(4 of 5)
Condemned to years of living death in Mzensk, the heroine commits three murders to relieve her boredom. The first Soviet opera, Lady Macbeth became a Red fad, was given more than 200 performances in Leningrad and Moscow. In the U.S., where it arrived in 1935, the opera was called flippant, noisy, vulgar and a hodgepodge of musical styles. Nevertheless, Lady Macbeth of Mzensk fascinated many musicians by its vitality, shrewd musical characterization, brilliant orchestration.
It also nearly ruined Composer Shostakovich. At the height of the Purge, when Russian nerves were badly frayed and people were plopping into prison like turtles into a pond, Stalin decided to hear Lady Macbeth. He did not like it, walked out before it was over. Murder from boredom struck him as a bourgeois idea. Besides, Stalin's musical taste runs to simple, more tuneful things, zigzags between Beethoven's Eroica and Verdi's Rigoletto. Also, he had a seat directly above the brasses.
Promptly a Pravda article called Shostakovich's music "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric and leftist" (atonal). A few days after that, Pravda attacked his ballet, The Limpid Stream. Friends feared that Shostakovich's next composition might have to be called Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make. But Composer Shostakovich was not a revolutionist for nothing. He publicly agreed that Pravda knew more about music than he did. He withdrew his Fourth Symphony (it has never been performed) after one rehearsal. He announced that he would stake his musical future on a Fifth Symphony.
Simple, romantic, perfectly keyed to the new order in Russia, the Fifth Symphony restored Shostakovich to official favor.
Two years later the Sixth Symphony brought him further official plaudits. Outside Russia, music lovers were more critical. Shostakovich's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies combined spontaneous gusto, originality and nobility, with a curious taste for trite themes and musical horseplay, as if the composer were constantly fighting down an impulse to throw musical custard pies.
Beer and Soccer. Today strangers who meet Shostakovich for the first time find him shy, serious, scholarly. At parties or among musicians, he unbends, jokes, out-drinks his companions. He likes automobiles, fast driving, U.S. magazines, reads the U.S. authors who most appeal to Russia—Mark Twain, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair. Strictly a city man, he dislikes dachas (Russia's summer bungalows), and komaryi (Russia's multitudinous mosquitoes).
Before the German invasion, Shostakovich lived in a five-room Leningrad apartment filled with his family (wife, two children, mother, sister and sister's son) and piles of scores, books on music and sport. An enthusiastic soccer fan, Shostakovich is a regular correspondent of the chief Russian sports paper, Red Sport. Says he:
"The climax of joy is not when you're through a new symphony, but when you are hoarse from shouting, with your hands stinging from clapping, your lips parched, and you sip your second glass of beer after you've fought for it with 90,000 other spectators to celebrate the victory of your favorite team."