Shostakovich plays Hamlet (for laughs?)

Synopsis

A very unusual production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” opened in Moscow on today’s date in 1932. The play’s director felt that a traditional staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy would be irrelevant for the proletariat audiences of the new Soviet state, so he turned the play upside down: Hamlet was an obese, upper class glutton who just wanted to seize the throne for himself. Hamlet had just made up all that stuff about his father’s ghost.

As for Hamlet being troubled by his mother’s remarriage and “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” that was just a sop for the bourgeoisie morality of pre-revolutionary audiences.

This “Hamlet” was more parody than tragedy, and the young Soviet composer Dimtri Shostakovich supplied appropriately loony incidental music. Alas, timing is everything—both in theater and politics. The show was a flop with audiences and the whole idea was panned by the Soviet critics as ideologically unsound.

For his part, Shostakovich had just published a diatribe against the poor quality of music for Soviet film and theatrical productions. As a model for new Soviet music, Shostakovich was pinning all his hopes on a big opera he was writing entitled “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.” As he found out to his horror, that opera, coincidentally a loose parody of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” got him into serious political trouble with everyone from Joseph Stalin on down—a position that could mean an artistic or literal death sentence in Stalin’s increasingly conservative totalitarian state.

Poor Shostakovich would spend decades trying to make artistic amends with the powers that be for THAT ideological misstep.

Music Played in Today's Program

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975) Hamlet Incidental music, Op. 32 City of Birmingham Symphony; Mark Elder, cond. Cala 1021

On This Day

Births

• 1616 - Baptismal date of German composer and organist Johann Jacob Froberger, in Stuttgart;

Deaths

• 1935 - American composer Charles Martin Loeffler, age 74, in Medfield, Mass.;

• 1954 - American composer and insurance executive Charles Ives, age 79, in New York;

• 2009 - British composer Nicholas Maw, age 73, in Washington, D.C.;

Premieres

• 1842 - Donizetti: opera "Linda di Chamounix," in Vienna;

• 1886 - Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 ("Organ"), in London;

• 1911 - Ravel: "L'Heure espagnole" (Spanish Hour), in Paris at the Opèra Comique;

• 1915 - Stravinsky: Three Pieces for string quartet, in Paris;

• 1932 - Shostakovich: incidental music for Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in Moscow at the Vakhtangov Theater;

• 1939 - Cowell: "Return" for 3 percussionists and wailer, at the Cornish School in Seattle, by John Cage and his Percussion Group;

• 1942 - Cage: music for the radio play "The City Wears a Slouch Hat" (text by poet Kenneth Patchen), broadcast in Chicago;

• 2000 - Robert X. Rodriguez: "The Last Night of Don Juan" for chorus and orchestra, by the San Antonio Symphony and chorus, Wilkins conducting;

• 2002 - William Bolcom: "Seventh Symphony (A Symphonic Concerto)," at Carnegie Hall in New York, by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, James Levine conducting.

Others

• 1886 - American premiere of J.S. Bach's Mass in B minor (11 selections), during the May Festival in Cincinnati, conducted by Theodore Thomas; The next documented performance (12 sections) was given in Boston on February 27, 1887, by the Handel and Haydn Society, with Carl Zerrahn conducting a chorus of 432 and an orchestra of 50; In both the 1886 Cincinnati and 1887 Boston performances, the famous 19-century German soprano Lilli Lehmann appeared as one of the soprano soloists; The first complete performance of the work was apparently given either at the Moravian Church in Bethlehem on Mar 17, 1900, by the Bach Choir under J. Fred Wolf, or at Carnegie Hall in new York on April 5, 1900, by the Oratorio Society, Frank Damrosch conducting.