Dangerous drama

Stalin was no music critic, but he knew what he didn’t like.

It was 1936 and the Soviet dictator happened to see a Moscow production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” The gritty story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who murders her father-in-law and husband to pursue a love affair with one of their workers, “Lady Macbeth” had first been performed two years earlier, in Leningrad and Moscow, where critics and crowds alike had made it a hit. But days after Stalin’s trip to the opera, Pravda ran an unsigned editorial:

“From the first minute of the opera, the listener is dumbfounded by a deliberately dissonant, confused flow of sounds.... All of it is crude, primitive, vulgar.... The music quacks, moans, pants and chokes in order to render the love scenes as naturally as possible.” It has long been assumed that Stalin himself wrote the editorial; he is surely responsible for what happened next.

“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was banned in the Soviet Union for 30 years, and it was very seldom performed outside the country because of strict controls on the orchestral score. One of only two operas by Shostakovich, it became something of a legend: the mysterious unknown work.

It was also a personal turning point for the composer, who up until then had been the golden boy of Soviet music. The “Lady Macbeth” controversies kicked off decades of dangerous political ups and downs for Shostakovich. When he was perceived as living up to the ideals of Socialist Realism, he was awarded the Order of Lenin (twice) and the Stalin Prize (twice), named secretary of the USSR. Composers Union for eight years and, in 1966, became the first composer to receive the title Hero of Socialist Labor.

When he fell short, he was attacked. The Pravda “Lady Macbeth” editorial was followed quickly by another one objecting to a Shostakovich ballet score. At that point, the composer expected to be arrested at any moment.

His response was the controversial Fifth Symphony, with which he expressly apologized for his supposed crimes. But in 1948, he was attacked again, denounced for “formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies” in his music.

Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, when he felt freer to write more directly, he encountered opposition. In an atmosphere of intense anti-Semitism, government officials wanted to prevent the premiere of his 13th Symphony (1962), which decried the Ukrainian and Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev. Shostakovich continued to create music through periods of repression and liberalization; he died at age 68 in 1975.

Conductor Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son, who was himself denounced after his defection to the West in 1981, remembers something of the roller coaster ride. “It was tragic,” he said from his son’s home in Paris, a few days before he was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles to conduct part of the run of “Lady Macbeth” in the current Kirov-Los Angeles Opera production of the work. “My father suffered. Everyone in the family was unhappy. It was a hard time; 1948 was a disaster.”

Maxim wasn’t born until 1938, two years after the Pravda denunciations, but, he says, as he was growing up, the saga of “Lady Macbeth” wasn’t hidden or forgotten. “Always, when father talked about something, he liked to use some phrase from the opera’s libretto,” Maxim said. “So everybody in our family knows this opera. He wasn’t worried about talking about it because he was talking within the family.”

More important, Maxim said, it was clear that the opera was his father’s “most beloved music child. He suffered a lot because of the prohibition of this work.”

Once the assistant conductor of the Moscow Symphony and later chief conductor of the Hong Kong and New Orleans symphonies, Maxim, 64, is now a freelancer, based in St. Petersburg since the demise of the former Soviet Union. On Monday and Tuesday, he takes over the podium in Los Angeles from the Kirov’s music director, Valery Gergiev. He has conducted this opera for the Kirov in the past, at the company’s home Maryinski Theatre in St. Petersburg and on tour in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.”Always, when I conduct father’s music, I feel he’s very close to me,” Maxim said. “I can hear his voice and personality in his music. All his feelings.” The current Kirov production, he added, is one his father would have approved of; it hasn’t been reset in time or place. “He didn’t like when some stage director changed anything. He wanted the staging to be the time of the opera.”

The Soviet ban against the opera faded in 1963, 10 years after Stalin’s death. At that time, the version authorities allowed on stage was renamed -- “Katerina Ismailova” -- reorchestrated, and some of the edgier aspects of the drama, especially a sex scene, were smoothed over. Even that wasn’t enough to get it back on stage the first time Shostakovich tried.

“The idea of granting permission to do this opera surfaced,” Maxim said. “A committee from the Ministry of Culture came to our house. Father played the score. I turned pages. It was in the early ‘60s. They said, ‘It’s not the time for this opera yet.’

“My father was very upset. It was like torture because he played a lot of the score for them. They knew that he had waited for a time when he thought the opera could appear again. But they knew it in advance that they wouldn’t permit it.”

Controversial overseas

In the guise of “Katerina Ismailova,” “Lady Macbeth” also made the international rounds, appearing in 1963 at London’s Covent Garden and a year later in San Francisco. It was controversial, with many critics regarding it as politically suspect.

“Most musicologists consider the first version the stronger one,” said Edgar Baitzel, L.A. Opera’s director of operations. “The later version is considered an artistic compromise the composer had to do to see the work performed again. Valery Gergiev, however, thinks both versions are fascinating and has done both back to back at the Kirov. We left the artistic decision to him. He decided to bring the early version, which is fine with us.”

Maxim doesn’t see the revision as a compromise. “I don’t think the revision is tainted at all,” he said. “I like very much both versions. I conduct both of them.

“Father preferred ‘Katerina,’ ” he said. “He changed his opinions about some of the words, orchestration and entr’actes. Father remembered when people in the audience heard dirty words, they laughed. So he made the language more pure. [‘Katerina’] is absolutely the same [as ‘Lady Macbeth’] except for a little change in the words and orchestration. The orchestra was too loud at times. He was later more experienced in orchestrating, and he decided to change that himself.”

As for why “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was plunged into obscurity in the first place, Maxim has a theory. It was not so much the adventuresome musical idiom or the work’s vulgarity mentioned in the original editorial, he said. Nor was it, as others have suggested, that Stalin saw himself satirized in the character of a busy but ineffective police sergeant.

“I think there were two causes,” Maxim said. “First, there are the scenes when the peasants and workers say to Zinovy [Katerina’s husband], ‘Oh, how we like you. Oh, when will you come back? Without you, life is so poor.’ Immediately in the next scene, they are alone and they say, ‘How we hate him.’ Stalin thinks, ‘Ah, it’s the same. In my presence, they say they love me. Inside of their souls, they hate me.’

“Also, the idea of someone poisoning him scared him. Katrina kills her father-in-law by feeding him poisoned mushrooms. Stalin was very upset that somebody would poison him. He thought that after this opera, someone would get this idea to do it.”