March 01, 2009

Dead Souls for Two Metronomes

“There’s nothing more elevated,” wrote Nikolai Gogol, “than the effect on a person of a perfectly coordinated harmony of parts, which has so far only been heard in a single orchestra.” Gogol was not only a great writer, but also musical. He knew how to read music, and felt it intensely. His best works are remarkably musical, and many of them inspired masterpieces by composers such as Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, Shchedrin, and Schnittke.

Recently, opera diva Galina Vishnevskaya decided to mark the 200th anniversary of Gogol’s birth in a unique way. On the eve of the celebration, her Opera Center in Moscow staged an unusual performance based on themes from key “Gogolian” operas. The production, entitled Marriage and Other Horrors, was staged by Vladimir Mirzoev, the renowned stage director of the Mariinsky Theater. In her own words, Vishnevskaya wanted to present a “unique kaleidoscope” of Gogolian opera. The performance opened with Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera Marriage. Mussorgsky had attempted to set the text of Gogol’s story to music exactly as it was written. (Shostakovich would attempt the same thing in the following century with The Gamblers, and would also leave the work unfinished). The second act was a witty pastiche of selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas May Night and Christmas Eve, Tchaikovsky’s The Slippers, Mussorgsky’s Sorochintsy Fair, and Shostakovich’s The Nose, each based upon a famous short story by Gogol. The varying scenes, arias, and duets were presented as if dreamed by Agafya Tikhonovna, the fiancée in Marriage, forming a second act.

The production thus was able to include — even fragmentarily — almost all the operas based on Gogol, up to and including Shostakovich’s [1930] The Nose, which deserves particular attention. While the operas by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky are interesting on their own merits, they don’t add much to our understanding of Gogol’s works. The Nose is different, however. In it, the twenty-one year old Shostakovich managed to create a masterpiece that is truly akin to Gogol’s text. During the Soviet period, scholars usually categorized Gogol’s prose as “critical realism.” Yet Gogol as no one else managed to penetrate the melancholy absurdity of life in Russia, where literally anything under the sun can happen.

This is precisely what Shostakovich embodied in The Nose, one of the best operas of the twentieth century. For the first and perhaps the last time, music was able to convey what only literature had previously done. Perhaps Dostoevsky says it best in his description of St. Petersburg, where The Nose is set: “If the fog were to vanish upwards like smoke, wouldn’t this entire city of rot and slime float away with it, leaving the Finnish swamp [it was built upon] behind, and in the midst of it, [Pushkin’s] Bronze Horseman, [exhausted from his wild gallop through the city], seated on his breathless horse?”

Dostoevsky’s was referring to Gogol’s writing, but his words apply equally well to Shostakovich’s opera, which depicts St. Petersburg as an enchanted place, where the most fantastical events can become reality. Shostakovich’s The Nose forms the apogee of the Gogolian tradition that developed in Russian music over the course of several decades.

Shostakovich would turn to Gogol yet again in 1941, more than a decade later, when he began writing an opera based on Gogol’s play, The Gamblers. Inspired by Mussorgsky’s Marriage, Shostakovich attempted to put the entire text to music, word for word. Unfortunately, after finishing only 45 minutes of music, Shostakovich broke off work, fearing the opera would ultimately be too long. The Gamblers wasn’t performed during his lifetime, but he valued the composition, reworking part of it into the second movement of his last work, the Viola Sonata. Krzysztof Meyer, a modern Polish composer, attempted to continue Shostakovich’s project by setting the remaining scenes of Gogol’s play to music. The result was an intriguing dialogue of musical eras and composers. Later, renowned conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky rescued The Gamblers from obscurity and also presented The Nose after it had been tacitly banned for several decades.

The second half of the twentieth century saw another series of vivid compositions on Gogolian motifs, including Werner Egk’s opera The Inspector General and Rodion Shchedrin’s Dead Souls. Alfred Schnittke also turned his hand to Dead Souls, penning the score to the 1984 miniseries of the same name, directed by Mikhail Shveitser (famed for the satiric comedy, The Golden Calf). Rozhdestvensky would later use the score to create a concert suite whose most striking section consists of an étude for two metronomes. Initially, one of the percussionists was supposed to start them up, but during performances Rozhdestvensky prefers to “play the metronome” himself, and the audience loves it.

Schnittke’s earlier Gogol-inspired work should also be mentioned. More vivid and more well-known, it grew out of the music he wrote for the play The Census List, which was performed at the Taganka Theater in Moscow. While Rozhdestvensky compiled a suite by the same name under the composer’s approving gaze, that didn’t render it any less Schnittke’s work; he often enlisted performers as his co-composers. The enormous orchestra, with its expanded percussion section, organ, piano, celestina, harpsichord, electric guitar, and bass gives The Census List (also known as the Gogol Suite) a resemblance to Schnittke’s symphonies. And the “polystylistic method” of composition — which uses varying musical styles simultaneously rather than one after another — seems strikingly close to the absurdity present in Gogol’s artistic world.

The combination of the harpsichord with popular musical instruments in the opening section creates a multidimensional space where different musical eras jostle against each other as if at a Mardi Gras. Schnittke’s famed first symphony had a similar goal, although The Census List has more of a democratic flair. The festivities are rudely interrupted by the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which is followed by a reference to Haydn’s Surprise Symphony. Schnittke comes across in many of his works as a subtle master of style, the tongue in his cheek being barely noticeable, but the version of Hadyn here is so sickeningly sweet it’s no wonder the section is known as Chichikov’s Childhood, after Gogol’s fake and soulless hero.

The suite’s most vivid selection is the music to The Overcoat, popularly known in encore calls as The Polka, although it’s far from effective as a musical sketch. Its simple melody belies an infinite melancholy that unites The Overcoat’s forlorn hero Akaky Bashmachkin with Aksenty Poprishchin, narrator of another Gogol work, Notes of a Madman. The director intones a madman’s monologue, accompanied by psychedelic organ sounds intertwined with snatches of the Overcoat motif: “They say in England a fish swam to the surface and spoke two words in a language so strange that scientists have been trying to identify it for three years, but still have not succeeded. I’ve also read in the newspapers about two cows that came into a shop and asked for a pound of tea. This is all happening, in my opinion, because people suppose that a person’s brain is located in his head; to the contrary, it is carried on the wind from the direction of the Caspian Sea.”

Next, the ghosts of Mozart and Tchaikovsky whirl by, heralding the infernal ball that brings all of Gogol’s characters together. They circle in a waltz, dance the tango—and even the cancan, until Gogol in a fit of pique brings the spectacle to an end. The Gogol Suite ends with a somber reflection from Gogol: “It’s dull in this world, gentlemen!” These specific words aren’t pronounced, but are conveyed quite clearly by the wondrous music. They aptly summarize the Gogolian musical tradition that has survived for nearly a century and a half and is poised to continue into the twenty-first century. RL

RECOMMENDED: The best translations of the nearly untranslatable Gogol are Dead Souls, Translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. Revised and edited by Susanne Fusso (Yale Univ. Press, 1996); The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, and Selected Stories, translated by Ronald Wilks (Penguin Classics, 2006)

March 01, 2009

Dead Souls for Two Metronomes

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Shostakovich watching rehearsals of The Nose

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