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During the entire prewar period Wagnerian operas played in Russia, but somehow limply, weakly, and wanly. Various things got in the way. They found traces of idealism, mysticism, reactionary romanticism, and petty-bourgeois anarchism in his works and they wrote all kinds of insulting things about him. And then suddenly the situation changed once again. (The word "suddenly" appears here like a messenger in a bad play-when the plot needs to be thickened, the runner comes and announces, "Your beloved is dead!" or "The enemy has entered the city!" Suddenly. That's bad writing, used by bad playwrights. And I'm a bad raconteur. Naturally, nothing happens "suddenly.") It was just that Stalin wanted to give Hitler a tighter hug, with loud music in the background. Everything had to be on family footing, as of yore. Wilhelm and Romanov were blood relatives. Stalin and Hitler were spiritual relatives.
And the most appropriate composer to accompany Russo-German friendship turned out to be Wagner. They called Eisenstein and told him to quickly produce The Valkyrie at the Bolshoi. Why Eisenstein, a film director? They needed a famous name. Wagner's opera had to be dramatic, as loud as the music. And most important, the director had to be a Gentile. And Eisenstein's father was even German, a converted Jew.
Eisenstein didn't realize the point of the invitation right away. He called up Alexander Tyshler, • a Jewish artist, and asked him to be designer of the production.
Tyshler was a wise man. He said, "Are you mad? Don't you realize what this production is? They won't let you use my name on the poster. The production will have to be judenfrei, free of Jews."
Eisenstein laughed. He still didn't want to understand what everyone else already did. Perhaps he was pretending, but anyway he said,
"I guarantee you work on this production." He called back a few days later, and this time he didn't laugh. He apologized. "You were right,"
Eisenstein said to Tyshler, and hung up.
Why didn't Eisenstein refuse to work on the project when he saw what it really was? We often say about someone that he works not for
•Alexander Grigoryevich Tyshler (b. 1908), artist who designed some of the most famous productions in Sovi� theater, including King Lear at the Moscow Jewish Theater (1935).
Tyshler was one of the favorite painters of the poet Osip Mandelstam.
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fear but for his conscience. Well, he had no conscience at all, but he did have fear, a lot of it. It turned out that Eisenstein was risking his head. They say that he was in torment and suffered greatly, but consoled himself with the thought that it would be interesting to work in the Bolshoi and that The Valkyrie was an opera of genius.
Recently I was talking to a musicologist, a friend of mine, and we brought up the shameful Wagnerian production. The musicologist def ended Eisenstein, saying that he had long wanted to work in opera, that he had "thought a lot about the synthesis of the arts," and that he had managed to introduce some of his ideas-certainly not all of them-onto the stage of the Bolshoi.
But I reminded the musicologist that Eisenstein had had an opportunity to realize his marvelous ideas in another opera production, also in Moscow. And the opera was by his close friend Prokofiev. I'm ref erring to Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko. This opera deals with the occupation of the Ukraine by the Germans in 1918. The Germans are depicted as cruel butchers. When Prokofiev was writing the opera, this corresponded to the political setting.
Actually, this Prokofiev plot was distinguished by great ideological consistency. There were Bolsheviks and evil kulaks and a vow sworn by Red partisans over the grave of a commissar and even a people's uprising.
Semyon Kotko was put into production at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater by Meyerhold himself. It was his last work in the theater. In fact, he never finished it, he was arrested in the middle of it, and he was no longer Meyerhold, but "Semyonich." That was his alleged underground saboteur's nickname. That's quite ridiculous. It was probably the interrogator who invented the name, having read something about Semyon Kotko in the papers.
The director was arrested but the work went on as though nothing had happened. This was one of the terrible signs of the age, a man had disappeared but everyone pretended that nothing had happened. A man was in charge of the work, it had meaning only with him, under his direction. But he was no longer there, he had evaporated, and no one said a word.
The name Meyerhold immediately disappeared from conversations.
That was all.
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At first everyone shuddered. Each thought: I'm next. Then they prayed-I don't know to whom, but they prayed that the next one would be someone else. And since there was no ·order stopping the work, they could continue. It meant that high up they felt that the work was necessary, and perhaps in working they could save their lives.
Prokofiev turned to Eisenstein, his friend. The word "friend" is used as a convention here, particularly when it's used for two men like Eisenstein and Prokofiev. I doubt that either of them needed friends.
They were both remote and aloof, but at least Prokofiev and Eisenstein respected each other. Eisenstein had also been a student of Meyerhold's, so Prokofiev asked the film director to bring the production of Semyon Kotko to completion.
Eisenstein refused. The political climate had changed by then, and in that wonderful era, attacks on Germans, if only in an opera, were forbidden. The opera's future looked doubtful. Why get mixed up in a politically dubious venture? So Eisenstein said, "I don't have the time." He found time, as we know, for The Valkyrie.
The subsequent history of both productions is interesting, very, very interesting. The premiere of The Valkyrie proceeded with all due pomp, and leaders from the Party and the state and the Fascist ambassador all attended. There were rave reviews. In a word, another victory on the arts front. Semyon Kotko barely squeaked into the world.
Naturally, the Germans were gone from the production, replaced by some unnamed occupying force. But nevertheless, the powers that be were displeased. Stalin panicked at the thought of angering the Germans. Officials from the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs showed up at every rehearsal, frowned, and left, saying nothing. That was a very bad sign.
Finally, Vishinsky* himself appeared. He was Stalin's right-hand man, a bastard and a butcher. Obviously, the leader and teacher had sent him to determine just what seditious ideas were being preached from the stage of the opera theater named after a man whom Stalin respected. I mean Stanislavsky. Under the wise direction of Vishinsky,
•Andrei Yanuaryevich Vishinsky (1 883-1954), one of the prime organizers of the political trials of the 1930s. In _his memoirs Winston Churchill described Vishinsky's performance as state prosecutor in these trials as "brilliant."
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