Walking the tightrope with Stalin
Angelina Nikonova directs Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Hamburg (****½)
Author : Jos Hermans
Just last month, polemicist Norman Lebrecht recalled that Dmitri Shostakovich's children, Maksim and Galina, had written an introduction to the Russian edition of Solomon Volkov's book "Shostakovich and Stalin" in 2006. The final paragraph reads as follows: “We, Shostakovich’s children, who watched his life pass before our eyes, express our profound gratitude to Solomon Volkov for his marvelous work, the naked truth of which will undoubtedly help our contemporaries and future generations better to see the difficult fate of our unforgettable father and, through it, better to understand his music.”
This warm endorsement flies in the face of the claim by Richard Taruskin and his followers that the Shostakovich family regarded Volkov as ‘dishonest’ and an impostor over his Shostakovich memoir, Testimony. “If there was dishonesty in the war over Shostakovich’s legacy, it was on Taruskin’s side. As time passes and Taruskin fades, Volkov emerges more and more as the bearer of truth. That he earned the wholehearted gratitude of Shostakovich’s children is a fact unadmitted by Taruskin or the New York Times, who waged a relentless witch hunt against Volkov”, Lebrecht writes.
This does not put an end to the controversy among musicologists surrounding the Shostakovich reception that has been dragging on for 45 years. Lebrecht only throws some oil on the fire. Volkov's Testimony turned the composer into an opponent of the Soviet regime and his oeuvre produced after 1936 into a form of encoded dissidence. This was followed by an overheated, polemical battle among musicologists. In his book De leugens en de schaterlach, Pieter Bergé divides the warring factions into revisionists (Volkov) and anti-revisionists (Taruskin). Revisionists are usually right because they break into a narrative forcibly imposed by some political agenda. Because the debate has been conducted ideologically all these years, the authenticity of Testimony may never be convincingly proven.
Taruskin is very categorical in his moral condemnation of Lady Macbeth: "In his second opera, Shostakovich shows himself to be an authentic genius of the genre, fully capable - like Verdi, Wagner and Mussorgsky - of creating a world in tones that is convincing on every level. And he used his awesome powers to effect a colossal moral reversal of values. This is perhaps the most pernicious use ever made of music." Taruskin believes that if ever an opera deserved to be banned, it was this one.
As Taruskin rightly points out, Katerina Izmajlova is a true opera character in the traditional sense. She expresses herself in lyrical phrases and expresses her feelings in a melodic vocal style. Her entourage, on the other hand, is portrayed in the satirical style of The Nose. That he did so to deliberately dehumanise his heroine's entourage seems to bother Taruskin. Clearly, Shostakovich is fishing for our sympathy for the double murderess with his adaptation of the Leskov original and even more so with his music. In his eyes, Katerina was not responsible for her crimes. They were the result of the suffocating patriarchal society in which she lived. It is also a hymn to love in its purest form. The most problematic act in moral terms is the murder of Zinovi, a spineless man who has done nothing wrong to Katerina other than belongingto the clan of the Ismailovs. But after the murder, the music goes into hesitation mode and when Katerina says to Sergei "Now you are my husband", both of them fully realise what the price of getting there has been. Then the fear of discovering her crimes strikes Katerina. From the wedding party onwards, her guilt goes crescendo and in her final arioso, she mentally bids farewell to life, gazing into the pitch-black waves of the lake while also seeing the unfathomable abyss within herself. In other words, the composer has provided a very explicit catharsis for us spectators in the opera's final scene. So what is then the problem, Mr Taruskin?
So in that sense, it was a good idea by Hamburg to outsource the direction to a female director. It is the first time it has happened to me and I have seen all the productions of the past 10 years in an 800 km radius. Most productions were very good, by the way, with Tcherniakov (Lyon) and Warlikovsky (Paris) as the standouts. Very different is the situation with Wagner : here you can count the successful productions on one hand. And so we have to keep asking ourselves why that is. The answer is sobering in its simplicity : modern directors do not believe in Wagner. But they do believe in Shostakovich. And they do so despite the opera's "bad" reputation. And that makes a world of difference.
That Russian culture has become a target of politics has not escaped Russian director Angelina Nikonova, of course. She herself considers it "a crime to mix politics and art". And so, in Hamburg, we get to see the most apolitical reading of the opera imaginable. Nor does the sexual liberation of women seem to be a major theme for her.
Workers clear out snow on the idyllic yard of the Ismailovs. No trace here of "the walls are high, the dogs run loose", as it says in Leskov's novella. On the left is a horse stable, on the right Katerina's bedroom with an upright bed and the desk where Boris watches footage from the surveillance cameras next to his oversized money safe. The video wall in the background is like a canvas for displaying a rural setting in real time with trees swaying in the wind, migrating birds and intermittent shooting stars. Rats are occasionally visible in the basement floor.
The cook Aksinja (an excellent Carole Wilson), is put in a pot of sauerkraut. The rape scene is thus greatly toned down. Katerina's feminist sermon following Aksinja's rape fills the bystanders with a certain embarrassment. For a moment, she is the moral centre of the play. The copulation scene is soon covered by a projection surface that vividly depicts the members of the orchestra with their pornophonic sounds. Alexander Roslavets as Boris is given too little by the director to turn his age-failing potency into powerful satire. The passacaglia accompanies a predictable procession with his coffin. To the dying tones of the second act, the fresh assassins stare in dismay. That's all it really needs to be.
The wedding party is almost like a garden party at the Larina's in Yevgeny Onegin. Thunderclouds crowd the video wall when the police invade. That Shostakovich had the audacity to add the scene in the police station, a scene not available in Leskov's original text, speaks for the revisionists. The policemen are portrayed with Gogol-like sharpness as utter imbeciles and corrupt bureaucrats. "In an enlightened century like ours, how on earth could society function without police?" sings the police chief. Stalin could not possibly have appreciated that scene, so closely did it match Stalinist reality.
In an added scene between the third and fourth acts, Nikonova has a priest spend minutes praying for the salvation of Boris and Zinovi. In the sacred atmosphere of this incantation, the ominous opening chords of the fourth act can assert themselves with even greater effect. In Paris, Ingo Metzmacher had inserted a section of the eighth string quartet in the same place. Will this become a new trend? A rusty boat surrounded by ice floes on the video wall simulates the final scene along the Volga. Katerina sings her final arioso with an imaginary baby cradled in her arms, alluding to her desire for children in the 3rd scene. Then she briefly resembles the sister of Chrysothemis ("Ich bin ein Weib und will ein Weiberschicksal").
Camilla Nylund may not be an ideal Brünnhilde (the two final litmus tests are yet to follow in Zurich), but for Lady Macbeth, her latest debut, she has all it takes. It is an overwhelming debut and, as expected, she bets on euphony rather than expression. Her bedroom romance of the third scene, starring cello and bass clarinet, exemplifies the intimate balance between soloist and orchestral voices that Hamburg achieves. In the duet following the passacaglia, she manages to make her exclamation "Ah, Serjozja" shine like the sun. I had never heard it like that before. Vincent Wolfsteiner sings the part of the impotent Zinovi with a lot of voice and rhythmic precision. Dmitri Golovnin can make us believe that Sergei’s love for Katerina is genuine. Perhaps initially she is. Alexander Roslavets' bass does not project sufficiently to really impress vocally. The Pope is given little profile by Tigran Martirossian. Well articulated is Karl Huml's police chief. The choir performs superbly both in Zinovi's farewell, the wedding party and the final lament in the penal camp.
Kent Nagano's reading with the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg astounds in the first instance because of the care given to the score's numerous chamber music sections. All the precious solo moments in the menacing low woodwinds and bristling brass contribute to a terribly exciting soundtrack. In the passacaglia, you can hear how Benjamin Britten was inspired by the Sea Interludes. The banda can only be heard off-stage or from the orchestra pit. That one is packed to the brim, the timpanist a little tucked away under the stage. Dynamically, Lady Macbeth is an extreme work : the most searing ffff crescendo in the entire opera literature that introduces Katerina's suicide decision, Nagano does not take as loudly as Metzmacher in Paris but it certainly does not miss its effect.