St Petersburg полностью

This stratum of Leningrad society also took to heart the musical depiction of Petersburg as an oppressed city. The introduction to the first movement evoked the mood of some scenes in The Queen of Spades. The music may in general be characterized as a “symphony of catastrophe.” This depiction of Petersburg as a backdrop for tragedy unites Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Mandelstam, and especially Akhmatova, who maintained that “Leningrad is at bottom extraordinarily well suited for catastrophe…. That cold river with heavy storm clouds always over it, those menacing sunsets, that operatic, frightening moon…. Black water with yellow reflections of light…. It’s all frightening. I cannot imagine how catastrophes and trouble look in Moscow: they don’t have all that there.”24

Alas, by the time the Eleventh Symphony was written, Shostakovich had a good idea of what catastrophe looked like in Moscow. He had moved there permanently in the spring of 1943, a move sanctioned as part of Stalin’s general policy for the cultural deprivation of Leningrad. He was there when the infamous Party resolution of 1948 condemned composers of a “formalist, anti-people tendency,” including Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian. This resolution, issued by Zhdanov on Stalin’s orders, cut Shostakovich out of the mainstream of Soviet music. Even so, Shostakovich was allowed to work in film—also on Stalin’s orders—and his music accompanied many of the hit films of the final years of the Stalin era.

Practically all these films were made in Moscow. The significance of Lenfilm dwindled in those years. The successful duo of Kozintsev and Trauberg had broken up, but Shostakovich continued working with Kozintsev. They were brought together by their Shakespeare project. Back in 1941 Kozintsev staged a production of King Lear with music by Shostakovich. The sets and costumes were designed by Nathan Altman, with whom Kozintsev had studied art.

This prewar King Lear was a Leningrad sensation. Shakespeare had always been one of the most admired writers in the country, both before and since the revolution. Interest in him rose at crisis moments, when productions of his plays became political statements in disguise.25 Kozintsev’s production of Lear was a closet commentary on the madness of Stalin’s purges in Leningrad. Altman’s scenery prominently featured scaffolds with dangling nooses, a menacing and easily understood visual hint. The Leningrad critic Naum Berkovsky wrote in Aesopian terms about Kozintsev’s production, talking about a city exhausted by terror. “For Shakespeare there is tragedy in a regime that does not emanate from human personality, which does not seek justification for itself there … society has abandoned public morality, it has turned to random cohabitation, it fosters low, base, crude behavior in people and leaves noble deeds to languish unnoticed or punishes them.”26

In 1954 Kozintsev produced Hamlet at the former Alexandrinsky Theater. Once again Shostakovich and Altman were part of his team. This outstanding production, mounted soon after Stalin’s death, opened a new era in Soviet interpretation of Shakespeare and prepared the way for two films by Kozintsev—Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971 )—which were to be his swan song. They rank among the Lenfilm’s greatest achievements.

Yevgeny Shvarts called Kozintsev “a mix of mimosa and nettie,” a description that could apply equally to Shostakovich.27 The two men were drawn together by a certain shared emotional restraint that Petersburgers like to think of as characteristic of their upbringing. Shvarts noted that habit as well, saying about Kozintsev, “In his snobbish, aristocratic nature, formed in the twenties, he is ridiculously reticent. Like Shostakovich. Their strict bandbox neatness trains them for tidiness and meticulousness of the spirit.”

Kozintsev, himself a master of Aesopian language, noted approvingly the subtlety of Shostakovich’s music. After hearing the Eleventh Symphony, he wrote in his diary, “The beginning was frightening: ice cold on the square and damned tsarism beating a small drum. And then—cruelty, desperation, an evil force destroying all life, pain, heartrending grief; and the question—what was all this for?”