|
|
|
Carnegie Hall Sound Insights - The Music of Shostakovich
|
 |
“There are some enjoyable snippets in Krokodil Magazine, No. 24 of 30 August 1965. I have picked out five of them and set them to music for bass voice with piano accompaniment.”
—Shostakovich, letter to Glikman |
|
|
|
|
Krokodil was perhaps the most prestigious of the many satirical magazines to emerge in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. But while the others closed down during the early Stalin period, the authorities traded on the Krokodil reputation, adopting the title for an officially sanctioned humorous review. While Krokodil was given leeway denied to other publications, the satire was now toothless, subversion transformed into harmless amusement. Nevertheless, within these limits, the magazine was often well written and enjoyed a mass readership, and it possessed a demotic appeal that the serious Soviet press always lacked. For Shostakovich in the 1960s, the Krokodil texts represented a light-hearted exercise in nostalgia— they hark back to the 1920s Dadaistinspired device of setting newspaper clippings to music—the more prosaic and clumsy the better (such as Alexander Mosolov’s Four Newspaper Ads, or Hanns Eisler’s Newspaper Extracts, both from 1926). Shostakovich himself had made prominent use of the device in his first opera, The Nose, throwing together eight newspaper advertisements to chaotic effect in an absurdist ensemble scene.
Although Shostakovich’s (and Krokodil’s) targets are very diverse, the chosen texts are united stylistically through parody—they are all full of standard Soviet clichés, some bureaucratic, others more general. The singing of leaden phrases such as “obilechivayet passazhirov” (“he is charging the passengers for tickets”) or “provodit’ meropriyatiya” (“to undertake measures”) undoubtedly has its own comic effect, but beyond this there is the general theme of homo sovieticus, whose mind is deformed after decades of absorbing Soviet officialese. Particularly pointed satire arises in the last song, which tackles the pompous and hypocritical language of official incantations. Here, the satire is musical as well, with the piano attempting to stage a bells-and-timpani apotheosis of the kind Shostakovich himself had only recently used in earnest (in his 12th Symphony, for example).
—Marina Frolova-Walker
Marina Frolova-Walker’s writings on Russian music have appeared in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and elsewhere.
|
|
|
|
|
|