Download Dmitri Shostakovich Suite from “Hamlet,” Opus 32a DMITRI

Dmitri Shostakovich
Suite from “Hamlet,” Opus 32a
DMITRI DMITRIEVICH SHOSTAKOVICH was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on September 25, 1906,
and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. The music in the “Hamlet” Suite, Opus 32a, was originally
composed in 1931 and 1932 as incidental music for a theatrical production of “Hamlet” directed by Nikolai
Akimov that had its premiere at the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow on May 19, 1932. Soon after the
premiere, Shostakovich arranged some of the music composed for the theatrical production into a suite
made up of thirteen short sections, of which seven are being performed in these concerts. There is no record
of the first performance of the suite, which was published in 1960 by Sovetskii kompozitor.
THE ORCHESTRA FOR THE “HAMLET” SUITE includes piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two
horns, two trumpets, trombone, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, and
strings.
By all accounts, Nikolai Akimov’s scandalous avant-garde 1932 Hamlet smashed the rules of
Shakespearean decorum. This farcical “materialist” interpretation transformed the treasured tragedy into a
comic adventure, “a zany story of political intrigue.” Akimov (1901-1968) cast one of Russia’s leading
comic actors as a rakish, fat, and frequently drunken Hamlet struggling against the old bourgeois order
represented by his mother and her new husband, his adulterous uncle Claudius, murderer of his father and
usurper of his throne. Virginal Ophelia was a dissolute nymphomaniac who drowns not by suicide—as is
the usual convention—but by tumbling into the water in an alcoholic stupor, having been impregnated by
Hamlet. Her father, Polonius, was played as a pompous parody of theatrical icon Konstantin Stanislavsky.
Akimov also altered the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father whose appearance prods his selfdoubting son into action. Instead, in a ruthless pursuit of personal power, Hamlet himself pretends to be the
ghost, unsettling Claudius and his conspirators. Akimov’s Hamlet is not the cerebral, vacillating, and
alienated figure familiar from Shakespeare. Here he becomes a fun-loving, earthy humanist with close links
to the people of his realm, feigning madness for political purposes, in a clever and carefully planned
campaign to gain control of the kingdom. He even addresses his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy to
the royal crown for which he lusts.
Audiences flocked to see the show. One New York critic called it “the best show in Europe.” The response
of official Communist Party officials was less enthusiastic. They saw (rightly) in Akimov’s “formalist” and
carnivalesque staging a veiled attack on the increasingly repressive atmosphere of Stalin’s Russia. After a
negative review in the Party newspaper Pravda, the Moscow production was closed down and exiled to
provincial Leningrad. Akimov’s was the last Hamlet seen in the Soviet capital until after Stalin’s death in
1953. The play’s themes were just too close to Stalinist reality: regicide, bloodthirsty political intrigue,
spying, exile, imprisonment, murder, and suicide.
Shakespeare’s plays, and particularly Hamlet, have long enjoyed great popularity—and controversy—in
Russia. “Hamlet should have been a Russian, not a Dane,” wrote Englishman William Morris. Authors Ivan
Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Boris Pasternak all wrote fictional responses to the
play. Tchaikovsky (twice) and Sergei Prokofiev also created scores inspired by the “tragical history” of the
Danish prince. Living as they did in a repressive society controlled by Tsars, commissars, and their often
ruthless henchmen, Russian and Soviet artists and intellectuals could strongly identify with Hamlet’s
feelings of impotence and rage as he frets over how to right the wrong of his father’s murder at the hands of
a bullying usurper. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” Hamlet laments.
In his (contested) memoirs, Testimony, created with Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich muses at length about
the dangerous power of Hamlet in the Stalin era. “A criminal ruler—what could attract the leader and
teacher in that theme? Shakespeare was a seer—man stalks power, walking knee-deep in blood. . . . No, it’s
better not to become involved with Shakespeare. Only careless people would take on such a losing
proposition. That Shakespeare is highly explosive.”
Akimov’s Hamlet was Shostakovich’s first attempt at setting a Shakespearean text, and inaugurated an
intense lifelong creative relationship with the Bard. He would return to Hamlet twice more, producing
incidental music for Grigori Kozintsev’s 1954 stage version, and a powerful score for Kozintsev’s
acclaimed 1964 film version. With director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Shostakovich discussed the idea of
collaborating on a Hamlet opera; but Meyerhold’s arrest and execution during the purges of the late 1930s
unfortunately killed (quite literally) that extremely promising project.
Reportedly, Shostakovich was at first reluctant to take on Hamlet because he feared being dismissed as a
composer of incidental music. By this time, the twenty-five-year old had already written, besides three
symphonies, a large body of what he sometimes scornfully referred to as “applied music”: three film
scores, incidental music for five theatrical productions, two ballets, and his first opera, The Nose. He was
also preoccupied with his ongoing work on the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. But
Shostakovich had already spent the theater’s advance on a Black Sea vacation, so he went ahead and wrote
a witty, cinematic score that matched the madcap mood of the proceedings—with can-cans, ironic fanfares,
raucous gallops, cartoonish processions, and rude noises. Akimov had said he wanted music that was
“sharp-edged, brilliant and witty, and full of innovation.” Shostakovich complied.
One of the most memorable and politically pointed musical moments came during Act III, scene 2, when
Hamlet compares himself to a pipe to be played upon. (“Call me what instrument you will, though you fret
me, you cannot play upon me.”) In a daring attack on the so-called “proletarian” composers who then
controlled the Soviet musical scene, Akimov and Shostakovich had Hamlet hold a flute near his buttocks
while the piccolo, accompanied by snare drum, trumpet and tuba, played (or rather, farted) an off-key
version of a popular patriotic song written by one of their leaders, Alexander Davidenko.
Understandably, Shostakovich did not include this episode in the orchestral suite,
which he fashioned from fifteen “numbers” written for the show, organized into
thirteen short sections. All are very brief; three of the present selections—
Introduction and Night Watch; Flourish and Dance Music, and The Hunt—can
suggest the manic energy of silent-film chase music. This is not surprising,
considering Shostakovich’s recent experience as a movie hall pianist and film
composer. With a jazzy, cabaret-style accompaniment, Ophelia’s Song, a catchy
urban ditty, was set, in the complete incidental music, to a bawdy text (“he invited
the virgin in, but she didn’t leave a virgin”) that Marlene Dietrich might have
enjoyed singing. Only in the haunting Lullaby, scored for string orchestra, and in
the Requiem (built around the familiar Dies irae theme), does the music strike a
more serious note.
Akimov’s Hamlet, and Shostakovich’s music for it, represented the last gasp of the irrepressible,
experimental spirit of the early Soviet cultural scene. Indeed, 1932 was a crucial turning point, as Stalin
began to tighten the screws on artists of all sorts. Only a few years later, in 1936, Shostakovich himself
would become a major target of Stalin’s wrath, when Party officials attacked and banned his opera Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk as dangerous anti-Soviet material. It was only in 1964, after Stalin’s death, that
Shostakovich would pour the tragic experience of the terrible years following that condemnation into the
Hamlet suite drawn from the film project, this time brimming with grief and despair.
Harlow Robinson
HARLOW ROBINSON is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History at
Northeastern University. The author of “Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography” and “Russians in Hollywood,
Hollywood’s Russians,” he is a frequent lecturer and annotator for the Boston Symphony, Lincoln Center,
Metropolitan Opera Guild, and Aspen Music Festival.
THE PRESENT PERFORMANCES are the first by the Boston Symphony Orchestra of any of
Shostakovich’s “Hamlet” music, though Arthur Fiedler led the entire thirteen-movement suite with the
Boston Pops Orchestra, also recording it with that orchestra for RCA in May 1968.