Add One to the List of Greats

By Michael Walsh

Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth is a top modern opera

Any list of the great 20th century operas would have to start with Puccini's Turandot and Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, which summed up, respectively, the Italian and German romantic traditions. It would also include Debussy's Petteas et Melisande, the French composer's 1902 masterpiece of Gallic allusion and understatement; Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, the most important work to enter the international repertory since World War II; and Alban Berg's twin monuments -- Wozzeck, the seminal opera of our time, and Lulu, the apotheosis of the twelve-tone system.

Now 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 trombone slides that accompany the furious lovemaking of Katerina and Sergei in Act I, called the music "pornophony." But the opera proved popular, with 83 performances in Leningrad and 97 in Moscow before it offended the delicate sensibilities of the Soviet commissars, who denounced it in Pravda as "Muddle Instead of Music." Shostakovich, the only important 20th century Russian composer who worked entirely under the Soviet system (Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky eventually settled in America, and Prokofiev spent many years abroad), found himself labeled an "enemy of the people" and for a while even feared for his life. It took him more than a year to restore his reputation as a good Soviet citizen with his Fifth Symphony. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth, a brief candle, disappeared from the stage.

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 its U.S. premiere in 1964, Lady Macbeth showed a power and raw urgency that was weakened by its later revision.

The opera's plot is a domestic tragedy with universal implications. Katerina is the sexually frustrated wife of a rich provincial merchant, Zinovy, and the object of the thinly disguised passion of Boris, her lecherous father-in-law. Into her life comes Sergei, a handsome young worker. The pair become lovers, but Boris catches them in feverish embrace and publicly whips Sergei. Katerina coldly poisons Boris in revenge, and then she and Sergei compound the crime by strangling Zinovy. When the village drunk later stumbles across Zinovy's body, he alerts the police at the moment when Katerina and Sergei are celebrating their wedding. Under arrest, Katerina bribes a guard to let her visit Sergei during the long march to Siberia. Her erstwhile lover, however, blames her for his predicament and already has eyes for another female prisoner. This is too much for Katerina, who pushes the other woman off a bridge into a swiftly moving stream and then leaps in herself. Lady Macbeth ends with a desolate chorus of convicts bemoaning their fate as they trudge wearily into Siberian oblivion--an effect that in its peculiarly Russian desolation recalls the Kromy forest scene at the end of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

As the titular heroine, sexy Soprano Anja Silja was in rare form, her powerful, dramatic voice fully under control. Tenor William Lewis, the narcissistic lover Sergei, was preening and selfabsorbed, his voice strong and true. Most impressive of all was Conductor Calvin Simmons, 31, who threw himself into the music with the single-minded intensity it requires, fanning the opera's central fires to white-hot incandescence.

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 tragedy in high relief.

Curiously, the rough edges, inevitable in a piece by so young a composer, give the work more impact. Lady Macbeth is an opera of sexual obsession; Katerina Ismailova, by comparison, is 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

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