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Shostakovich, The Nose: (New England Premiere) Stephen Salters (Kovalyov), Torrance Blaisdell (The Nose), Vladimir Matorin (Ivan Yakovlevich), Opera Boston, Gil Rose (conductor). Cutler Majestic Theater, Boston, 3.3.2009 (KH)


Shostakovich’s first opera is as full of musical invention as his First Symphony (and if anything, displays yet more assurance and originality of design, and brilliance in scoring);  but where the symphony rapidly entered the international repertory, The Nose suffered from accidents of timing.  They are both not merely precocious, but admirably made works.

Shostakovich took thought to work on adapting Gogol’s celebrated short story for the stage while yet a tender 20 years of age.  He worked at it for two years.  Not that he worked slowly — among other works, in that interval he composed his Second Symphony (To October).  And when the young composer was at a pause in creation of The Nose, in setting the third act, the music came to him over a night’s sleep (in an interesting echo of Stravinsky’s remark that he was “the vessel through which The Rite passed”).  The composer’s mother recalled that Shostakovich

had dreamt that he was late for a dress rehearsal of the opera, and arrived at the theatre after the second act had finished.  In his dream, he stood at the back of the hall and listened to the whole of the third act.  On waking he was able to recall every note.  (Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, 2^nd ed., p. 83)

In Soviet Russia of the ’20s, the arts were in a state of riotous flower.  It was a brief spring of creative freedom before The Terror crashed in.  By the time The Nose reached the stage, however (on 18 January 1930), Anatoly Lunacharsky had been removed from his post as Commissar of Enlightenment, and the stage was set for various proletarian committee-organizations to begin exercising a tyranny of dumbing-down.  Spokesmen for RAPM (the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians) dismissed The Nose as “a nonsensical joke” and “an ugly grimace”;  Shostakovich’s first opera was packed up after some 16 performances (with two alternate casts) over a period of half a year.  Nonetheless, it was partly as a result of this stage success (as conductor Nikolai Malko reckoned it) that the composer came to collaborate with Grigory Kozintsev;  decades later, Shostakovich would score two justly famous Kozintsev films after Shakespeare.

Here in Boston, we have had to content ourselves with three performances, and demand has been high. The daunting challenge of The Nose is not its musical difficulty per se — as the pit orchestra at Gil Rose’s command amply demonstrated, an ensemble accustomed to the technical challenges which arose in the latter half of the century can take this score in something like its stride.  The difficulty springs from the nature of the story, as much as from the turn-on-a-dime structure of Shostakovich’s marvelous score.  For the whole story is about Kovalyov, the sudden inexplicable disappearance of his nose, and his consequent travails.  The story plays out in a series of waggish improbabilities; yet – lest we take it for “and it was all just a dream” – before there is any scene with Kovalyov missing his olfactory organ, we see the on stage the barber (and his harridan wife), aghast at being in possession of a loose nose, and driven out to the street to rid himself of the evidence.

Stephen Salters, thus carrying on his shoulders the lion’s share of the evening’s burden, performed splendidly as Platon Kuzmich Kovalyov, in excellent voice and with infectious energy.  Of many standout moments, I recall most readily his desolate arioso at the end of Act II, which Shostakovich accompanied sparely with plaintive accents of the cor anglais and contrabassoon.

If instrumentalists take music of this difficulty in stride, that is not quite the case with singers;  and the cast performed as a magnificent ensemble, both musically and as a dramatic corps.  I was going to praise one fellow’s Russian enunciation in particular, but when I read his bio, it turned out he was born in Moscow. (Praise a fellow from Newcastle for his keen knowledge of coal.)  This is a performance which could hit the road, and be a credit to the city of Boston.

Staging and set design was mostly fine.  One item which should be repaired is The Nose’s costume.  Although the costume looked suitably Gogolian, Torrance Blaisdell’s singing was too muffled;  a pity, for he must have been working hard.  The famous – or infamous – nocturne for percussion instruments (the joke being that the battery is easily the loudest section of the orchestra) underscores Kobalyov’s restless night before first discovering that the front of his face now looks ‘smooth as a pancake’.  The ladies of the cast danced all around him as mischievous sprites spoiling his rest, and they all wore molded plastic boobs which reminded this operagoer a bit too readily of the floor-show finale of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, with Graham Chapman impersonating Tony Bennett, singing “It’s Christmas in Heaven.”  It could well be that both Gogol and Shostakovich would have liked that.

Karl Henning


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