(no subject)
Nov. 17th, 2014 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThis past Thursday, I saw Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Met with ghost_lingering. I imagine that in three months ghost_lingering will post about the opera more thoughtfully and interestingly than I can, but I'll do my best anyway.
It's a gleefully murderous story about a bored, childless housewife in Russia and a series of really, really awful men she is connected to. My program said Shostakovich labeled it 'tragi-satirical', which maybe sounds more like a word in Russian. It's also historically famous for having led to Stalin's denunciation of Shostakovich, likely because of some scathing attacks on Russia's penal system in the final act.
At intermission I toldghost_lingering that it seemed like the men in the story were competing on a scoreboard to be the worst man in the opera. The standings kept changing as they one-upped each other. Sergei, the poor laborer, rapes Katerina in her bedroom while her husband is away on business. While this is happening, her father in law Boris gets drunk and melancholy and therefore decides he's going to rape her, and he is colossally angry when he realizes that someone else got there first... so angry that he seizes the man, strips him naked, and beats him with a whip until he is too exhausted to keep whipping. At this point, I was pretty sure Boris was going to win the prize, but Sergei kept going and by the end, I think he managed to outdo Boris. And this doesn't even mention the stupidest priest in existence, the police sergeant more interested in wangling an invitation to Katerina's wedding than in chasing down crime, or Katerina's husband Zinoviy, who spends most of his time travelling on business so he can avoid the horror of having to kiss his wife. Basically, men are terrible. Really, really terrible.
Being surrounded by horrible men eventually turns Katerina, our Lady Macbeth, into a serial murderess. As I read the story, it is the specific nature of Sergei's rape that changes her: She says no repeatedly to his advances and he tells her that he is going to take her anyway because he wants her, and from this she learns that her desires, heretofore unfulfilled, do not need to be constrained by society. She adopts Sergei as her lover and begins to dominate him. She kills her father in law to end his harassment of her. She kills her husband so that she is no longer beholden to a man that hates her, and she uses his money to marry the man that she wants to marry. Katerina learns that power emerges from, er, leaning in. So she leans, and once she starts leaning she can't stop. She leans way too hard.
And ultimately she learns that there is a problem with this theory of society, and it's the obvious one. If you live in a society where the only decider of whose desires are fulfilled is physical power and the will to take, ultimately you will be put down if you are put into collision with someone with more physical power and more will to take: In other words, the State. The State does not care all that much that she murdered her father in law, but it does care that she killed Zinoviy, who as a wealthy land owner embodied the desires of the state. For this crime the State turns her into a prisoner.
Yet even as a prisoner Katerina does not forget the lesson Sergei taught her. When Sergei takes up with another prisoner, Katerina exercises her power one final time, killing her ex-lover's new flame and dying in the process. It is not a tragic ending for Katerina and Shostakovich's music mostly doesn't treat it as such. After a very brief lamentation, Shostakovich moves back to his real point: a dirge sung by the remaining prisoners about the misery of their lives. The power play is over, and the State has won, because in a society where power rules unchecked, that is the only plausible outcome.
Shostakovich's music is, unsurprisingly, brilliant. Wikipedia calls Lady Macbeth 'incorporates elements of expressionism and verismo', which is a great way of saying that the mixture of dramatic moods is unharmonious yet strangely effective. Shostakovich uses his orchestra with incredible expressiveness as another character, with opinions about the other characters that are sometimes surprising and often enlightening. He introduces the four main players in the first act with instrumental lead-ins that communicate so much that by the time the singers opened their mouths, you already knew exactly who they were. Later, orchestral interludes turn dramatic scenes into comic ones and vice versa, with retrospective commentary that transforms how you viewed the things you'd just seen.
I think I'm putting it at #11 on my list of favorite 20th century operas.
ghost_lingering. I imagine that in three months ghost_lingering will post about the opera more thoughtfully and interestingly than I can, but I'll do my best anyway.It's a gleefully murderous story about a bored, childless housewife in Russia and a series of really, really awful men she is connected to. My program said Shostakovich labeled it 'tragi-satirical', which maybe sounds more like a word in Russian. It's also historically famous for having led to Stalin's denunciation of Shostakovich, likely because of some scathing attacks on Russia's penal system in the final act.
At intermission I told
ghost_lingering that it seemed like the men in the story were competing on a scoreboard to be the worst man in the opera. The standings kept changing as they one-upped each other. Sergei, the poor laborer, rapes Katerina in her bedroom while her husband is away on business. While this is happening, her father in law Boris gets drunk and melancholy and therefore decides he's going to rape her, and he is colossally angry when he realizes that someone else got there first... so angry that he seizes the man, strips him naked, and beats him with a whip until he is too exhausted to keep whipping. At this point, I was pretty sure Boris was going to win the prize, but Sergei kept going and by the end, I think he managed to outdo Boris. And this doesn't even mention the stupidest priest in existence, the police sergeant more interested in wangling an invitation to Katerina's wedding than in chasing down crime, or Katerina's husband Zinoviy, who spends most of his time travelling on business so he can avoid the horror of having to kiss his wife. Basically, men are terrible. Really, really terrible. Being surrounded by horrible men eventually turns Katerina, our Lady Macbeth, into a serial murderess. As I read the story, it is the specific nature of Sergei's rape that changes her: She says no repeatedly to his advances and he tells her that he is going to take her anyway because he wants her, and from this she learns that her desires, heretofore unfulfilled, do not need to be constrained by society. She adopts Sergei as her lover and begins to dominate him. She kills her father in law to end his harassment of her. She kills her husband so that she is no longer beholden to a man that hates her, and she uses his money to marry the man that she wants to marry. Katerina learns that power emerges from, er, leaning in. So she leans, and once she starts leaning she can't stop. She leans way too hard.
And ultimately she learns that there is a problem with this theory of society, and it's the obvious one. If you live in a society where the only decider of whose desires are fulfilled is physical power and the will to take, ultimately you will be put down if you are put into collision with someone with more physical power and more will to take: In other words, the State. The State does not care all that much that she murdered her father in law, but it does care that she killed Zinoviy, who as a wealthy land owner embodied the desires of the state. For this crime the State turns her into a prisoner.
Yet even as a prisoner Katerina does not forget the lesson Sergei taught her. When Sergei takes up with another prisoner, Katerina exercises her power one final time, killing her ex-lover's new flame and dying in the process. It is not a tragic ending for Katerina and Shostakovich's music mostly doesn't treat it as such. After a very brief lamentation, Shostakovich moves back to his real point: a dirge sung by the remaining prisoners about the misery of their lives. The power play is over, and the State has won, because in a society where power rules unchecked, that is the only plausible outcome.
Shostakovich's music is, unsurprisingly, brilliant. Wikipedia calls Lady Macbeth 'incorporates elements of expressionism and verismo', which is a great way of saying that the mixture of dramatic moods is unharmonious yet strangely effective. Shostakovich uses his orchestra with incredible expressiveness as another character, with opinions about the other characters that are sometimes surprising and often enlightening. He introduces the four main players in the first act with instrumental lead-ins that communicate so much that by the time the singers opened their mouths, you already knew exactly who they were. Later, orchestral interludes turn dramatic scenes into comic ones and vice versa, with retrospective commentary that transforms how you viewed the things you'd just seen.
I think I'm putting it at #11 on my list of favorite 20th century operas.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-19 01:45 am (UTC)I started to write up my thoughts, but I'm still thinking through it and changing my mind and also I keep coming back to the tiny mortal frog souls, which aren't the heart of the opera, except in my head where they are possibly the heart of everything. (Joking! Mostly.)
Anyway: I really like your read of the politics / power dynamics! Very different from my read, but also in some ways more empowering to Katerina, which I like. Your read also makes the implicit comparison to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth more understandable in that Katerina's murders are about gaining power and that power is, ultimately, political in nature, which echoes Lady Macbeth's plots to gain political power for her husband/herself. I'd been struggling with the invocation of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth because I think she's a very different character than Katerina is.
Strangely, Sergei managed to not anger me as much as Boris did, perhaps largely because for all that he raped and cheated on her, he didn't manage to constrain her life to the extent that Boris did. DIE BORIS, DIE DIE. EAT THOSE MUSHROOMS.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-19 02:25 pm (UTC)I feel like there are two definitions of 'empowerment' at work in this comment which are in conflict. First is the straightforward 'to give power to', and the second is a more nuanced/colloquial definition, i.e. as in the (loaded) phrase 'female empowerment'. I don't think that my read on Katerina empowers her in the second sense in any meaningful way, but it does position her within the opera's (crude, brutal) power dynamics as a player who moves the needle.
I think Sergei angered me more than Boris by the end mostly because his sheer longevity in the opera meant he had time to perpetrate more terrible acts. EAT THOSE MUSHROOMS, THO.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-21 03:06 am (UTC)My read on her might also be because I simply can't believe that anyone who hides a body in the trunk of the car and doesn't at least drive it to a less obvious location than their own wedding is someone who is purposefully killing people to gain power. But maybe I shouldn't judge her getting away with murder abilities given that this is also an opera where the priest was given a deathbed summary of how the murder took place and his response was "wow, that was weird, must have been those mushrooms after midnight!"
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-21 03:15 am (UTC)I don't think she is totally purposeful. I certainly don't think she's a planner. She is just someone who knows what she wants and decides to take it.