The censors felt that the play was too frank. Meyerhold, in defense, insisted that if you wanted to remove all vulgar words from the stage you'd have to burn all of Shakespeare and leave only Rostand.
Meyerhold wanted to put on Tretyakov's play as a debate too. In fact, things seemed to be moving toward the abolition of love. One good woman in a play said as much: "The only thing I love is Party work." And love can fall by the wayside. From time to time, we'll give birth to healthy children, naturally pure from a class point of view, of a good Aryan, I mean proletarian, background.
This is not a happy business. Tretyakov dreamed of how everyone would give birth by plan, and they destroyed him. And it went on Meyerhold's record that "he stubbornly persisted in staging the play I Want a Baby by enemy of the people Tretyakov, which was a hostile slander of the Soviet people."
So you see that even though my opera's plot did not deal with our glorious reality, actually there were many points of contact, you only have to look for them. In general, a heroine like Ekaterina Lvovna is not very typical for Russian opera, but there are some traditional
*Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov (1892-1939), avant-garde playwright, who worked with Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Mayakovsky. Bertolt Brecht considered Tretyakov one of his teachers in the field of Marxism. He was shot during the "great terror."
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things in Lady Macbeth and I think they're very important. There's the scrawny little man, something like Grishka Kuterma, * and the entire fourth act, with the convicts. Some of my friends objected that the fourth act was too traditional. But that was the finale I had -in mind, because we're talking about convicts.
In the old days a convict was called neschastnen'kii, or "poor little wretch"; people tried to help them, to give them something. But in my day the attitude toward the arrested had changed. If you got yourself in jail, you no longer existed.
Chekhov went to Sakhalin Island to better the lot of criminal convicts. As for political prisoners-they were all heroes in the eyes of cultured men. Dostoevsky recalled how a little girl gave him a kopeck when he was a convict. He was a poor wretch in her eyes.
And so I wanted to remind the audience that prisoners are wretched people and that you shouldn't hit a man when he's down. Today you're in prison, tomorrow it might be me. That's a very important moment for me in Lady Macbeth, and incidentally, a very traditional one for Russian music. Recall Khovanshchina, for instance-Prince Golitsyn is an extremely unsympathetic character, but when he's taken away into exile, Mussorgsky sympathizes with him. That's as it should be.
I think it was a great stroke of luck for me that I found the plot of Lady Macbeth, even though there were many factors promoting it. For one, I like Leskov, and for another, Kustodiev did good illustrations for Lady Macbeth and I bought the book. And then I liked the film that Cheslav Sabinsky made of the story. It was roundly criticized for being unscrupulous, but it was vivid and engrossing.
I composed the opera with great intensity, which was enhanced by the circumstances of my personal life.
When I write vocal music I like to picture concrete people. Here's a man I know-how will he sing this or that monologue? That's probably why I can say about any of my characters, "That's So-and-so and she's So-and-so." Of course, that's just my personal feeling, but it does help me compose.
'"Grishka Kutenna is the character in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Tale of the City of Kitezh who symbolizes betrayal and repentance. Lunacharsky wrote or "the almost Wagnerian, yet Slavic, Russian Orthodox power or the sinner Kutenna."
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Naturally, I think about tessituras and such, as well. But first of all I think about personality and that may be why my operas don't have an emploi and sometimes it's hard for the performers to find themselves. It's the same with my vocal cycles.
For instance, I have rather complicated feelings about Sergei from Lady Macbeth. He's a bastard, of course, but he's a handsome man and, more importantly, attractive to women, while Ekaterina Lvovna's husband is a degenerate. I had to show Sergei's flashy sex appeal through my music. I couldn't resort to mere caricature because it would be psychologically false. The audience had to understand that a woman really couldn't resist a man like that. So I endowed Sergei with several characteristics of a close friend of mine, who naturally wasn't a Sergei at all, but a very intelligent person. He missed nothing when it came to ladies, though; he was quite persistent in that regard. He says many beautiful things and women melt. I gave that trait to Sergei.
When Sergei seduces Ekaterina Lvovna, in intonation he's my friend.
But it was done in such a way that even he-a subtle musician�didn't notice a thing.
I feel it's important to use real events and real people in the plot.
When Sasa Preis and I did our first drafts of Lady Macbeth, we wrote all kinds of nonsense drawn from the personalities of our friends. It was amusing and it turned out to be a big help in our work.
The opera was a huge success. I wouldn't bring it up at all, of course, but later events turned everything around. Everyone forgot that Lady Macbeth ran for two years in Leningrad and for two in Moscow under the title Katerina lzmailova at Nemirovich-Danchenko's theater. It was also produced by Smolich* at the Bolshoi.
Worker correspondents wrote incensed letters about The Nose. And the ballets The Golden Age and Bolt were also denounced in every way. But it wasn't like that with Lady Macbeth. In both Leningrad and Moscow the opera played several times a week. Katerina lzmailova ran almost a hundred times in two seasons at Nemirovich-Danchenko's and as often in Leningrad. You might say that that's good for a new opera.
You must understand that I'm not indulging in self-praise here. The
*Nikolai Vasilycvich Smolich (1888-1968), opera director, avant-gardist, who directed the premieres of The Nose and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District.
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point isn't only in the music and in the productions themselves, which in both Leningrad and Moscow were done with talent and care. The general atmosphere was important too, and for. the opera it was good.
This may have been the happiest time for my music, there was never anything like it before or after. Before the opera I was a boy who might have been spanked, and later I was a state criminal, always under observation, always under suspicion. But at that moment ·everything was comparatively fine. Or to be more accurate, everything seemed to be fine.
This essentially unfounded feeling arose after the breakup of RAPP
and RAPM. * These unions had been on everybody's back. Once the Association came to control music, it seemed that Davidenko's "They wanted to beat, to beat us"t was going to replace all available music.