Inside Dmitri Shostakovich lurked a wicked satirist who had to be hidden until long after the composer was tormented and driven to despair by the Soviet bureaucracy. What is most remarkable, in retrospect, is the sense of humor and absurdity he managed to preserve, which still stings with sharp authority decades later.
The stings had special resonance at the première of a Shostakovich double bill at the National Theater's New Stage in Prague, where communist oppression is still a fresh memory. The opener is a recent discovery: Orango, a fragment unearthed by a musicologist in the Glinka Museum in Moscow in 2004. It was to be the prologue of a three-act opera about a half-man, half-ape slated for production at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1932. For various reasons the project was scrapped, and the prologue ended up in Shostakovich’s wastebasket.
Fortunately, a friend bribed his maid to save his trash, and after Shostakovich’s death the Glinka Museum was given more than 300 pages of unfinished scores and sketches. Orango has been staged three times since its discovery, in Los Angeles, London and Moscow, all with musical preparation by Esa-Pekka Salonen. But those were reconstructions. The Prague premiere on Dec. 17 was the first time the piece has been performed in the original piano reduction.
The second work, Anti-Formalist Rayok, takes its title from a satirical 1870 piece by Mussorgsky, and its content from two gatherings of the Congress of Soviet Composers – the first and most notorious in 1948, the second in 1957 – at which decrees were handed down on the proper way to compose music. At the first, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and others were denounced as anti-socialist formalists and their work banned. Shostakovich was particularly humiliated, forced out of the Moscow Conservatory, required to make a self-critical public “confession” and restricted to writing film scores.
In quiet retaliation, he composed a brief opera portraying a mock gathering of Soviet apparatchiks giving instructions on writing politically correct music, seconded by a yea-saying chorus. The speakers are thinly veiled caricatures of Stalin and the henchmen who enforced his crackdown on the arts, issuing orders in pompous, vacuous speeches with sly musical undertones – Stalin’s speech, for example, is set to his favorite folk song, Suliko. The work was performed for a small circle of Shostakovich’s friends several times at his home, and received its first public airing in a performance led by Mstislav Rostropovich at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 1989.
Slovak director Sláva Daubnerová tied the pieces together with two clever devices. Before Orango started, a bizarre trio – three men in dark suits, seemingly spray-painted in white from the chest up – were shown to seats in the front row. They didn’t like the performance and left in disgust halfway through, which made sense when they turned out to be the three main speakers in Anti-Formalist Rayok. And she inserted Shostakovich himself as a character, conducting the music in the first piece, playing the piano in the second, and generally getting pushed around and intimidated the entire evening. The part was played by Czech pianist, conductor and composer Jan Kučera, who looked uncannily like his Russian counterpart.