Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

If there is such a thing as "pure music"— that is, music that has no representational program—opera cannot be, because it involves people doing more than standing and singing. The notion of "pure music" is particularly remote from the work of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1075), whose works were pilloried by the communist state as examples of everything bad (elitism, formalism, disrespectfulness, masked satire).

The period of experimentation in the arts that coincided with the New Economic Program of the late 1920s was quashed by Stalin and his henchmen during the 1930s. Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" premiered in 1932 and had several productions (including one that the Clean Amusement Association of the City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia) attempted to block in 1935. At the beginning of the next year (28 January 1936), following a visit to a Moscow production by Stalin that the dictator loathed, an article titled "Muddle Instead of Music" appeared in Pravda, the regime's organ that complained that "from the first minute the listener is confused by a deliberately disordered, chaotic stream of noise." (Although there is certainly some dissonant and macabre music in the opera, the opera begins with Katerina in bed singing about how bored she is. I found this boring rather than chaotic.)

The opera was withdrawn form production, Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was held back, and he never wrote another opera. He was not shipped off to Siberia, but lived in fear the rest of Stalin's life (until 1953).

The story Katerina Lvovna Izmailova with spoilers

As I've already mentioned, the opera begins with Katerina Izmailova bewailing her boring life in the countryside. She has no interest in running the household or in her husband Zinovi Izmailov. His father, Boris TImofeyevich, has little respect for him and has his own eye on Katerina. Perhaps he could succeed in impregnating her, he thinks. He sends his son off for a few days and insists that Katerina swear she will be faithful to her husband before Zinovi leaves.

The cook, Aksyinya calls Katerina's attention to Sergei, a studly new employee—who had been forced to leave his previous job for (uh-hum!) bedding the wife of his previous employer.

The next two scenes are the notorious ones, sure to wake up anyone who was being put to sleep by Katerina singing of her boredom and ZInovi's send-off. After having their communal bath, the laborers molest Aksyinya. In the opera they threaten to rape her. In the movie it seems that they gang-rape her. Katerina hears the hubbub and rescues Aksyina. She continues with an aria about the strength of women that (incredilbly) leads to a contest of strength between Katerina and Sergei. Boris comes in with him on top of her and she claims to have fallen and that he fell trying to help her up.

The next scene, back in Katerina's very red bedroom, Sergei comes a knocking, ostensibly to borrow a book (Katerina is illiterate), and achieves the real purpose of his late-night visit, with some feverish music and a very famous trombone slump of detumescence after it.

Next, Boris takes his shot at her, but stomach trumps penis and he wants some mushrooms first. Katerina does not serve him poisonous ones, but adds rat poison.

After some vigorously athletic simulated sex, Katerina hears someone returning and knows that it is her husband. He upbraids her with rumors he has heard and while he is beating her, Katerina cries out for Sergei (who had hidden when Katerina heard Zinovi returning. Sergei strangles Zinovi and Katerina lights the way to carry him to the cellar.

The film skips the seventh scene (with policemen complaining about their lot) to go directly to the wedding feast of Sergei and Katerina. (Someone can marry so quickly with a spouse only officially missing?). A peasant breaks into the cellar seeking wine he expects must be hidden there and instead finds the corpse and runs to the police. The police arrive in (mounted) force and arrest the murderers (a case might have been made that the movie Sergei was saving Katerina from being slain by her husband; the movie cut her premeditation).

Sergei and Katerina are part of a group of convicts being driven to Siberia. Sergei wheedles Katerina's stockings as the price to f____ woman, Sonyetka. When Katerina realizes this, she jumps Sonyetka on a bridge and both drown in the swift current. The opera (and movie) end with the convicts mournfully intoning:Steppes, you are so endless,
Days and nights so countless,
The thoughts we think so cheerless,
And the guards we have so heartless.

What did Shostakovich have in mind?

The libretto was credited to Alexander Preis and Dmitri Shostkakovich. It was based on a novella by Niolia Leskov that had originally been published in Dosteovesky's magazine Epoka in 1865. It included a third murder (of Zinovi's nephew). There had been a silent Soviet movie of the story made in 1927, which the composer saw, and various stage versions. The opera was composed between 1930 and 1932, a period in which two possibly relevant processes occurred.

The first and most obvious one was the forced collectivization of agriculture in the first of the Soviet Union's Five Year Plans. The rural nonpeasants, nonproletarians, labeled "kulaks" were being liquidated. Soviet critics who wrote about the opera before Stalin saw and hated it thought it was politically correct, showing the rottenness of the old rural order, in particular the lecherous Boris and the woman who went from boredom to multiple homicides. A 1933 statement by Shostakovich professed that he "wanted to unmask [pre-revolutionary] reality and to arouse a feeling of hatred for the tyrannical and humiliating atmosphere in a Russian merchant's household" and specifically labeled Boris a "kulak."

The second and not-at-all obviously relevant process was that Shostakovich was courting Nina Varzar. They married in 1932 and the opera was dedicated to her. While Shostakovich made Katerina more sympathetic than Leskov had, an opera about a woman who plans to kill her husband and causes it to be done seems a very odd wedding present to me. (This would have been slightly less remarkable if he had written it for a star soprano he was marrying...)

The later, posthumous Testimony—the credibility of which is hotly debated by scholars—claimed that I dedicated 'Lady Macbeth' to my bride, so naturally the opera is about love, but not only love. It's also about how love could have been if the world weren't full of vile things." (A similar reversal of Shostakovich's 7th symphony from celebrating Soviet resistance to the Nazi siege of Leningrad to covertly critiquing Stalin also comes from Testimony.

Besides complicity with the "liquidation" of the kulaks, and making Leskov's Katerina more sympathetic in an opera about love (played, and not just in the movie adaptation as about lust), focuses on the seventh scene (the one of the policemen grousing that was cut from the movie version) and the last. More than prudishness what might have upset Stalin was the parallel between the czarist police and hopeless Siberian imprisonment and the communist police and hopeless Siberian imprisonment. Note that final chorus that I quoted above.

What any of this has to do with "Macbeth" is beyond me. The goings-on seem much closer to The Postman Always Rings Twice (which was not yet written), since the bored wife is without ambition and plots to have her new beau kill her husband rather than have her husband rise to power through a series of killings. (And there are no witches, and no woods on the move...)

And then there was a movie

Petr Weigl directed the only other opera I have seen in which actors who look the parts lip-synch to real opera singers ("Turn of the Screw"). He also directed a movie of Gaetano Donizett's "Mary Stuart" with the main roles sung (in Italian) by Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti with Czech actors lip-synching them and speaking parts (in German) of Friedrich Schiller's original play. That staggers my imagination!

The running time of the movie is 100 minutes, while my recording of the opera runs 156. The main cuts are all of scene 7 (no loss) and most of the first part of scene 5 (cutting Sergei's aria bemoaning having to see his beloved with her husband and the crucial response of Katerina: "That won't happen"). Even before anyone is killed, the Izmailov home, particularly the bedroom, is very red in the movie.

The movie was made in 1992, using the definitive recording conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich with his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, singing Katerina. (Shostakovich was close to the Rostropoviches). The voice of Sergei was Nicolai Gedda's. Markéta Hrubesová and Michal Dlouh looked (both Czech) the young and randy parts (and were willing to play the sexual gymnastics in the nude).

After the boring start of singing about boredom, the nude sauna and gang-rape (or at least nude molestation) are a jolt. There is both male and female full-frontal nudity, though the pubic regions are mostly blocked by beams and other characters not facing the camera. There is also a vivid whipping scene after Boris catches Sergei sneaking out of the house, and Sergei taking Sonyetka against a tree.

Some of those who love the opera were upset by the shortening. A "tasteful" version of the opera is an absurdity, but most productions have managed with less graphic sex. The music seems abrasive to more people than just the Pravda hit piece author (enacting the will of the dictator). It in Russian, not only subtitled but with not very good lip-synching, at least at the start (I don't know whether it improved or I was distracted by the nude bodies and paying less attention to synchronicity of lip movements and sounds...). Replacing opera singers with lip-synching actors also upsets some opera-lovers. So this movie has a limited appeal. I wish the lip-synching was as good as Fanny Ardant's in CallasForever, but think 100 minutes is just fine and having people who look the parts is good.

Given that the opera is not performed very often, the movie is very helpful in showing something of what the fuss was about, which reading the libretto and listening to audio recordings cannot easily do, so I can recommend it to those not enumerated in the previous paragraph.

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My September Shostakovich binge has included reviews of his Jazz Suites and 10th Symphony. More are going to appear.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD