RAPM would have none of it, and Prokofiev was left to joke, ruefully, that he had been pitched from the theater along with his principal supporter, the deputy administrative director Boris Gusman, a force for change who believed that the old repertoire needed to go. “The salvation of the Bolshoi Theater would to a large extent be achieved by a big—bol’shoy—bonfire,” Gusman told a repertoire commission a month before Prokofiev’s appearance, “so long as it burned all those things, so long as it pushed the Bolshoi Theater onto new rails.”3 Those rails were part of the stage design for Le pas d’acier.
In his diary, Prokofiev used the Russian word for “purge” to describe his conflict with RAPM, albeit long before NKVD interrogators extracted another meaning from it. He described playing through the score and then sitting behind a table on the stage to answer several dozen questions from the audience in the presence of the director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who proposed redoing the ballet for Bolshoi audiences in collaboration with Asaf Messerer, and “a boilerman or fitter who was acting as presiding officer and who was in fact quite competent in the role.”4 Prokofiev glowered when told he needed political reeducation, and after the following unpleasant exchange about the accelerated machine rhythms of the ballet’s end: “Is the factory capitalist, where the workers are slaves, or Soviet, where they are the masters, and if it is Soviet, then when and where did you have the opportunity to study any factory here, since you have been living abroad since 1918 and only came back for the first time in 1927, for just two weeks?” “That is a political question, not a musical one, so I don’t intend to answer it.”5 The consequence of his silence became evident at the January 23, 1930, meeting of the Bolshoi’s artistic and political council. The meeting, chaired by Gusman, concerned the repertoire for the season. Shostakovich’s raucous first opera, The Nose, was listed as “doubtful” for a Bolshoi staging, and Prokofiev’s dance of steel—“canceled.”6
UNLIKE PROKOFIEV, SHOSTAKOVICH came from inside Soviet culture and had an artistic and political support network that ensured his embittered survival of, and triumph over, the politics of several Soviet leaders. He cut his teeth as a composer during the revolution and civil war and embodied the aesthetics of the 1920s. As he completed his conservatoire education, he became a fellow traveler of proletarian arts organizations, which increased in prominence through the 1920s, thriving in the cultural badlands before the Great Gardener (one of Stalin’s many sobriquets) weeded them out of existence. He dabbled in the burlesque and the sleazier sides of American popular culture, and he worshipped the German modernist Alban Berg, whose short career came to a sudden end in 1935, leaving unfinished an expressionist nightmare of an opera about a prostitute whose last john turns out to be Jack the Ripper. A prodigious pianist, Shostakovich earned an income improvising into existence the accompaniments to silent films and theatrical revues bearing weirdly untranslatable titles like Uslovno ubitïy (Conditionally [?] killed). His macabrely comic first opera from 1928, The Nose, finds the hero “gargling at his sink” instead of singing a cavatina.7 Both the plot and the cast are battered into submission by drums and cymbals.
In short, Shostakovich liked being all over the map, privileging nothing and everything, pinching from the classics and smashing the purloined goods into the songs and dances of the Communist League Movement. “Tea for Two” too. RAPM respected his iconoclastic approach to the imperial era, but could not abide the neurosis, psychosis, and anti-agitprop, anti-Marxist/Leninist content of his scores. Up to a point, his music sounded like he looked: it stammered, pontificated, protested, lacked sentiment and seriousness, but also twinkled with erudition. Shostakovich was an old-fashioned vaudevillian in modernist threads. Those who did not enjoy the fun, including the RAPM veterans who would bring him low in the mid-1930s, failed to understand that the revolution, for all the suffering it induced, was a free-for-all for creative experiment. He would be forced to repent, but not before deprecating the solemn rituals that once occasioned the coronations of the tsars, and also out of the maturing revolution.
For the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, in 1932, he began work, for the Bolshoi, on an opera about a human-primate hybrid, Orango, who rises and falls in the French business world only to end up caged in a Moscow zoo. The project, which never had any chance of reaching the stage, was meant as a satire of the bourgeois capitalist West, though it was convoluted and opaque enough as to invite all manner of interpretation. Charles Darwin appears; Bertolt Brecht too. The leading Shostakovich scholar Olga Digonskaya considers it a meta-satire, an example of a work that mocks itself: “laughter at Orango is turned around by the author’s laughter at their ridicule.”8 Since the protagonist is a radical hybrid, it is fitting that the opera, at least the concept behind it, privileges doubleness. The tragic and the comic are swapped around as symbols of the protagonist’s split consciousness, his fear that those around him regard him as pitiable despite, or because of, his constant efforts to ennoble himself.
The characters include an emcee, a chorus that celebrates the liberation of Soviet man from serfdom, a Bolshoi ballerina, soldiers, and sailors. There is a touch of pathos: Orango complains to his keeper about the “suffocating” animal costume into which he has been stuffed.9 The prologue lasts thirty-two minutes—too long, the emcee tells us, for its performers, and too long for Shostakovich, who, seeing the writing on the wall, abandoned the opera after less than a month of work.
By the late 1920s, the aesthetic and political ground had shifted, and artists as well as bureaucrats struggled to keep their footing. Lenin’s cultural commissar, Lunacharsky, was elbowed into retirement in September of 1929, having left the “golden rattle” of the Bolshoi Ballet in rougher hands than his—hands capable of smashing a lot of toys.10 He was put out to pasture as a Soviet diplomat and died three years later. Elena Malinovskaya resigned (for the second time) from the Bolshoi in 1935. She had just turned sixty and needed a cane to get around. The proletarian organizations of the 1920s were liquidated and replaced by artists’ unions under the eventual control of the Committee on Arts Affairs. Few fantasies were given wings.
During this period, Stalin began to take an intense interest in the affairs of the Bolshoi Theater, creating a “state within the state” with special perks for the chosen few. Cafeterias opened inside the theater; dancers were awarded apartments, dachas, and vacations at the spa; children of employees found places in pioneer camps.11 Stalin allocated (or specified, as he tended to do, that he “did not object” to allocating) hard currency to injured stars of the Bolshoi so they could seek medical treatment abroad.
There were also prizes named for Lenin and Stalin, the Red Banner of Labor, and awards for service of distinction, for defending Moscow during the war, for dancing on sprained ankles, for not defecting on tour, or, in the case of ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya, for having the shoplifting charges brought against her in Brussels in 1958 dropped.12 These all came with pendants, ribbons, and up to 100,000 rubles. Lobbying was intense, decorum intricate. Awards ceremonies were another kind of performance, with harsher consequences for any miscues. How a winner (or loser) reacted would be recorded in his or her file. Among the janitorial staff, makeup and wig artists, stagehands, and performers themselves lurked agents of the Sekretno-politicheskiy otdel, the clandestine political department of the NKVD tasked with reporting on their fellows. Yet it was not, in fact, secret. Everyone knew and played along.
Thus in 1937 Lepeshinskaya knowingly uttered within earshot of an NKVD scribe that she credited her prize to her country. Only “in the USSR,” she dutifully declared, could such an award come to an artist of her age. (She was twenty-one at the time.) Dancer Mikhaíl Gabovich also announced his joy at being named a “merited artist” on the same day he became a member of the Communist Party—membership being another form of honorific. Those denied prizes and membership, moreover, could whisper their dissatisfaction to the eavesdroppers in hopes of reconsideration. Soloist Sulamith Messerer was not one to hold b
ack: “I’ve been working in the theater for eleven years, dancing lead roles the entire time. When word of the presentation of awards reached me I had no doubt that I’d somehow be recognized. Such bitter disenchantment. Lepeshinskaya, performing for just a few years, receives an Order, but I am denied. I can’t show my face in the theater.”13 Her wounded pride was not allowed to fester. As soon as word reached the Politburo, she received her prize.
Such was the remaking of Moscow’s grand ballet and opera house, which had fallen into a disgraceful physical state after the revolution, and which, during the tumultuous 1920s, had lost a lot of talent. Stalin did not offer a return to the imperial era but instead struck a devil’s political bargain. The government privileged the artists of the Bolshoi, but in exchange they had to commit to the cultivation of a strictly defined Soviet repertoire and maintain a properly joyful communist attitude. More than prizes or trips to the spa hung in the balance: personal safety could be won or lost.
The first Soviet ballet, the Janus-faced The Red Poppy, anchored the new repertoire, but its politics no longer suited the times and had to be reworked. That was step one. Step two involved putting the triumphs of the five-year plans on the stage. The Bolshoi floorboards were reinforced to accommodate industrial equipment that was to appear in ballets and operas about dams, crops, tractors, power plants, and collective farms. Yet Glavrepertkom would approve few of these new works. Among the bigger fiascos was a hydroelectric-themed ballet called Native Fields (Rodnïye polya, 1953), “an outright failure from the beginning,” Christina Ezrahi comments, “synonymous with the shortcomings of drambalet.”14 Lenin himself became a character in many works—not seen or heard from, but constantly invoked, as though he were lurking just around the corner. He would have a cameo in a socialist-realist opera called Into the Storm (V buryu, 1939), by Tikhon Khrennikov. Lenin speaks instead of sings, typically a symbol of deformity in opera, but here a mark of divine otherness.
The artistic challenge for composers and choreographers increased even as their creative options narrowed. By the time the ideological transformation of the Bolshoi was complete, at the height of the Great Terror, there could be no expression of autonomous will within the public sphere. The experience of the willful Shostakovich marked the beginning of the cataclysm. Hindsight sees in his ballets a Soviet culture that might have been, could have been, had Leninism not ceded to Stalinism.
In the short-lived 1930 production of The Soccer Player (Futbolist) at the Bolshoi Theater, Lev Lashchilin and Igor Moiseyev sought to invigorate classical variations and ensembles with goal-scoring headers and penalty kicks—although the action, in truth, unfolded in a department store. It was supposed to delight but instead garnered mean-spirited reviews. The critic for the proletarian publication Rabochiy i teatr (Worker and theater) mocked its attempt at fusing real life with “pure classicism, founded on adagios and the simplest classical variations.”15 The dancers were also accused of failing to capture the seriousness of purpose with which Soviet sportsmen conducted themselves. Even some of the performers found fault with the ballet. “I leapt over a group of girls,” soloist Asaf Messerer recalled of a dance called “The Waterfall.” “I leapt over one group, then another. I just showed off my leaps, that’s all.”16 Not to be excluded, the Bolshoi condemned itself for allowing the ballet to be performed, in the form of a “briefing” to the director on the “painful phenomena” afflicting the rehearsals.17 That The Soccer Player lacked a plot was one problem—but hardly a serious one, since it was conceived less as an action-filled spectacle than as a criticism of contemporary culture. It surveyed socialism under Lenin and found it wanting. A more serious concern was that the second and third acts were hastily set to hastily composed music. The composer of The Soccer Player, Viktor Oransky, had taken ill with scarlet fever and missed the rehearsal deadline, leaving much of the ballet to be staged at the last minute, leaving no time for nuance—hence Messerer’s deadpan description of his leaping, again and again.
Shostakovich loved soccer and was an ardent fan of his local Leningrad teams. Naturally he was drawn to the idea of writing music for a ballet about soccer and other sports that would be at once more artful and more realistic than The Soccer Player. The resulting ballet, his first, involved three sports-minded choreographers, one for each act. In the second, choreographer Leonid Yakobson turned his dancers into athletes and their equipment; the “high jumpers” became the “high jump.”18 Scholar Janice Ross quotes a thirteen-year-old dancer, Natalya Sheremetyevskaya, recalling how she and her balletic teammates “had to recreate precisely the moves of a volleyball game, the teams were next to each other, and there was an imaginary net separating them.” Yakobson’s insistence on precision—his refusal to permit improvisation—made the rehearsals “painful and tortuous.” Ross further describes a photograph of the emerging superstar ballerina Galina Ulanova in the role of a Komsomol (Communist Movement of Youth) girl, one of the positive Soviet characters in the ballet. Her partner, Konstantin Sergeyev, lies on the floor as she balances “with one foot” on his stomach, articulating “a deep and beautifully arched backbend.”19
The ballet’s original title was Dinamiada, after the actual Soviet soccer team Dinamo, but ended up being renamed The Golden Age (Zolotoy vek). The title in Russian rhymes with that of The Red Poppy (Krasnïy mak), and the echo is not accidental. As the distinguished editor of the Shostakovich complete edition notes, there are numerous similarities in the plots of the two ballets: “The main character in The Red Poppy, Chinese dancer Táo-Huā, who falls in love with the captain of a Soviet ship, can be likened to the dancer Diva who is infatuated with the Leader of the Soviet football team (also a symbolic figure without a name).”20 But Shostakovich was not simply out to embarrass Glière; he was hunting bigger game. The Golden Age transplants upstanding Soviet soccer players into a netherworld of fascist sports, racism, sexual licentiousness, boxing-match-rigging, and “mass hysteria.” The action takes place in the none-too-subtly named realm of Faschland, also known as “a large capitalist city in the West.” The chaos of the years surrounding the revolution is impishly referenced when a raised soccer ball is perceived as a bomb (Bolshevik terrorism!) and the Soviet sportsmen pestered by provocateurs (anti-Soviet infiltrators!). The music enhances the zaniness of the plot but is relentlessly unserious and intended to offend tender sensibilities. “The Touching Coming-Together of the Classes with a Certain Degree of Fakeness” is a cancan; the divertissement that precedes it a racist assemblage of a tap dance titled “Shoe Polish of the Highest Grade,” a polka, and a tango. American blues makes an appearance in the form of a weird banjo-and-sax combo in the episode with the black man and the Komsomol girl. Warhorses of the nineteenth-century ballet and opera repertoire are quoted, along with a few orchestral bonbons like Tchaikovsky’s Italian Capriccio. Shostakovich invokes Swan Lake but vandalizes the great tunes, stripping them of passion and interrupting beautiful melodies with trite xylophone licks.
Reviews of The Golden Age shifted from positive to negative as the ballet found itself caught in a cultural war that pitted the advocates of avant-garde experimentation against the extreme proletarian factions who favored didactic storytelling. Thus the ideological encounter, or collision, represented in the plot had its real-life counterpart. Shostakovich’s own loyalties lay with the experimental camp in the cultural war. He and his allies dug their trenches and settled in for the long fight against conservative political factions, but they were destined to lose. RAPM and other organizations of its ilk morphed into official cultural organs, and the kinds of criticism in Rabochiy i teatr found a home in Pravda, the official newspaper of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which was published in a building named after Stalin. The Golden Age would be prohibited from production under Stalin and would not be revived until 1982, albeit with a different plot and a bowdlerized score.
The plot of Shostakovich’s next ballet, a second front in the cultural war, took up the topical theme of indust
rial sabotage. Titled The Bolt (Bolt), it tells of a “lazy idler” who jams and shortcircuits a machine with the help of a naïf from the streets. For this act, the “lazy idler” must be punished by the Communist Union of Youth. The urchin who helped him, and who later outs him for his crime, must be converted—turned from a breaker into a fixer, given a job and girlfriend. “Comrade Smirnov” assembled the scenario, Shostakovich recalled in a letter, and the composer made it seem that he himself considered the project trifling, with the action confined to the third act and the rest unfolding as but a series of divertissements: an exercise class, a civil defense drill, a drunken priest and dancing church, and the cacophony of the plant.21 Critics agreed, though perhaps the scenarist Viktor Smirnov, who had a jumbled career in the Communist Party, the Red Army, the Moscow Arts Theater, the cinema (he loved Disney), and the VOKS cultural exchange organization, took it all more seriously. He had padded the plot only at the choreographer’s insistence and had been sincere in his representation of industrial sabotage. Smirnov claimed to have found inspiration in a visit to the factory Red Hercules, where he saw the objects that had been mangled in the machines, and a banner threatening severe punishment for bad conduct.
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