![]() ![]() Julian Barnes makes this traumatic event central to his fictionalized portrait of Shostakovich in his ambitious but claustrophobic new novel, “The Noise of Time.” It’s a book that attempts to turn the composer’s complex relationship with the Soviet authorities into an Orwellian allegory about the plight of artists in totalitarian societies - and a Kafkaesque parable about a fearful man’s efforts to wrestle with a surreal reality, even as he questions his complicity with the system. Shostakovich was so convinced that the secret police would come to take him away in the middle of the night that he reportedly kept a packed suitcase ready for his arrest. The composers’ union quickly condemned the opera, too, and onetime supporters began berating Shostakovich in speeches and statements. It was, people speculated, an artistic death warrant (if not the real thing) and possibly penned by Stalin himself. Two days later, there appeared in Pravda a scathing denunciation of the evening under the headline “Muddle Instead of Music.” The review castigated Shostakovich’s opera as tickling “the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music.” 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s much-acclaimed opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and the composer was disturbed to see that the Soviet leader and his government companions abruptly left their box before the final act. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |