Zooming Albert, Tito, and Russians from 1948

It seems appropriate to kick off the summer term of my Opera in Depth Zoom course with Britten's Albert Herring*, that Maupassant-adapted classic operatic comedy - one of the few truly great ones of the 20th century - since we're heading towards the merriest of months, and Eric Crozier's libretto is about a virginal May King crowned in the absence of any suitable village maidens (pictured above by Robert Workman: Richard Pinkstone as Albert with Adrian Thompson as the Mayor, Clarissa Meek as Florence Pike and Orla Boylan as Lady Billows in the wonderful Grange Festival production, which I reviewed on The Arts Desk). 

Helping that great mezzo Jean Rigby and her husband director Jamie Hayes with some of the fiddly bits about Zoom sound and vision for a talk they were giving to the Northampton Opera Group, and instantly warming to them both, I thought I might be able to call upon Jean to talk about the Glyndebourne production originally directed by Peter Hall (and still ready for revival, I think). She's delighted to be able to help, and I'm hoping we might reassemble other members of that original cast, including John Graham Hall, Felicity Palmer and Alan Opie. Fingers crossed.

We kick off next Monday afternoon (19 April), 2.30-4.30pm, and the next three or four Mondays (Bank Holidays obviously excepted) will be devoted to Albert. Then we move on to Mozart's La clemenza di Tito for the following five Mondays (pages of Metastasio's libretto, much used by the time Mozart came to set/adapt it, pictured above), due a new production to mark the Royal Opera's emergence from lockdown. Director Richard Jones and conductor Mark Wigglesworth, both regular visitors to my Opera in Depth courses, have promised to come along. 

The last of four terms on Russian music begins next Thursday, 22 April. You don't need to have attended the other three to follow this one. I've made a provisional draft for each class thus:

1: The Zhdanov trials and after  22 April

After the ‘chaos instead of music’ Pravda article attacking Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, a second massive blow fell on Soviet composers in February 1948, when Stalin’s right-hand man Andrey Zhdanov initiated a conference attacking so-called ‘Formalism in Music’. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were the main victims. The attacks on film came earlier: clips from the main culprit, Lukov's A Great Life (Bolshaya Zhizn) - a mining sequence entirely set to music - and Part Two of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, with Prokofiev's finest film score are followed by the final scene of a party-line monster, Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin (1949), where Stalinalike Mikhail Gelovani arrives in the destroyed German city to a perfunctory choral epilogue by Shostakovich, and see how Prokofiev adapted with a further simplified, but still characteristic, style. We hope that Steven Isserlis will be our guest to discuss the cello works of that period.

2: The effect of the trials on symphonic music  29 April

We look at Shostakovich’s ‘bottom-drawer’ parody of the event and its 1957 sequel, Rayok or The Musical Peepshow, before hearing excerpts from symphonic music composed in the shadows, with short clips from Myaskovsky's 26th and 27th Symphonies, much more on Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto and his swansong, the Seventh Symphony, with a backwards glance at his major revision of the 1930 Fourth Symphony in 1947. Andrew Litton returns to the class. 

3: Shostakovich before and after the death of Stalin  6 May

Shostakovich had begun his Tenth Symphony before the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953 (the same day as that of Prokofiev; no surprise to see see how the Italian communist paper l'Unità covered the 'main' event, pictured above) but did not compose the bulk of it until after that watershed, allowing himself an uncharacteristically jubilant if wild finale. Andrew Litton returns to give a masterclass on a symphony he has conducted 66 times. With a brief look at how the 24 Preludes and Fugues were received by a hostile committee in 1951.

4: Chamber and instrumental: Shotakovich and the younger generation in the 1950s 13 May

Shostakovich's position as the supreme chronicler of Russian life and soul was now unchallenged, but new names start to emerge: the considerable figure of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, aka Moisey Vainberg, born in Poland in 1919 but Moscow based from 1943, at Shostakovich’s urging; and Galina Ustvolskaya, Shostakovich’s pupil from 1939 to 1941 and then from 1947 to 1948. Her output is small but original – ‘there is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead’, she declared, with a certain hyperbole – and Shostakovich quotes her 1949 Trio for clarinet, violin and piano in his Fifth String Quartet, premiered in 1953.

5: Quotations: Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony and Eighth String Quartet  27 May

Why did Shostakovich revert to revolutionary songs as the material for his Eleventh Symphony, 'The Year 1905'? We look at some of them with the help of the singing of the National Youth Orchestra players. And what was the real significance of the deeply personal Eighth Quartet? With an interlude in the shape of light music by Kabalevsky and Shostakovich in his operetta Moscow Cheryomushki.

6: Americans in the USSR: Van Cliburn, Bernstein, Stravinsky and Balanchine 3 June

The third great 20th century Russian composer came in triumph to Moscow, celebrating his 80th birthday (pictured above with Rostropovich). We take the opportunity to look at the very different paths he had taken in America, and what came next.

7:  End of the Thaw and musical life after Khrushchev: 1962-8  10 June

Khrushchev's sudden rages against jazz and abstract art signalled a closing-down of hard-won freedoms. Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, setting a range of poems by the young iconoclast Yevgeny Yevtushenko, was a surprise casualty. Meanwhile, dodecaphony was having its impact on a younger generation of composers, but not for long: we see how Alfred Schnittke and the Estonian Arvo
Pärt. With a special visit from pianist Sophia Rahman.

8: The inspirers: great Russian performers of the later Soviet years, Shostakovich and Britten  17 June

Time to consider those towering artists who offered such lifelines to composers in trouble, with special focus once more on Rostropovich, and this time investigating the special connections forged by his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (pictured above at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in 1963). Britten quickly became friends with the pair, and later with Shostakovich: we examine further links between the British and Russian composers.

9: Shostakovich: Endgames   24 June

In his later years, an ailing Shostakovich was much preoccupied by death, and approached each work as if it could be his last. The Fourteenth Symphony is his answer to Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which he orchestrated: a cycle setting poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke for soprano, bass, strings and percussion. The Fifteenth Symphony of 1971 is an autobiographical orchestral summing up, but by no means his last work. Each of the last three string quartets offers a different angle on death: terrified in the Thirteenth, ultimately radiant in the Fourteenth and skeletally enigmatic in the Fifteenth. Parallel are the last song cycles, with explicit reflections in the texts especially of the Michelangelo Suite, and the swansong of the Viola Sonata

10: The end of history – the mid-1970s onwards  1 July

Two towering figures in Russian music emerged after Shostakovich – Alfred Schnittke, who like the master constantly surprised with his eclecticism up to his death in 1998, and Sofia Gubaidulina (born in 1931), who has continued to compose music of a visionary intensity.

If you're interested in signing up - each two-hour class is a tenner, making it £100 for each term - leave me a message here with your e-mail. I won't publish it, but I promise to get back in touch.

*UPDATE - since Mark Wigglesworth offered 24 May for his date to talk about the Royal Opera La clemenza di Tito, I thought we'd actually start with the Mozart instead. 

The Terror novel

None could be more authentic than Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev; he lived through the earlier waves of eliminations and was imprisoned/exiled himself before French connections got him released in 1936, of all years. But a great chronicler of his times - chiefly in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, through which I introduced my first acquaintance with this literary giant and attempted to provide a potted biography - might not be guaranteed to be a great imaginative novelist. Serge undoubedly is, and in her introduction to this New York Review of Books edition (thanks to the imprint for so many discoveries), Susan Sontag explains why, in a series of questions followed by eloquently argued sentences, Serge has missed the 'master' status he deserves. Born in Belgium of Russian anti-Tsarists in exile, 'no country can fully claim him', and no 'national literature' either; he was hyperproductive, and people are suspicious of that; 'most of what he wrote does not belong to literature', and what does has been 'politicised' as a 'moral achievement'; his life was full of dualities; an embattled revolutionary to the last, he 'refused to take on the expected cargo of melancholy'.

Indeed - necessarily dark, even black as hell, as The Case of Comrade Tulayev undoubtedly is, it's constantly lit up by a cosmic perspective. The very first chapter echoes War and Peace with the title 'comets are born at night'; three members of the old guard meet in a snowy wood outside Moscow, knowing that they won't see each other again and so alive to the strange beauty around them; and in the most amazing chapter, for me, of all, 'the brink of nothing', the only one of the fall-guys to meet a triumphant fate of sorts (it is not survival) is seen at one with his overseer among a small population of Ostiaks and Old Believers at what is constantly depicted as the end of the world. He transcends fear and sees that one of his persecutors will become one of the next victims. This is prose of the highest, most poetic order, in Willard R Trask's translation from the French.

The structure of the novel is an original polyphony of voices. It both is and isn't about the fallout from the random assassination of Kirov in 1934; the height of the Terror, which fell three years later, is past and we start in 1939, end on the brink of the German invasion. Scapegoats from the not-yet-wiped-out first and second wave of revolutionaries must be wiped out. their individual fates are taken in turn. Stalin appears throught as 'the Chief'.

All the major figures are political ones, so the sweep of the Terror isn't the subject of the book. I thought it coincided well enough, though, with the near-misses that Shostakovich and Prokofiev had in the second half of the 1930s, so I urged the students on the third of my Russian music Zoom terms to read both the autobiography and the novel. We were so privileged that Elizabeth Wilson, author of the best book on Shostakovich, joined us for the class dealing with the formation of the Association of Soviet Musicians in 1932 and the Pravda attack on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, with the opera and the Fourth Symphony as the main musical focuses. I like to think that Liza and I are good friends now, so the exchanges were relaxed, but she is rigorous with the facts and shed some new light on the interrogation of Shostakovich which is the main subject of Julian Barnes's The Music of Time, on which she advised. That's Liza top far right in the screenshot below. I've lopped off the bottom of the screen because it had the time bar over the five folk there, and there are more on two other screens who only feature when they pop up to ask a question or make an observation.

Term is coming to an end with the music of the war years this coming Thursday, and the bleak time between 1948 and 1953 in the last class. For the Opera in Depth classes, we've gone from the heights of Fidelio/Leonore - and a marvellous finale which featured Linda Esther Gray, Mark Wigglesworth and Ian Page - to the depraved depths of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (three more classes left). Then I want to offer a double one-off, as it were, with two classes on Prokofiev's War and Peace on Thursdays 18 and 25 March, 2.30pm-4.30pm UK time: anyone interested, just leave a message here with your email and I won't publish it, but I'll reply.

War and disquiet with Grossman and Lipke

Two remarkable men, a Russian and a Latvian, share equal honours here for respective perfection of the work and of the life. Above is Vasily Grossman in the thick of it in 1945, and below is Žanis Lipke in 1977 holding the 'Righteous Among the Nations' medal which bears the inscription 'He who saves one life saves the world'. You'll have to read some way on to find out how Lipke did it.

First time round with Grossman's long-concealed Life and Fate, I stopped around the page-180 mark. Who were all these people zooming into sight around Stalingrad with very little in the way of introduction? When I read in translator Robert Chandler's introduction that many of them had already featured in a previous novel dealing with the earlier stages of the German invasion, For a Just Cause, published in 1952, which to this day remains untranslated into English, I felt we were being cheated, presented with Life and Fate as a self-contained entity rather than part of a diptych.

It's complicated. For a Just Cause, according to Chandler, doesn't stick its neck out against the Soviet regime in the way that Life and Fate so startlingly does. Grossman thought the latter might be published during the Khrushchev thaw. He was wrong. In February 1961 KGB officers came to his apartment to confiscate the manuscript and anything related to it. But Grossman had left two other copies with friends, one of which was smuggled out on microfilm to the west with the help of Andrey Sakharov, among others, in 1974, a decade after Grossman's death; the novel was finally published in 1980.

Though Grossman wrote Life and Fate with the benefit of hindsight, and compressed into 1941-2 a timescale which actually extends up to Stalin's big drive against Russian Jews with the 'Doctors' Plot' a decade later, he lived through the events it describes as a reporter (his war journalism will be my next reading once I've finished Elena Ferrante's tetralogy).

The most lacerating transferal of his own experience into that of the man who becomes the novel's main character, Jewish physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, is of the loss of his mother, who was sent to her death in Treblinka from Berdichev, which he reached too late. This is why the last letter of Viktor's mother in Chapter 18 of Life and Fate's first part is one of the most powerful of all literary testimonies to the horrors of the Holocaust; no wonder it has been adapted for the stage both as a monologue and within Lev Dodin's very selective Maly Theatre adaptation, which led me back to the novel.

The other sequence that I found almost unbearable is the strand following unmarried teacher Sofya Osipovna Levinton's journey to Auschwitz, and her poignant adoption of a Jewish boy who dies in her arms. Later stages deal with the tragicomic compromises of Shtrum, who finds himself suddenly of use to Stalin again when Russia needs to develop a nuclear bomb. The book, unlike (as I am led to believe by one who's read it) its predecessor, makes it clear that Stalin's horrors, not least the indelible mark of the 1937 Terror, scar people as much as Hitler's. As with the even-handed condemnation of Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, this is what made Life and Fate unpublishable in Soviet Russia.

Shafts of light are often extinguished, despite the profound Tolstoyan humanity throughout. Another seminal chapter is devoted to the manuscript of Ikonnikov, a so-called 'Holy Fool' in another German camp. He decries the inevitable corruption of the 'common good' principle and contrasts it with

a kindness outside any system of social or religious good...Even at the most terrible times...this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium...This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! 

Later, the army driver Semyonov is taken in by an old peasant woman who tells him she has seen good and bad on both sides. Khristya Chunyak is the embodiment of Ikonnikov's 'stupid kindness'.

There is a memorial in Rīga to another, real person who epitomises the personal good, Žanis Lipke. Not exactly an ordinary Latvian - stevedore, dockworker and smuggler, he had always been a stalwart left wing activist. But when he was working at a warehouse under German command and heard that Riga's Jews were being massacred in the woods near the city, he devised an elaborate rescue scheme to make sure that many of the Jewish workers did not return to the ghetto and certain eventual death at the end of the day - unnoticed, miraculously - but to various shelters around the city. His reason? That it was simply the duty of a human being. When circumstances became too dangerous for the escapees there he transported them across the broad Daugava river to his home in semi-rural Ķīpsala. 

There eight to 12 people at any one time were housed in a three-by-three-metre hole in the ground. All the family were involved in the task, including his wife Johanna, whose words and eloquent visage (such eyes!) are so movingly captured in an interview you view on a screen at the bottom of the new building's central well, 

and young son Zigfrids who stood guard above. As the numbers grew, Lipke arranged with a distant parish to shelter people in three farmsteads. He saved around 50 lives. None of the 25 people who helped him was ever betrayed. Later, when he was interrogated by the NKVD, he told his questioners that the Communists were even worse than the Nazis - the latter shot you while looking you in the eye, the other shot you in the back. Astonishingly, he wasn't carted off to Siberia for that. Pictured below, Johanna and Žanis in 1946, seated to the right with some of the Jews they rescued.

Ķīpsala is still a beautiful part of town with many wooden houses and much greenery, but the main reason for visiting is to see the stunningly-constructed memorial, created by architect Zaiga Gaile at the end of an alley with an almost hidden entrance (you only grasp the building properly on exiting at the other end).  Māris Gailis, businessman and former Latvian Prime Minister, and film director Augusts Sukuts wanted to make the tribute because what we usually hear is how Latvians welcomed in the Germans all too readily (as in Estonia, it was complicated; life under Soviet rule had been so harsh that many citizens thought at first the Germans would be more 'civilized'. They soon found out how wrong they were). The Žanis Lipke Memorial was opened in 2013, and it's a model in its restraint and simple artistry. In the opening ceremony, Shimon Peres echoed Grossman when he said:

I don't think I've ever seen a museum like this one anywhere in the world. It's special, it's different, it's deep, it's moving....I'm not sure that the majority of people are saints. But I'm sure there is a minority of people who are brave, who are right, who are just. And I do believe that this minority saves lives.

Tsars now and then

This one

stands roughly in relation to that one

as did Boris Godunov (c.1551-1605)

to Ivan IV, 'the Terrible' (1530-1584)

Why do I make the point? Because until Russian history stops repeating itself, we are likely to go back to truth-telling poets of the past to find the present in what they write. It was a scene in Pushkin's Shakespearean history-drama Boris Godunov not in either of Musorgsky's operatic versions which pulled me up short in the opera class last week. The poet uses one of his ancestors, a not exactly admirable plotting noble, to make the second of the comparisons above. 'He rules as did Ivan,' claims Afanasy Pushkin in James E Falen's admirable trnalsation:

What good that public hangings are no more;
That on a bloody stake, for all to see,
No longer do we sing our hymns to Christ;
That we're not burnt alive upon the square,
The Tsar to rake our ashes with his staff?
Are our poor lives in any way more safe?
We're threatened every day with some disgrace:
Siberia...the dungeon...or the cowl,
And there, in some forsaken place, to die
From hunger or a strangler's knotted rope...

Remove the religious associations - though those, of course, are coming back under a repressive Patriarch - and subtitute the psychiatric ward and the carefully chosen poison* for the cowl and the strangler, and you have a proper equivalent to how Putin wields his power as a Stalin for our times. In one way, it's devilish cunning: as Peter Pomerantsev puts it in his giddying evocation of his recent years in Russia, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, this political system thrives on 'democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent'. Plus the belief that if you lie often enough, people might start to believe you (look at Medvedev's bare-faced declaration that Russia is not bombing anybody but IS in Syria, that the west is creating a cold war. The Lithuanian President retorted that Russia is doing everything it can to make this a hot war.

Pomerantsev's subjects are chosen and paraded to give a lurid whirligig of absurdity and horror. He worked on Russian TV documentaries, so he knows that state control of Ostankino is making the country into one big grotesque (non) reality show. He gives us a terrifying portrait of Vladislav Surkov (pictured below speaking for his horrible creation Nashi, the new version of the Hitler Youth), the clever, cynical amoralist who has 'privatised the Russian political system', whose style of authoritarianism 'climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd...The Kremlin's idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movement develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state for bedtime'.

The different aspects are tellingly exemplified: the models and mistresses whose coaches turn back to pumpkins when their  multi-timing masters have tired of them, and who turn to the kind of cults not unknown here but operating on a more sinister scale there, a route ending in madness and suicide; the businesswomen who finds herself, totally innocent, caught in the mesh of corruption and an imprisonment which she's told can only be terminated by a large bribe to a lawyer - she turns to another route which only works because of a bigger political expediency; the hood who's a hero in his home town; the brutality facing army conscripts; the Russian 'offshore' in the rest of the world; the very differing fates of the former oligarchs now that all wealth is under state control: and the wholesale destruction of old Moscow - I knew very little about this and haven't been back since 2000 - so all businesses can be physically close to the Kremlin, the dead centre of all things.

What's fast being knocked down is chronicled by one of the few good guys in the book, Alexander Mozhayev, a kind of architectural Pimen (and definitely not to be confused with the pro-Russian separatist). What's going up, in the plethora of kitsch styles, includes such throwbacks to the 1950s as this

and this.

All government-approved politicians are adept at using the jargon of western capitalist companies, a trick learned by the proliferation of the latter in Russia during the 1990s. And everyone plays the game, knowingly or not; a dissident individual or organisation can be given a brief limelight, only to be dragged out of the spotlight the next day.

In fact this is the most potent aspect of the whole thing which reminds me what I read about Stalin's game - the rules could be changed daily or by the week, so that no-one ever knew where they stood. Keep everyone in a state of fear. At the moment, this is why it's impossible to win within the country, though some unimaginably brave individuals still keep on trying. Eventually this madness has to come to an end, but will Putin have succeeded in his biggest wish, to drag down Europe before Russia itself totally implodes? I know this: that I have never lived through worse times for the world. This article on The Interpreter, superbly expressed, offers no comfort at all.

We have our own Surkovs, of course, though they're not as clever. Thankfully we also have the freedom to bring pressure to remove them. It's hard work but it can be done.

Please sign this UK Government and Parliament petition against one of the biggest liars in the Conservative Party (and that's saying something) before he takes our precious NHS beyond repair. A reminder, too, that the ENO needs saving from its own management in a microcosm of what's happening with the junior doctors (chorus and orchestra shouldn't be in the line of fire). If you haven't already done so, sign and comment on The Spirit of Lilian Baylis's petition.

*17/2 Monday's announcement of the death of Nikita Kamayev, former head of Russia's anti-doping agency Rusada, prompts the worst thoughts in the wake of the doping scandal. A heart attack at 52? Well, it's Russia and men die young there, but still...he's the second person in the organisation to disappear conveniently from the picture within the past couple of months.