The Murders of Mzensk

In the respectable quiet of East Side Cleveland one night last week an old man ate poisoned mushrooms, died in wriggling agony. A merchant was smothered with a bed pillow and his corpse dragged into a cellar. A prostitute let out a blood-chilling scream as she was pushed to her death in an icy black lake. Yet as the heroine of Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (pronounced Muhzjensk), the woman responsible for these three atrocious murders was really a gentle soul whom only the sternest moralist would blame for her crimes.

The operatic rage of Soviet Russia was having its U. S. premiere by the Cleveland Orchestra, Conductor Artur Rodzinski and the troupe of White Russian singers which calls itself the Art of Musical Russia, Inc. Five days later the same performers gave Lady Macbeth in Manhattan. Audiences in both cities were equally impressed with the naivete of Comrade Shostakovich. The 28-year-old composer, who looks like a schoolboy with thatched hair and horn-rimmed glasses, had borrowed his story from Nikolai Leskov, a long-dead author who made his murderess a fiend incarnate. Shostakovich read of her crimes and promptly forgave her. Poor Katerina Izmailova! He would continue to call her Lady Macbeth but audiences were to understand that she was an innocent victim of her sordid bourgeois surroundings.

As seen on the stage last week, the home of Katerina Izmailova is sordid indeed. It resembles a crude two-story dolls' house with one side missing. Upstairs in a dreary bedroom Zinovi, the merchant, sleeps sluggishly with his boots on while downstairs Katerina, his wife, broods on a couch, paces the floor. She cannot sleep. She has never been taught to read. Her lecherous, spying old father-in-law comes in to charge her with being as cold as a cold fish to her spouse. Because of her there is no heir to the Izmailov name. The puling Zinovi is called hurriedly to repair a break in a far-away milldam. Before he leaves Katerina has to bow low before him, swear to be faithful in his absence.

A swaggering unprincipled clerk named Sergei starts the trouble. He squeezes the cook playfully, rolls her in a barrel while the peasants laugh uproariously.* Just for fun, Katerina accepts Sergei's challenge to wrestle with him in the courtyard. Because she has been lonely and restrained, she lets him into her bed after a minor struggle. There the father-in-law catches them, flogs the clerk until his bare back bleeds. For that Katerina feeds the old man mushrooms, seasoned with rat poison. His vitals burn and gnaw. A priest is summoned. "I die like a rat," gurgles the father-in-law. "He ate mushrooms at night," mourns Katerina Izmailova. "He dies like a rat?" bumbles the bibulous old priest. "That could not be so. A rat just dies. A man appears before God."

Unlike most operas, the proceedings on the stage are clear to everyone because in spooky blackness Actor Richard Hale explains before each act just what is coming. With the father-in-law dead and the husband away, Katerina and Sergei revel in the bed they share. Katerina has found love and she hopes for freedom. Sergei wants her money and the power money can bring in the little town of Mzensk. They are in bed again when Zinovi returns. With the belt Sergei forgetfully leaves be- hind when he goes into hiding, Zinovi gives Katerina a thrashing. Her screams bring Sergei from an alcove. Thereupon the irate husband is quickly done to death by the lovers.

To many a Clevelander a double bed on Severance Hall stage seemed exorbitantly funny. But at the next two scenes they could laugh with more reason. Three foul-looking peasants teeter drunkenly around Katerina's courtyard. On a hunt for more wine they break open the cellar door, discover the body of Zinovi. One of them veers into a police court where a dozen guardians of the law are going through foolish, wooden-soldier gestures. In goose step, their mustachios bristling, they march out jubilantly to put an end to the marriage ceremony of Katerina and Sergei.

Together with scores of other convicts the pair begin the long trek to Siberia. They camp beside a lake where a raft is to carry them to the other side. Sergei by this time lusts for the prostitute Sonetka whose price is a pair of stockings. Sergei beguiles Katerina into giving him the ones she is wearing. Jeering, he then leads Sonetka into the woods while the other convicts laugh until their chains jangle. Poor Katerina Izmailova has had enough. When the guard gives the call to march on, she pushes Sonetka into the lake. Then she drowns herself.

Marvel of Lady Macbeth is that by sheer vitality and shrewd orchestration Composer Shostakovich accomplishes exactly what he sets out to do: He makes the audience sympathize with Katerina Izmailova. With different singers his success might have been less pronounced. But, politics and economics aside, the White Russians seemed to see eye-to-eye with him last week. Natural, mobile actors, many of them were trained in the Moscow Art Theatre or for the Chauve-Souris. Anna Leskaya was perfectly cast as the "good" Katerina. She is hearty, handsome, kind-looking. And she sang the difficult music with rare skill and feeling. Ivan Ivantzoff, who was the bewildered hero in Alban Berg's Wozzeck (TIME, March 30, 1931), strutted offensively as the greedy, small-souled Sergei. Basso Yasha Davidoff made the father-in-law such a mean old bully that the audience was glad when he was out of the way. Nor did anyone mourn for Zinovi, the husband, or for Sonetka, the prostitute who haggled for stockings. By comparison the gibbering, groveling downtrodden peasants seemed attractive and human.

Whether Lady Macbeth will find a place in the world's operatic repertoire is a matter for doubtful conjecture. It was difficult to think of it last week without an all-Russian cast in which every member has a real feeling for an earthy Russian village. But what Shostakovich has accomplished with his orchestra will long be remembered by all who listened to it seriously. His vulgar homespun libretto prepared people for something madly modern. Such a heroine as Katerina seemed ludicrously impossible. Yet when the curtain went up there were no fierce shriekings. Katerina was quietly, miserably restless as strings droned and woodwinds sighed. The audience instantly caught her mood and hated the old father-in-law, introduced by strident horns and a mocking xylophone. The husband first piped in a silly high tenor while the orchestra beat out a double-quick waltz in which even a piccolo sneered.

Shostakovich's choral skill exhibited itself when the peasants rolled the cook in the barrel. The peasants shouted their delight but the music had reason and a sure, compelling rhythm. When the father-in-law caught Katerina wrestling, the horns were again cruelly loud and foreboding. As she climbed the stairs and settled herself in bed, Narrator Hale described her as seeing "visions of the mating beasts and birds. . . . Even the wind bending the tree to its will is a lover, alive, insistent. . . ."

Katerina thereafter has lovely lyrical music, played by tender strings. Upstairs in the bedroom she takes off her slippers, braids her hair. The percussions sound a tap-tap-tap and Sergei boldly enters. The rape scene which follows is probably the loudest in history, an uproar of brasses, tympani, cymbals. Shostakovich again uses a waltz, this time to satirize the prowling father-in-law who catches Sergei as he climbs out the window. In the flogging scene the audience could fairly hear the swish of the whip. When the father-in-law lay dying, Soviet scorn of the church was equally apparent. The priest who performed the perfunctory rites sang a song which sounded like a rowdy equivalent of "Hail. Hail, the Gang's All Here!" Musicians in last week's audience sat fascinated by the uncanny way the orchestra described each character, each situation. Laymen liked the swift-moving stage pictures, consistently more effective than those in almost any other opera. Sometimes sheer noise created the excitement but the pace never lagged, even at the end when the convicts' mighty chorus was as conventional as anything to be heard in a Russian Orthodox Church.

Conductor Artur Rodzinski, who obtained the first U. S. rights to Lady Macbeth, heard it six times in Russia last summer. Last week he called it "one of the most important contributions to music brought out in the past 25 years." The ardor of his performance proved that he meant what he had said.

*Here the producers were faced with one of many moral problems. According to Shostakovich's directions, the cook should be plopped into the barrel rump up. Clevelanders decided it would be wiser to exhibit her head. The Philadelphia Orchestra, which will give Lady Macbeth in March, considered an English translation but finally despaired of finding any that would pass even the most liberal censorship.

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