Word: vishnevskaya
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After 16 years of exile, Rostropovich had returned to his native land -- to give concerts, but more significantly to begin healing political and personal wounds. The homecoming, said his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, a former star of the Bolshoi Theater, "was very emotional...
...Vishnevskaya joined the Bolshoi Theater in 1952 when Stalin still acted as the opera's imperial patron. Millions of rubles were spent on the opulent sets and costumes for spectacles like Prince Igor and Boris Godunov. Seated in a heavily guarded box, Stalin reveled in the gilt-and-rhinestone production numbers as he munched on hard-boiled eggs. He had no knowledge of music. Once at an intermission he summoned to his loge the distinguished Bolshoi conductor Samuil Samosud and told him strongly that the performance "is lacking flats." Samosud had the wit to reply: "Good, Comrade Stalin. Thank...
...thus far proved ineradicable. His concept of the genre as patriotic spectacle has hindered the development of a knowledgeable and devoted opera public. Today the state encourages Soviet visitors to the Bolshoi but, says the author, it gives them little help in understanding what they see. Without condescension, Vishnevskaya recalls one typical group of prizewinning collective farmers rewarded with tickets in the front row of the Bolshoi. A peasant woman directly behind the conductor grew restive during the overture. She leaned over the orchestra pit and bawled out the man with the baton: "Why are you waving your arms around...
...book's most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming...
...spite of such difficulties, the completed movie was pronounced the best of all filmed operas by Conductor Herbert von Karajan. The Russian people have been deprived of seeing even one scene. Like all films and recordings of Vishnevskaya's performances, Katerina Izmailova is banned in its native country. So is this book. Westerners are not so unfortunate. -By Patricia Blake