BOLSHOI GOLD : Revised Shostakovich Ballet Comes to L.A.

Most people would never associate the mighty Bolshoi Ballet with the tango, fox trot, Charleston and Black Bottom. Nevertheless, it is these suavely rambunctious dances of the Roaring ‘20s, so closely identified with American culture, that will fill the stage when the Moscow company opens its three-week engagement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Aug. 11 with “The Golden Age.” That’s “Zolotoi vek,” comrades.

Set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), “The Golden Age” is the most unusual of three new full-length productions--”Raymonda” and “Giselle” are the others--that the Bolshoi has brought along on its first American tour since 1979. It was introduced at the Bolshoi in 1982 and represents a drastic revision of an ill-fated ballet of the same name first staged in Leningrad in 1930.

A sardonic, fast-paced, even cinematic celebration of the Soviet Jazz Age, the original “Golden Age” ran for only 18 performances before it fell out of the repertory, a year later, for reasons that have remained murky.

One thing is certain: Changes in the political-cultural climate definitely played a role. Next stop was the ideological deep-freeze, where the score shivered for more than 50 years. Finally, in 1982, seven years after Shostakovich’s death, Yuri Grigorovich, the Bolshoi Ballet’s often controversial artistic director and chief choreographer, brought “Golden Age” back to the ballet repertory.

For the new version, Grigorovich and his literary collaborator Ivan Glikman changed the setting from a European city to a lusty Soviet seaport on the Black Sea (probably modeled on Odessa).

In other changes, “Golden Age” became the name of a rowdy cabaret where profiteering scoundrels and their molls gather for champagne and a fox trot. A slimy master of ceremonies presides, boasting of his star performer, Rita (Diva in the original version). Her partner, Yashka, is a shady character who mugs unwitting decadents with his hoodlum friends.

Even today, no Soviet ballet set in the Soviet Union would be complete without a positive hero. Here, he is Boris, a young fisherman who (conveniently) dabbles in the young workers’ propaganda theater. The struggle between Yashka and Boris over Rita obviously represents the conflict between good (Soviet Communist principles) and bad (the exploitation and greed left over from the Czarist era).

The new libretto is in a style conforming more closely to Socialist Realism than the original, and there is no more doubt over the outcome than in an episode of “Superman.”

Grigorovich, who has often been accused of megalomania even by members of the tight-lipped Bolshoi company, also supervised the revision of the score. Instead of using Shostakovich’s original version, he and a collective of Soviet composers headed by V. E. Basner have assembled a sort of collage composed of pieces of the original spliced together with other unrelated Shostakovich compositions.

Among these inserts are the slow movements from his two piano concertos, used for extended romantic pas de deux-- even though the Piano Concerto No. 2 was completed in 1957, more than 25 years after the ballet’s composition. (This process might be compared to inserting fragments from Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony into “Swan Lake.”)

Why, you may well ask, did Grigorovich find it necessary to manhandle a score written by one of the great composers of the century at the height of his powers?

Grigorovich himself is unavailable for comment on the matter but the answer seems to lie in the original libretto and choreography, which were criticized even at the premiere for failing to attain the same artistic level and unity as the music. In the best Socialist tradition, the original choreography for “Golden Age” was a collective affair, supervised by Vasily Vainonen. No doubt this helps to explain its apparent weakness and inconsistency.

Not even the presence of Leonid Lavrovsky (the future choreographer of the first Soviet production of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”) and the 20-year-old Galina Ulanova, only recently graduated from the Choreographic Institute, could save the production.

Mind you, Shostakovich was no stranger to the theater at the time. When, a wildly precocious youth of 22, he agreed in 1929 to compose a score for a ballet (his first) on “contemporary” Soviet subject matter, Shostakovich was already a celebrated composer. By then, his first symphony (1925) had achieved an almost instant international success and he had completed two more. He had also finished a brilliantly original and fiercely anti-realistic opera (“The Nose,” eventually premiered in early 1930), and several film scores.

But more important for his work in ballet was his close friendship with the brilliant stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was killed in the late 1930s after being arrested for his “subversive” aesthetic teachings. Meyerhold’s highly stylized and anti-realistic staging methods (he called his system “biomechanics”) exercised a great influence on Shostakovich’s work in the theater, opera and dance.

The director and composer were particularly close around the time when “Golden Age” was composed, and the ballet’s original sets imitated those designed for several productions then running in Meyerhold’s theater.

The original libretto for “Golden Age,” written by A. V. Ivanovsky, a film director, had won a contest sponsored by the Management of State Theaters for a contemporary review with plenty of “milling around, fighting, crushing crowds and street activity.” Set in “a certain fascist country” in contemporary Europe (originally called Faschlandia!), the action centered around the conflict between a visiting Soviet soccer team and the decadent locals, and around the seductive local dancer, Diva. An industrial exhibition where the Soviet athletes and the fascists assemble gave the ballet its title.

In writing the music, Shostakovich said he strove to illustrate “the juxtaposition of two cultures . . . the Western European dances have left the sort of unhealthy eroticism so characteristic of contemporary bourgeois culture, while the Soviet dances must be saturated with elements of healthy calisthenics and sports. I cannot envision the development of Soviet dance in any other way.”

To characterize the decadent Jazz Age Europeans, he made extensive use of the popular music and dances of the Roaring ‘20s, of course refracted through his own ironic musical lens, as well as tap dancing, waltzes, can-cans and polkas. Shostakovich also threw in a spiffy arrangement of Vincent Youman’s “Tea for Two” that he had dashed off on a bet with the conductor Nikolai Malko in 1928.

But “Golden Age” was not simply an incidental piece thrown off in Shostakovich’s spare moments. The task of writing his first dance score absorbed him. “Music for the theater must provide not only accompaniment, but interaction,” he said in an interview published around the time of the premiere.

“A failure to observe this principle will relegate music to the background and forfeit its enormous power of interaction. . . . I have found it necessary to write not only the sort of music that one can dance to but also to dramatize the musical substance itself, to lend the music a real symphonic intensity and dramatic development.”

It’s worth recalling that Shostakovich made these remarks when he was already at work on his “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” one of the masterpieces of 20th-Century operatic literature. Its premiere took place in early 1934, less than four years after that of “The Golden Age.”

In the end, Shostakovich, who could be viciously self-critical, thought highly of the music he had written for the ballet, calling the score “unusually successful compared to many that I have done.” He arranged a short four-part (“Introduction,” “Adagio,” “Polka” and “Dance”) orchestral suite (Op. 22) from it even before the stage premiere. Unfortunately, the complete score has never been published, although it sits in the composer’s archives in the Soviet Union.

Shostakovich was pragmatic about the problems with the original Leningrad production of “Golden Age.” In a letter to a friend written four days after the premiere, he observed: “It’s the combination of music and stage action that produce a piece of musical theater. This didn’t happen in ‘Golden Age.’ The stage action and the music did not come together. . . . I learned a great deal in working on this production. I became convinced all over again that the music plays the main role in any work of musical theater. If the production fails to recognize this, then it will fail.”

But weak choreography and staging were not the only reasons why “Golden Age” disappeared from the stage so precipitously. By the time of its first performance in Leningrad on Oct. 26, 1930, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was moving aggressively to consolidate his control over all aspects of Soviet life. Shostakovich’s experimental nonrealistic, avant-garde tendencies, as well as his many rebellious artist friends (particularly Meyerhold), were being regarded with growing suspicion and hostility.

A staging of his wild and dissonant opera “The Nose,” about a hapless civil servant who wakes up one morning to find a flat place where his schnoz used to be, also encountered severe political criticism in 1930-31. (Dramatically, “The Nose” and the original “Golden Age” have a great deal in common.)

In short, the vivid and ultimately ambiguous portrayal of Western capitalist society painted in “Golden Age” did nothing to improve Shostakovich’s official standing in what was an increasingly xenophobic atmosphere.

Soon after “Golden Age” closed, Shostakovich wrote two more ballets: “Bolt” (1931) and “The Clear Stream” (1935). Both were attacked for political deficiencies. The composer and his collaborators were consistently accused of oversimplifying the complexity and profundity of the social transformation wrought by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and of failing to portray it with appropriate scope, accuracy and simplicity in music and choreography.

His deep love for the theater and dance notwithstanding, Shostakovich finally abandoned ballet entirely after Pravda lambasted “The Clear Stream” in 1936 for its false depiction of life on a Soviet collective farm.

Just 10 days earlier, in the famous “Muddle Instead of Music” article, Pravda (at Stalin’s personal command) had savagely criticized Shostakovich’s operatic masterpiece, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” and demanded its removal from all Soviet opera houses. For the rest of his life, the composer concentrated on symphonic, chamber and vocal (non-operatic) music.

According to Sophia Khentova, author of a 1985 biography of Shostakovich published in the Soviet Union, the composer was approached in 1964 by the Kirov (where the original production took place) about reviving the original “Golden Age.”

Apparently, he exhibited little interest, arguing that he had recycled some of the music in other compositions over the years. No doubt Grigorovich knew of these unsuccessful negotiations, for he served as ballet master at the Kirov from 1962 to 1964, when he left to become the leader of the Kirov’s great rival, the Bolshoi. Nearly 20 years went by, however, before he put “The Golden Age” on stage in Moscow.

When Shostakovich composed “The Golden Age,” he was at the height of his sardonic, ironic, anti-realistic and anti-romantic phase. The 1982 revision danced by the Bolshoi softens the biting satirical edge, emphasizes the love story between Rita and Boris and is more conventional and realistic than the fragmentary, fast-paced, cartoonish “review” Shostakovich had in mind.

His music could have been treated with more respect. After all is said and danced, however, “Golden Age” represents a notable attempt to come to terms with the difficult contradictions of the rich--and too often suppressed--Soviet cultural heritage.