He loved Katerina, perhaps because she didn’t exist. Far more patient with this heroine than with anyone, even Elena Konstantinovskaya, he’d explained to Nina, who was disgusted by Katerina: All of her music has as its purpose the justification of her crimes.
So you’re writing program music after all, she drily said, and he tumbled back into confusion.
Listening carefully to the bitter fartings of the trumpets, the defiant clashings of the brasses in Act I, he knew that he had truly conveyed the benightedness of prerevolutionary, vegetative Russia; and, moreover, that he’d carried the audience with him. The mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Welter, who sang Sonetka the Whore’s part in that “Lady Macbeth,” later recalled that sometimes one was overcome with a feeling of cold fear and horror at Shostakovich’s brilliant manner of offsetting the eternal themes, good and evil, the striving for freedom and the struggle with brutality. Now the workmen had trapped the cook in a barrel and were running their hands over her, singing out: Give us a suck! as she transchromatically wept: Ay! ay! ay! ay! Twisting anxiously in his seat, he read on all the listeners’ faces what he had hoped to find: not amusement, nor even disgust, but outraged pity. In that shocking third scene, as Katerina Izmailova slowly stripped, letting down her long hair and crooning out her yearning for a man who’d caress her pale breasts or at least smile at her, he saw tenderness in his neighbors’ gazes—yes, he’d shown them all!
There is a term called portamento, which refers to the sliding or changing of the musical voice. That was coming, but Mitya didn’t hear it yet, for the strings grew sweet and heavy just as they should, gorgeously perfumed with amorous “exoticism.” Came the seduction, half a rape—cold, angry and brassy, with jeeringly lascivious oohs and ahs from the brasses, until Sergei had finished, and Katerina’s desperate boredom returned with an ugly wilting glissando.
Meanwhile, the music was beautiful—as smooth as the hollows of Elena Konstantinovskaya’s neck—
At the end, he supposed, there’d have to be an encore, and then he’d be led up to the State Box. He could not for the life of him figure out what to say. Nina had told him to smile, bow his head and murmur soft thanks.—Do you have everything you need? Stalin would ask. Shostakovich needed any number of things, but Sollertinsky, Glikman, his mother and Nina had all advised him to reply that he possessed absolutely everything. That would please Comrade Stalin…
Shostakovich waited patiently through the pseudo-Wagnerian farewell of the illicit lovers in Act II, and still there was no summons, which he found odd. In the very first words of the third act, Sergei seemed to be directly addressing his creator when he sang to Katerina Izmailova: Why do you stand there? What are you gaping at?—She for her part kept staring at the cellar where her husband’s corpse hid. And Shostakovich kept twisting in his seat, trying not to gaze at the State Box.
At the end of the third act, Stalin, Molotov and the other luminaries arose from the State Box, then withdrew in an ominous silence. Sickened, Shostakovich waited out the final act, composed his face into the deathmask serenity required by the times, and even took his bow when called upon to do so by the rapturous audience—for public opinion, reader, has its own inertia; and the opera’s successes in Sweden, America, Czechoslovakia could not be instantaneously undone. He went backstage to thank the musicians—who recoiled as if he were a leper. His mouth twitched crazily. He took up his briefcase in silence. No one saw him out. He descended the portico into the blue pallor of another snowy night, then stopped. He gazed up at the rearing horses of Apollo above the colonnade—frozen horses. During the Civil War the lucky souls had eaten horseflesh. Oh, yes; that’s why our sailors had eaten Beethoven. Yielding himself to the streets, he passed a policeman whose greenish shoulders were obscured by snow. A few hours before, he would have smiled at the man. Now he dared not look into his face. He boarded the Archangel-bound train, his fingertips tapping out the rousing, crazy, drunkenly leering march which seizes hold when the ragged peasant, having discovered the husband’s stinking corpse, rushes off to the police station to denounce Katerina and Sergei. And Shostakovich’s compartment clitteryclattered allegro as he rode away into the oddly tender lavender of a Russian winter dawn.
Two days later, Pravda unmasked the opera’s bourgeois obscurantism. Expressing a quiet, well-mannered defiance, he continued the tour. Everyone was beginning to recoil from his guilt.
The Leningrad Union of Composers summoned him to a discussion of the charges against him, but he refused to attend. This, too, was remembered against him as evidence of unyielding individualism.
Within the week, Pravda exposed his collective farm comedy “The Bright Stream” as “Ballet Falsity.” His coauthor Piotrovsky was ostracized and eventually liquidated. Shostakovich never wrote another ballet.
As for all who’d ever praised “Lady Macbeth,” they found themselves in much the same position as those two female parachutists, Tamara Ivanovna and Liubov’ Berlin, who’d been so desperate to best each other in the recent All-Soviet competition that neither one pulled her rip cord in time. What would the praisers do in this turnaround race? Pravda had denounced their “fawning music criticism.” To save themselves, they must leap as far and fast as possible, leaving Shostakovich alone in the stormy skies of formalism. (And he knew that; he knew the rules. He’d done it to Malko. From Archangel he sent Glikman a telegram: Please send all the press clippings immediately, dear Isaak Davidovich! He wanted to hear each individual note in the symphony of denunciation.) They must rush to earth. They must exclude him from friendship, charity, memory. Ruthless seclusion in private, ruthless conformity in public—those were the two wires they must pull, to steer themselves safely down to obscurity. Now and again one of them got taken, and the rest turned pale; but because it was dangerous to comment ever again on those who had been devoured, let alone wonder whether they themselves might be arrested at the next tick of the metronome, they struggled to prove their faith in the dictum LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL, because who wouldn’t want that to be so? Some comforted themselves that Comrade Stalin did not realize what was being done in his name; for if that were only true, then they might not be utterly lost. Those afflicted with more knowledge than that still hoped that in regard to his growing collection of victims, Comrade Stalin resembled some bygone Russian boyar who, living luxuriously removed from the operation of his own vast power, needed to ask his stewards should he ever for some unlikely reason wish to find out how many villages, serfs and greyhounds he possessed. The truth, of course, was that night after night, Stalin sat up in the Kremlin with Molotov, tallying everything, commanding everything, initialing long lists of names to which they mutually added the prescription: All to be shot.
Shostakovich secluded himself. He kept saying to Nina: I don’t understand.