musically or lyrically identical. This means there is a plethora of material to sift through. The New Collected Works (2016) is now the standard edition, though Samosud’s annotated score (held by the Mariinsky Theatre Library) was unavailable for study, and a decade later some of the other manuscripts that were consulted seem no longer to be in the Shostakovich Archive. While Fairclough makes many strides in reconstructing the history of the revisions, some details remain obscure and perhaps always will.

What is clear, even from the materials we do have, is that Shostakovich and Preis struggled to wrench Leskov’s story into something Sovietic while keeping it dramaturgically logical, and that in places they failed.⁶ Ideologically, it had to become a class struggle, but that sidelined coherent individual motivation. Thus, Katerina is made more innocent (e.g. by removing the killing of the child which, as Shostakovich observed, “is particularly wicked and unjustified”⁷), while everyone else is an evil stereotype. Arguably liberating herself from her oppressive pre-Soviet background, this makes Katerina the “ray of light in the dark kingdom.”⁸ Discussions even veered into whether or not she was less a Lady Macbeth than a Desdemona, or a Juliet, or even a Beatrice.

Fairclough focuses on three moments, in descending order of prioritisation: Katerina and Sergei’s sex scene; the attack on Aksinya; and the last act. For the first two, she investigates to what degree they would have been considered sexual assault at the time, by looking at Soviet attitudes to sex socially, legally (with particular reference to a notorious gang-rape case from 1926), and in literature.

As with so much of the opera, these are sometimes linked to questions of class. Some have hinted that as a peasant, Aksinya was of less worth, and therefore the attack is less heinous. Shostakovich and Preis certainly portray her a less attractive, even if not deserving whatever happens to her. But for Fairclough, her gossiping with Katerina indicates a higher status in the household than she is generally accorded, and at one point the libretto indicated that she was a wet-nurse.

And what of Katerina’s slowness to intervene? Doesn’t that undermine attempts to make her a sympathetic character? It’s another moment that Shostakovich and Preis wrestled with, ultimately leaving the problem with producers.

These ambiguities are ingrained in the work. Fairclough spoke to singers Josephine Barstow and Eva-Maria Westbroek, neither of whom thought Katerina had been raped, whatever Shostakovich’s conception. She doesn’t quote them directly, respecting the fact that they had come to this conclusion honestly through working on the opera and developing a backstory for Katerina in rehearsal.

In the final act, Sonyetka connives with Sergei to con Katerina out of her warm stockings and mocks her for not being able to keep him. But this distinctly unfeminist behaviour is of less interest to Fairclough, who looks at this scene again from how Katerina stands out against the other characters. Sonyetka joins the stereotypes of the rest of the opera, but the other prisoners fare even worse, sinking into an undifferentiated mass.

The problem for some contemporary critics was not this depersonalisation (after all, opera choruses and characters with only a line or two have little enough chance to draw complex characters), but that this mass accepts their Dostoevskian fate, and despite their suffering do not rise up against their Tsarist oppressors in true Soviet fashion; the only way to view it through a class lens. Again, some minor changes in the revision make this a little more nuanced.

But the major focus is Sergei and Katerina’s sex scene; few discussions of the opera fail to mention it, allowing writers to both condemn the “prudish” and “puritanical” Stalin and to quote the delightful neologism “pornophony.” It was clearly always a highlight, at least musically; a newsreel was made of scenes from the opera and Shostakovich playing it at the piano.

But Fairclough denies the implied monolithic culture. In further evidence of its paradoxical nature, the popular films Bed and Sofa (1927) and The Counterplan (1932)—the second of which Shostakovich scored—feature relationships that are something like ménages à trois, similar to that of Mayakovsky and the Briks. More notably, his marriage to Nina Varzar, while devoted, was semi-open.

Perhaps he felt that in dedicating Lady Macbeth to his new bride he was honouring her with “the best of him,” but the troubling sexual content makes the dedication at least a little strange. And he retained the dedication for the revision, though he was by then married to someone else.

Much of the debate about the scene revolves around ideas of consent which might seem contemporary, but were just as relevant in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Shostakovich and Preis tried several ways of approaching this even before it went into production, where the staging could bring another layer of interpretation.

Preis seems to have been the more daring in trying to whitewash Katerina, at one point going as far as making her a virgin, the further to condemn Zinovy’s sexual inadequacy. But their to-and-fro compromises led to an inconsistent portrait, leaving producers to paper over cracks.

Fairclough delves into the Maly and Nemirovich-Danchenko productions, explaining as far as possible how each was staged, and how they dealt with the notorious scene.⁹ In Fairclough’s view, Smolich’s approach was the most successful and points toward the solutions of Katerina Izmailova.

As for how the Lady Macbeth debacle fed into the cultural policies of the time—was it the spark for, or the result of, the moves against “formalism”? For Fairclough, the culture was already moving in that direction and though the opera’s initial success had been a protection, once the mood turned against it some saw an opportunity to reopen old battles against Shostakovich and his mentor, the suspiciously polymathic Ivan Sollertinsky.

Finally, what about Lady Macbeth today? How do we turn round that supertanker of misunderstanding? And how to produce it in an era of such different sensibilities? It’s a difficult question.

The “authorised version” narrative surrounding the “original” is difficult to shift, not least because the problematic sections are so powerful musically, and with clever stagings and committed acting the narrative bumps can be smoothed over or at least made less obvious.

Fairclough speculates that without the controversies, Lady Macbeth / Katerina Izmailova would perhaps have less of a grip on the repertoire. But a grip it does have and she recognises the strength of the music—to whatever purpose Shostakovich put it.

She ponders whether Katerina Izmailova is even stageable at the moment, given its status as the Putin-approved version. But just as endorsing the revision is not to support Stalin, neither is staging it to support Putin.

While there’s much discussion of the political context and the libretto and its variants, the music itself gets scant attention. The magpie-composer’s nods to the misogynistic Onegin and Der Rosenkavalier’s boorish Ochs, and the mockingly bogus heldentenor-ism of Sergei don’t balance the scale to make the work untroublingly feminist, but that layer of meaning remains to be explored in detail.

Oxford Keynotes are aimed at “performers, curious listeners and advanced undergraduates.” Marina Frolova-Walker’s study of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 was reviewed in DSCH 61, and readers may also be interested in the volumes on Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, and Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1.

Like some other OUP books, an accompanying website includes texts for which there was no room in the book, e.g. the English translation of “Muddle Instead of Music.” Reader-friendliness and space are presumably why Russian texts tend not to be included (even transliterated) and, where possible, the reader is pointed to English-language sources.

Fairclough clearly has much more to say, but it feels like the format of the series was a constraint. Hopefully, she can continue her research into the areas that are here necessarily curtailed, to bring us a fuller account of the entire opera, including its music.

John Riley

---

Notes

1. In a similar revelation, Rozhdestvensky discovered the previously “lost” (in fact, actively suppressed) score to New Babylon within a few months of the composer’s death.
2. Richard Taruskin, “Shostakovich and the Inhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
3. In fact, Shostakovich considered and even started several operas, though he only completed Cheryomushki. See Rosamund Bartlett, “Shostakovich as Opera Composer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich, eds. Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 179–197.
4. John Riley and Henny van de Groep, “Maxim on Shostakovich,” in DSCH 16, 47–48.
5. As in Caryl Emerson, “Back the Future: Shostakovich’s Revision of Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (1989), 59–78.
6. Fairclough opts largely to present things in reverse chronological order, discussing the opera first, before outlining Leskov’s story and how Preis and Shostakovich altered it.
7. Sovetskoye iskusstvo, 3 March 1933.
8. The title of Nikolai Dobroliubov’s essay on Ostrovsky’s play The Storm. Sovremennik, no. 10 (1860).
9. Sergei Eisenstein, “Katerina Izmailova i Dama s Kameliya,” in Selected Works in Six Volumes, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1966), 536–604.

---