{"id":981,"date":"2018-03-25T22:02:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T02:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=981"},"modified":"2018-03-25T22:02:30","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T02:02:30","slug":"shostakovich-and-the-fool-boris-godunov-and-king-lear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/03\/shostakovich-and-the-fool-boris-godunov-and-king-lear.html","title":{"rendered":"Shostakovich and the Fool: Boris Godunov and King Lear"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The most galvanizing Shakespeare experience I know is the 1971 Soviet film version of King Lear<\/em> directed by Grigory Kozintsev with music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Its dimensions are such that it fails on a home screen; it demands a big theater and big sound.<\/p>\n

The profound Russianness of the Kozintsev\/Shostakovich Lear<\/em> transcends language. Re-encountering this great film in the context of PostClassical Ensemble<\/a>\u2019s ongoing two-season Russian Revolution immersion experience, I realized its Russian lineage connects to the most famous of all Russian operas: Mussorgsky\u2019s Boris Godunov<\/em>. It would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that Shakespeare\u2019s iconic seventheenth century play is here conflated with Mussorgsky\u2019s iconic nineteenth century opera.<\/p>\n

Obviously, both play and opera deal with a ruler who sins, and who dies consumed by crazed guilt. (Boris was complicit in the murder of the Tsarevich, and so ascended the throne.) But there is a more literal resemblance, a character common to Lear<\/em> and Boris<\/em>, and of special importance to Shostakovich. And that is the Fool.<\/p>\n

The Fool can say what others cannot. In Boris Godunov<\/em>, he alone can tell the Tsar to his face that he\u2019s a murderer \u2013 and not be punished.<\/p>\n

In Boris<\/em>, the Fool comes last: one of the most original finales in opera. A conventional ending would have been the Tsar\u2019s agonized death. He empties the throne room of all but the Tsarevich, sings \u201cFarewell, my son, I am dying,\u201d and expires. And that in fact is how the first version of Boris Godunov<\/em> ends. But in Mussorgsky\u2019s final version of 1872, Boris\u2019s death, however affecting, is penultimate. Mussorgsky trumps it with a culminating vignette in the Kromy Forest. The People \u2013 a pervasive presence \u2013 acclaim a false pretender to the throne. They march with him on Moscow, emptying the stage. And \u2013 the culminating stroke \u2013 the Fool sings:<\/p>\n

Cry, cry Russian land<\/p>\n

Russian people<\/p>\n

Cry<\/p>\n

(Here<\/a> is the peerless Ivan Kozlovsky, as Mussorgsky\u2019s Fool, from a Soviet film version of the opera.)<\/p>\n

In the Kozintsev\/Shostakovich Lear<\/em>, Lear\u2019s death is witnessed by the People \u2013 an oppressed ubiquitous presence, as in Mussorgsky\u2019s opera. The funeral cortege exits. And the Fool plays his plaintive song.\u00a0 It is Mussorgsky\u2019s ending, transplanted to King Lear<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(You won\u2019t find the Soviet Lear<\/em> on youtube, but there is a video of excerpts<\/a> with live accompaniment conducted by Claudio Abbado; the pertinent ending begins at 1:08.)<\/p>\n

Mussorgsky\u2019s sad, suffering Fool embodies a mass of sad, suffering humanity. So, too, does the Kozintsev\/Shostakovich Fool. His centrality is such that his song begins the movie, accompanying the credits. Then comes a trudging horde of placeless people. Shostakovich\u2019s scoring of this procession practically mimics Mussorgsky. The beginning of Shakespeare\u2019s play is delayed fully five minutes.<\/p>\n

The People even turn up in Edgar\u2019s hut \u2013 it becomes a homeless shelter. And they elicit some of Shostakovich\u2019s most potent and characteristic music. Their effect is to explicitly amplify and ramify the tragedy. Doubtless, Shakespeare\u2019s dysfunctional royal family implicitly embodies a larger malaise. In the Kozintsev\/Shostakovich King Lear<\/em>, this malaise is explicit. We see it. It is epic, as vast as Russia itself.<\/p>\n

Kozintsev wrote of the ending of Shakespeare\u2019s King<\/em> Lear<\/em>: \u201cLear has no end \u2013 at least there is no finale in the play: none of the usual solemn trumpets of tragedy, or magnificent burials. The bodies, even of kings, are carried out under conditions of war; nobody even says a few elevated words. The time for words is over.\u201d<\/p>\n

This dire view of the human condition was also Shostakovich\u2019s view, numbed by decades of Stalinist fear and oppression.<\/p>\n

Reinforcing these linkages of Lear<\/em> with Boris<\/em> is Shostakovich\u2019s reverence for Mussorgsky. He undertook a new orchestration of Boris Godunov<\/em>. He orchestrated Mussorgsky\u2019s Songs and<\/em> Dances of Death<\/em>. For Shostakovich, as for Mussorgsky, art was never for art\u2019s sake. It possessed an ethical dimension. It commented on human affairs. Shostakovich said of Mussorgsky:<\/p>\n

\u201cMussorgsky\u2019s concept is profoundly democratic. The people are the base of everything. The people are here and the rulers are there. The rule forced on the people is immoral and fundamentally anti-people. The best intentions of individuals don\u2019t count. That\u2019s Mussorgky\u2019s position and I dare hope that it is also mine.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeaning in music \u2013 that must sound very strange for most people. Particularly in the West. It\u2019s here in Russia that the question is usually posed: What was the composer trying to say, after all? The questions are na\u00efve, of course, but despite their naivete and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. Can music make man stop and think? Can it cry out and thereby draw man\u2019s attention to various vile acts? All these questions began for me with Mussorgsky.\u201d<\/p>\n

The official Soviet view of Mussorgsky, as propagated under Stalin, is not irrelevant: he was an\u00a0\u201cartist of the masses,\u201d an enemy of art for art\u2019s sake. He projected a social conscience.<\/p>\n

Stalin of course would never have endorsed Shostakovich\u2019s Mussorgsky encomium, with its repudiation of the \u201crule forced on the people.\u201d \u00a0But as surely as Mussorgsky, as surely as Shostakovich, he rejected art for art\u2019s sake. It was an instrument of patriotism, of propaganda, of Socialist Realist uplift.<\/p>\n

A remarkable recent book — Stalin\u2019s Music Prize<\/em> <\/a>by Marina Frolova-Walker \u2013 opens a window on Shostakovich the cultural bureaucrat. Culling Soviet archives previously shut, she documents the deliberations deciding the Stalin Prizes awarded to Soviet composers and musical performers. One discovers that Shostakovich took his role seriously. He embraced the criterion of popular appeal. His predilection that art “make man stop and think” resonates with Mussorgsky, with (an inescapable example) Tolstoy.<\/p>\n

It bears mentioning, in this context, that Shostakovich evidently didn\u2019t care for the United States. Also, that he said of his great expatriate contemporary Igor Stravinsky that he detected \u201ca flaw in his personality, a loss of some important moral principles. . . . Maybe he was the most brilliant composer of the twentieth century. But he always spoke only for himself, while Mussorgsky spoke for himself and for his country.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am not suggesting that Shostakovich was an ideologue; there is no Socialist Realist uplift at the conclusion Kozintsev\/Shostakovich King Lear<\/em>. But it aligns with ideals of Russian art that endured into Soviet times. It insists upon a social context. It make us ponder people other than ourselves.<\/p>\n

The Shostakovich quotes I cite above are from Solomon Volkov\u2019s Testimony: The Memoirs of<\/em> Dmitri Shostakovich<\/em>. This invaluable book is today widely reviled as fraudulent. But there is no \u201cobjective\u201d reading of Shostakovich the man. I am certain that Testimony<\/em> records a true picture of Shostakovich as experienced by Solomon Volkov. (The same could be said of my own Conversations with Arrau<\/a>,<\/em> which Claudio Arrau\u2019s cousin \u2013 a Pinochet supporter — repudiated as a false portrait.) Today, no one can deny that Shostakovich\u2019s scores are packed with encoded meanings subverting the Stalinist status quo.<\/p>\n

In his Introduction to Testimony<\/em>, Volkov calls Shostakovich \u201cthe second great yurodivy<\/em> composer,\u201d Mussorgsky having been the first. \u201cThe yurodivy<\/em> is a Russian religious phenomenon, which even the cautious Soviet scholars call a national trait. . . . The yurodivy<\/em> has the gift to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he tells the world about his insight in an intentionally paradoxical sway, in code. The plays the fool, which actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice. The yurodivy<\/em> is an anarchist and individualist, who in his public role breaks the commonly held \u2018moral\u2019 laws of behavior and flouts conventions. But he sets strict limitations, rules, and taboos for himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would say that the King<\/em> Lear<\/em> adaptation of Grigori Kozintsev and Dmitiri Shostakovich suggests that Shostakovich identified with Shakespeare\u2019s Fool. And that is why the Fool, not Shakespeare\u2019s Albany, has the last word.<\/p>\n

A final observation: during the Cold War, Shostakovich was widely perceived in the West as a composer whose early genius had been snuffed out by ideology and politics: a Soviet stooge. The notion of Shostakovich the yurodivy<\/em> was as yet unglimpsed.\u00a0 The Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, extolled Stravinsky and other artists of the Free World. And JFK delivered eloquent speeches denying that art could flourish in totalitarian states. In retrospect,\u00a0 many delicious paradoxes complicate these decades of cultural propaganda, during which the most enduring concert music was being composed in the Soviet Union, not Europe or the US. PostClassical Ensemble ends its two-year commemoration of the Russian Revolution on May 23 at Washington National Cathedral with \u201cSecret Music Skirmishes of the Cold War: The Shostakovich Case\u201d<\/a> \u2013 an evening including former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle, former CIA Staff Historian Nicholas Dujmovic, and former Soviet refusenik Vladimir Feltsman.<\/p>\n

And next weekend we present the first Kozintsev-Shostakovich collaboration \u2013 the classic avant-garde Soviet silent film The New Babylon<\/em> (1929) \u2013 with Shostakovich\u2019s enfant terrible<\/em> score performed live by PostClassical Ensemble and Angel Gil-Ordonez. That\u2019s at the American Film Institute (Silver Spring, Md.). Information: http:\/\/postclassical.com\/performances\/newbabylon\/<\/p>\n

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The most galvanizing Shakespeare experience I know is the 1971 Soviet film version of King Lear directed by Grigory Kozintsev with music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Its dimensions are such that it fails on a home screen; it demands a big theater and big sound. The profound Russianness of the Kozintsev\/Shostakovich Lear transcends language. Re-encountering this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-981","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-fP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":990,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions\/990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}