I wonder who plays the violins that Tukhachevsky made, if they 1 04
survived at all, that is. I have the feeling that the violins emit a pathetic sound. I was very unlucky in life. But others were unluckier. When I think of Meyerhold or Tukhachevsky, I think of the words of Ilf and Petrov: "It's not enough to love Soviet power. It has to love you."
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I WORKED on Lady Macbeth for almost three years. I had announced a trilogy dedicated to the position of women in various eras in Russia.
The plot of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District is taken from the story of the same name by Nikolai Leskov. The story amazes the reader with its unusual vividness and depth, and in terms of being the most truthful and tragic portrayal of the destiny of a talented, smart, and outstanding woman, "dying in the nightmarish conditions of prerevolutionary Russia," as they say, this story, in my opinion, is one of the best.
Maxim Gorky once said: "We must study. We must learn about our country, her past, present, and future"; and Leskov's story serves this purpose. Lady Macbeth is a true treasure trove for a composer, with its vividly drawn characters and dramatic conflicts-I was attracted by it. Alexander Germanovich Preis, a young Leningrad playwright, worked out the libretto with me. It followed Leskov almost in its entirety, with the exception of the third act, which for greater social impact deviates slightly from the original. We introduced a scene at the 1 06
police station and left out the murder of Ekaterina Lvovna's nephew.
I resolved the opera in a tragic vein. I would say that Lady Macbeth could be called a tragic-satiric opera. Despite the fact that Ekaterina Lvovna is a murderer, she is not a lost human being. She is tormented by her conscience, she thinks about the people .she· killed. I feel empathy for her.
It's rather difficult to explain, and I've heard quite a bit of disagreement on the matter, but I wanted to show a woman who was on a much higher level than those around her. She is surrounded by monsters. The last five years were like a prison for her.
Those who criticize her harshly do so from this point of view: if she's a criminal, then she's guilty. But that's the common consensus, and I'm more interested in the individual. I think it's all in Leskov.
There are no general, standardized rules of conduct. Everything depends on the situation and on the person. A turn of events is possible in which murder is not a crime. You can't approach everything with the same measure.
Ekaterina Lvovna is an outstanding, colorful person and her life is sad and drab. But a powerful love comes into her life, and it turns out that a crime is worth committing for the sake of that passion, since life has no meaning otherwise anyway.
Lady Macbeth touches on many themes. I wouldn't want to spend too much time on all the possible interpretations; after all, I'm not talking about myself in these pages and certainly not about my music.
In the long run, you can just go to see the opera. In the last few years it's been produced frequently, even abroad. Of course, all the productions are bad,· very bad. In the last few years I can point out only one good production-in Kiev under the direction of Konstantin Simeonov, a conductor who has a wonderful feel for music. And he starts from the music, not the plot. When his singers started overpsychologizing their parts, Simeonov shouted, "What are you trying to do, set up the Moscow Art Theater here? I need singing, not psychology. Give me singing!"
They don't understand that too well here, that singing is more important in opera than psychology. Directors treat the music in opera as something of minor importance. That's how they ruined the film version, Katerina lzmailova. The actors were magnificent, particularly 1 07
Galina Vishnevskaya, * but you can't hear the orchestra at all. Now, what is the point of that?
I dedicated Lady Macbeth to my bride, my future wife, so naturally the opera is about love too, but not only love. It's also about how love could have been if the world weren't full of vile things. It's the vileness that ruins love. And the laws and proprieties and financial worries, and the police state. If conditions had been different, love would have been different too.
Love was one of Sollertinsky's favorite themes. He could speak for hours on it, on the most varied levels: from the highest to the very lowest. And Sollertinsky was very supportive of my attempt to express my ideas in Lady Macbeth. He spoke of the sexuality of two great operas, Carmen and Wozzeck, and regretted that there was nothing comparable in Russian opera. Tchaikovsky, for instance, had nothing like itand that was no accident.
Sollertinsky believed that love was the greatest gift and the person who knew how to love had a talent just as does the person who knows how to build ships or write novels. In that sense Ekaterina Lvovna is a genius. She is a genius in her passion, for the sake of which she is prepared to do anything, even murder.
Sollertinsky felt that contemporary conditions were not conducive to the development of talents in that area. Everyone seemed worried about what would happen to love. I suppose it will always be like that, it always seems that love's last days are here. At least, it always seems that everything is different today from what it was yesterday. And it will all be different tomorrow. No one knows how, but it will be different.
Love for Three was a success in the movies, the theaters were running plays like The Nationalization of Women, and there were debates on free love. Debates were very popular, and they debated the theory of "the glass of water." It used to be said that having sexual inter-
*Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya (b. 1926), soprano. Shostakovich's vocal cycle Satires and his instrumentation of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death are dedicated to her. She sang the premieres of these works and sang in the first performance of the Fourteenth Symphony. In 1978
she and her husband, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, were stripped of Soviet citizenship for "systematic acts that bring harm to the prestige of the Soviet Union." Thereafter, Vishnevskaya's name was removed from all Soviet reference works.
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course should be as simple as having a glass of water. At TRAM, in some play, the heroine said that satisfying your sexual needs was the only important thing, and that drinking from the same glass all the time gets boring.
There were also debates on a popular book, Moon from the Right, by Sergei Malashkin. It's a terrible book, but the readers didn't care.
The point was that it described orgies with young Komsomol girls.
And so they tried the heroes of this book-with appointed counsel and judges. The question they were hotly debating was can a young woman have twenty-two husbands?
This problem was on everyone's lips, even Meyerhold was taken with it, and he was a man of excellent taste. This is just further proof of what the atmosphere was like then. Meyerhold planned to stage Tretyakov's* play I Want a Baby and even began rehearsals, but the play was banned. He tried for two years to get permission and failed.