Parody and Pathos

Forms of Instrumental Musical Theater

Thomas May

Amid its teeming polyphony of ideas, Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) stages a face-off between the Nazi apocalypse and a superhero created by a defiant pair of budding comic-book artists. For all the biases against the comic-book genre, this is anything but “escapist” entertainment. Ditto for the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who transformed his experience as the son of Holocaust survivors into the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus (1991). György Ligeti anticipated these bold innovations with his sole opera Le Grand Macabre. Cartoons and comic strips—as Ligeti knew—posit a kind of contemporary mythology. When he set the “Dies Irae” of his Requiem from the mid-1960s, Ligeti described the way the poem copes with the fear of death as “an extraordinarily colorful, almost comic-strip representation of the Last Judgment.” A similar aesthetic pervades Le Grand Macabre, a work peopled by grotesquely cartoonish characters who confront the imminent end of Planet Earth. In her book Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, Esti Sheinberg asserts that the Russian composer’s music “speaks about human nature as horrifying and ludicrous, simultaneously repellent and cruel, cowardly and loving, humorous and courageous”—a contradictory mélange often interpreted as a reaction to the degrading treatment to which the composer was subjected by Soviet cultural authorities. Yet already in the Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra—the first of his remarkable series of concertos, written before his infamous denunciation by the Party in 1936—we find Shostakovich stirring a wildly clashing mixture of styles into a heady musical cocktail. In essence, the Concerto entails a work of instrumental theater—and it was into such instrumental contexts that Shostakovich would, in large part, channel his natural gift for musical theater in the aftermath of the attack on his most successful opera.

For their program this evening, Ensemble Resonanz, Jeroen Berwaerts, and Alexander Melnikov use these musical representations of the grotesque, the cartoonish, and the ironic to frame two works by Galina Ustvolskaya, a student of Shostakovich who also faced serious impediments to her creative work from the Soviet cultural police. Her astounding originality and striking musical personality prompted Shostakovich to declare: “It is not you who are under my influence, it is I who am under yours.” In contrast to the modes of parody and stylistic promiscuity of the Ligeti and Shostakovich pieces we hear, Ustvolskaya’s Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra, and Timpani and her Octet impart a message of dire seriousness—all the while posing enigmas of their own.

A Hysterical Tragedy Mocking Death Sampling Ligeti’s Grand Macabre

Among its labyrinthine ironies is the fact that Le Grand Macabre is now recognized as a masterwork of 20th-century opera. György Ligeti himself once jokingly referred to his score (1974–77) as a “flea-market,” in view of the postmodern spectrum of stylistic references and ironic musical hand-me-downs it braids together. The quest to write an opera during a period of the postwar European avant-garde that regarded the old genres as dead was itself, on some level, quixotic. Ligeti had survived the Holocaust (most of his family perished) and later escaped the oppressive control of the Communist regime in his native Hungary but discovered another kind of censorship among the avant-garde of Western Europe. All of these experiences conferred on Ligeti what he once called “an immunity to all ideologies.”

He later noted that his experiments with setting nonsense texts and eliciting extremities of vocal expression in such preceding musictheater works of the 1960s as Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures could be classified as “a kind of anti-opera” but that when he started working on Le Grand Macabre, “gradually I realized that the time of anti-opera is over.” He called the work “anti-anti-opera,” adding that “the double negative results in an affirmation.”

Commissioned by the Royal Opera of Stockholm—interestingly, it was Swedish Radio that had commissioned Ligeti’s Requiem in the early 1960s—the project that became Le Grand Macabre started off as a comic-strip version of the Oedipus myth. Ligeti then turned to the play La Balade du grand macabre (1934) by the avantgarde Belgian writer Michel de Ghelderode, collaborating with the puppet theater master Michael Meschke to fashion a German libretto (though the premiere was sung in Swedish).

The narrative is both garish and straightforward, in the manner of a comic strip, with plentiful detours. It revolves around the specter of death as represented by the titular Grand Macabre, who is given the name Nekrotzar. He bears a message of apocalypse to the fantasy realm of Brueghelland, whose denizens engage in S & M rituals, necrophilia-tinged sex, supersize-me gluttony, and paranoid hysteria. Whether the apocalypse occurs and what it means are the enigmas at the heart of the opera.

Among the large cast of characters are the inebriated Everyman Piet the Pot, a pair of young lovers, an astrologer and his wife, the Prince Go-Go and his ministers, and the head of the Gepopo, Brueghelland’s Gestapo (a high coloratura role). “My opera is a kind of black farce, a ridiculous piece, humorous but utterly tragic at the same time,” Ligeti explained. “At the center of the play stands the fear of dying, the impossibility to change fate and the actions and efforts undertaken in vain to escape death. One of the strategies used to avoid this destiny is the attempt to ridicule death.”

Ligeti’s score runs a gamut from the scatological to the celestial. He substantially revised it (especially the ending) for a Salzburg Festival production in 1997. Meanwhile, in 1991 the conductor of the Stockholm premiere, Elgar Howarth (also a trumpeter), prepared a set of concert extracts that comprise three arias, which were published as Mysteries of the Macabre in alternate versions, for coloratura soprano or solo trumpet with accompaniment by piano or instrumental ensemble. All three arias are delivered by the hyperparanoid Gepopo Chief, whose stratospheric coloratura is a signature example of Ligeti’s Rabelaisian sonic palette. The extremities of the writing and over-the-top (literally) virtuosity enhance the composer’s brand of humor in this work which, for all the slapstick, takes on nothing less than death.

Unwaveringly Serious The Uniqueness of Ustvolskaya

For too long, Galina Ustvolskaya’s work was unjustly neglected. Like so many of her peers in the Soviet Union, she had to bifurcate her creative work into “true” expressions that defied Party demands and commercial projects (film scores and the like) expressly written to bring in income. Yet even after many of those peers went on to be discovered in the West, Ustvolskaya long remained a relatively little-known cult figure.

Adding insult to injury is the tendency to associate her immediately with her Conservatory teacher Shostakovich and his music. A lifelong resident of Saint Petersburg, Ustvolskaya became the only female student when she first entered Shostakovich’s composition class in 1939. The war of course interrupted her studies, but she resumed them with Shostakovich later in the 1940s. For his part, Shostakovich admired her music so much that he even quoted one of her themes in his String Quartet No. 5 and in his settings of Michelangelo sonnets. So it is perhaps not surprising that Ustvolskaya, the centenary of whose birth was celebrated just last year, so firmly repudiated her former teacher (and rumored lover) following his death: “Never once … even during my studies at the Conservatory which I spent in his class, was Shostakovich’s music close to me. Nor was his personality,” she stated, “I bluntly refused to accept his music… Unfortunately, Shostakovich’s personality only deepened my negative attitude towards him.”

The Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra, and Timpani—the work that Ustvolskaya pointedly listed at the beginning of her approved catalogue of works (numbering 25 total)—dates from 1946, when she was completing her studies under Shostakovich. It served as her diploma composition, and soon she would embark on her own teaching career at the Conservatory. Dedicated to Alexei Lyubimov, the Concerto had to wait until 1964 to be premiered (in Leningrad, with Pavel Serebryakov as the soloist and Arvīds Jansons conducting).

It is possible to detect an influence here of such figures as Bartók, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and, yes, Shostakovich, yet already Ustvolskaya’s forceful personality emerges with mesmerizing impact. The Concerto is cast in a single movement, forged of sections that posit contrasts of texture, tempo, and affect. Her instrumentation in itself is striking. If the combination of piano and string orchestra conjures associations of a Neoclassical economy and eloquence, the prominent role of the timpani here creates a unique sound world. The timpanist serves as an alternate protagonist and a kind of antagonist to the solo piano role. Key elements of the unique musical idiom that Ustvolskaya would later develop are also already recognizable. These include an insistence on certain gestures, such as the rhythmic patterns so aggressively emphasized in this score, which can be exaggerated to intense extremes—as in the heavily accentuated short-long motto played at the very start by the piano, which defines much of the musical material. The aura of tragic earnestness is characteristic. An austerity in the string scoring enhances this pathos.

In the end, the Concerto traces an archetypically Romantic trajectory from darkness to light, finding its way from C minor to a transfigured coda in C major. Yet the music never sounds like any of the countless models for such a journey. Ustvolskaya’s eccentric scoring and unwavering seriousness evoke something more enigmatic. (Listen, in the final pages, for the D flats in the timpani that clash against the arrived-at C major.)

A Cast of Eight Characters The Octet’s Exhausting, Compact Drama

“Yesterday in the House of Composers was the Leningrad concert,” Shostakovich wrote of a program on which Ustvolskaya’s Octet figured during the first half. “[It] made such an impression on me that I couldn’t force myself to listen to the second half of the program,” though it included music of which he was very fond. “The Octet exhausted me and deprived me of strength for further listening. Surprisingly beautiful and strong music…”

As with the Concerto, a long gap separates the premiere of the Octet, which took place in Leningrad in 1970, from the time of its composition (1949–50). Ustvolskaya lists it as the fifth of her approved works, and it is contemporaneous with such other pieces as her Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano and the second in her masterful cycle of six piano sonatas (performed in toto earlier this season at the Pierre Boulez Saal). Yet from the composer’s perspective, it is mistaken to try to pigeonhole these compositions as “chamber music.” Just as she rejected attempts at theoretical analysis of her music, Ustvolskaya believed the category of chamber music was inadequate to convey “the tremendous power and aspiration to God, which are inherent in each composition…” The issue of religion, too, has an enigmatic status in her work, clearly separating her spiritual references from those of, say, her younger peer Sofia Gubaidulina. Ustvolskaya herself referred to her “spiritual, non-religious creativity.” The Octet is scored for a characteristically unconventional ensemble of two oboes, four violins, timpani, and piano. “I do not like talking about my music. It is very difficult to discuss my own works. My ability to write music unfortunately does not grant me the ability to write about it. In fact, it is said that one precludes the other,” said the hermetic Ustvolskaya, who guarded her privacy unwaveringly and had no interest in self-promotion.

At the same time, one cannot listen to a piece like the Octet dispassionately. It imparts a sense of internal drama so stark and uncompromising—no wonder the attacks in the final measures left Shostakovich emotionally exhausted—that the abstract title almost seems ironic. Austere repetition is used in a way that, again, is unique to this composer and lightyears apart from “Minimalism.” The pathos is Ustvolskayan as well, yet it is wedded to the allure, if not the sensuality, of the timbral combinations enabled by her unusual palette.

An Irrepressible Theater Composer Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra

Dmitri Shostakovich was still on the rise as one of the Soviet Union’s most promising young composers when he completed this Concerto in July 1933—yet his chilling fall from official grace lay only two and half years in the future, with Pravda’s accusation that his hit opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk exhibited decadent, counterrevolutionary shortcomings. Before such censure (despite a minor wrist-slapping from the cultural tzars for an earlier gaffe), Shostakovich had felt free to experiment and produced a prolific outpouring of music that, in retrospect, would represent his most overtly Modernist mode.

The sensational success of his First Symphony of 1926 (the result of Shostakovich’s student years at what was then known as the Leningrad Conservatory) secured the composer’s image as a fearless innovator. When the precocious musician, who had also trained as a pianist, failed to take a prize at the 1927 Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, he made composition his main focus—though he continued intermittently to give public performances at the keyboard until his final decade.

Shostakovich gained additional practical experience playing the piano outside conventional venues—for example, accompanying silent films. During his career-building years, these gigs intensified his interest in music for theater and film. Along with pieces for the new medium of cinema, he soon produced a remarkable range of theater, ballet, and opera scores, including the absurdist opera The Nose (inspired by a Gogol story) and the tremendously successful (yet ill-fated) Lady Macbeth. But Shostakovich also found time to focus again on instrumental composition with such works as the Prokofiev-flavored 24 Preludes for Solo Piano (1932–33). The musicologist David Fanning observes that “Prokofiev is again behind the Piano Concerto, which takes over much more of the theatrical element from Shostakovich’s stage works, complete with galops, can-cans, and hilarious quotations.” Having abandoned an earlier plan for a piano concerto, with Op. 35 Shostakovich made the first of his several significant contributions to the concerto tradition. The chamber scale of the orchestration for string ensemble plus a solo trumpet also touches with sardonic humor on the fashion for neoclassical solutions. The composer himself was the piano soloist at the premiere in October 1933. He wrote the prominent solo trumpet part for the Leningrad Philharmonic’s principal player, Aleksandr Shmidt.

In comparison with Shostakovich’s more wildly adventurous scores of this period, the overall tone of this Concerto is relatively conservative—at least in terms of its lyrical element, which was much commented on by contemporaries. At the same time, a playful, theatrical sense of humor is an obvious signature of the piece as well. The composer even seems in some passages to be thumbing his nose at the highbrow conventions of the genre with outrageously comical posturing.

The opening establishes the engaging interplay between solo piano and trumpet that defines this Concerto. The main theme itself, given by the pianist, alludes to the one that launches Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata—just one of several such intertextual aspects (including a number of self-quotations). Its fatalistic strain is contrasted with an astonishing array of stylistic shifts, including hints of the world of popular entertainment, such as the music hall. A kind of slow-motion waltz follows without pause. Already, the young Shostakovich’s Mahler obsession is unmistakable. The muted trumpet adds a note of blues-inflected melancholy.

As a variant of the usual three-movement concerto format, Shostakovich adds a brief preludial movement featuring the piano (here the Neo-Baroque idiom is most obvious) that leads directly into the tumultuous finale. Its mingling of jazzy syncopation and popular song along with Neoclassical gestures anticipates a postmodern demeanor. The trumpet vies for the limelight in the finale pages as the Concerto races on to its boisterous, unbuttoned ending.

Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work has been published internationally. He contributes to the programs of the Lucerne Festival as well as to The New York Times and Musical America.