Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin
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| Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin | |
|---|---|
| Song cycle by Dmitri Shostakovich | |
 Shostakovich in June 1973 | |
| Opus | 146 |
| Text | Fyodor Dostoyevsky Anonymous |
| Language | Russian |
| Composed | August 23, 1974 |
| Published | 1975 |
| Publisher | Muzyka Hans Sikorski Musikverlage Boosey & Hawkes DSCH Publishers |
| Duration | 10 minutes |
| Movements | 4 |
| Scoring | Bass and piano |
| Premiere | |
| Date | May 10, 1975 |
| Location | Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory Moscow, Russian SFSR |
| Performers | Yevgeny Nesterenko (bass) Yevgeny Shenderovich (piano) |
The Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin (Russian: Четыре стихотворения капитана Лебядкина, romanized: Chetyre stikhotvoreniya kapitana Lebyadkina) by Dmitri Shostakovich is a song cycle composed in 1974. It is his final vocal work.
Despite having a lifelong appreciation for the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich did not embark on a large-scale musical setting of them until the penultimate year of his life, when he became fascinated by Captain Ignat Lebyadkin, a character who affected to be a learned poet in Demons. Shostakovich had read the novel while convalescing in Barvikha. He selected several of his verses from the novel and fashioned them together idiosyncratically for his song cycle.
Yevgeny Nesterenko and Yevgeny Shenderovich premiered the work at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on May 10, 1975; it was the last time Shostakovich attended a premiere of his own music. The reception from the public and press was muted. Alfred Schnittke, who was in the audience, recalled that the hall was only half full. Krzysztof Meyer called the work "truly astonishing", while Bernd Feuchtner, president of the German Shostakovich Society, described it as a "dark counterpart" to the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Shostakovich had a profound appreciation for Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[1] In 1975, he wrote to a friend:[2]
I love him and admire him as a great artist. I admire his love for people, for the humiliated and the wretched.[2]
In the same letter Shostakovich also said that he "never parted" from his copy of The House of the Dead while composing Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.[2] In spite of this, he had never set any of Dostoyevsky's texts to music, aside from a brief excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov in The Nose. A cue from his 1928 film score to The New Babylon representing the Franco-Prussian War, which juxtaposed "La Marseillaise" with the can-can from Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, may have been inspired by a reference to a fictitious piano piece with similar characteristics in Dostoyevsky's Demons.[1]
Composition
In 1974, while convalescing in Barvikha, Shostakovich read Demons; he became interested in Captain Ignat Lebyadkin, a character whose verses were described by Sofia Khentova, the composer's official biographer, as a "parody of poetry, the philosophy of a crook".[3] Musicologist Dorothea Redepenning referred to Lebyadkin as "one of the most distasteful figures in Russian literature".[4]
On August 23, 1974, Shostakovich reported in a letter to Isaak Glikman that he had composed "quite a lot recently", and announced that he had completed the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, as well as its predecessor, the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti.[5] Glikman recalled that Shostakovich had been profoundly upset over having "not a single musical thought in his head" during the period immediately preceding his work on these compositions.[6]
In early 1975, Yevgeny Nesterenko and Yevgeny Shenderovich, who Shostakovich chose to premiere the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, received the score. They mostly prepared the premiere apart from each other because of Nesterenko's recurring illnesses. Shenderovich visited Shostakovich in Repino, who was there being treated for a chronic neuro-muscular disorder. The composer described the character of Lebyadkin to him:[7]
You know, Lebyadkin, of course is a buffoon and a laughing stock. But there is something frighteningly creepy about him. Tell this to Nesterenko, maybe it will give him an indication of the image I had in mind.[7]
Nesterenko and Shenderovich later went to Kiev to perform a series of concerts. While there, they began to intensively rehearse for the premiere of the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin. Although they had frequently performed Shostakovich's Five Romances on Texts from Krokodil Magazine, which Nesterenko premiered, Shenderovich said the new work "required much more technical mastery, a more incisive satire, and much more subtle innuendo" than the earlier work.[8]
Music
The Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, Shostakovich's final song cycle,[9] consists of four songs scored for bass and piano:[10]
- The Love of Captain Lebyadkin
- The Cockroach
- The Charity Ball of the Governesses
- A Pure Soul
Shostakovich presents the selected verses from Demons out of order and also uses prose excerpts as connective material.[4] Lebyadkin's verses parody the writings of Afanasy Fet and Nestor Kukolnik;[2] they also demonstrate his illiteracy.[11]
The first song, "The Love of Captain Lebyadkin", conflates three strophes that are disparately located within the novel.[12] It describes the titular character's unrequited love for Yelizaveta Nikolayevna Tushina. He views her physical qualities, which inspire him to yearn for "marital and legal delights", as his feminine ideal. In the course of the song, he likens his love to the explosion of a cannonball at the siege of Sevastopol where he had lost his arm, but later contradicts himself by saying he has neither ever visited Sevastopol nor is missing an arm.[13][14][11] The song includes quotes from the Prelude No. 15 in D♭ major from Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues[15] and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades.[12] It also includes allusions to Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto.[2]
"The Cockroach" is a fable in the style of Ivan Krylov, which tells of flies and a cockroach in a glass being discarded into a trash bin by an old servant. The music is based on the folk song "Chizhik-Pyzhik". In the novel it appears as a dialogue between Lebyadkin and Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, one of the main characters. At the end of the song, Lebyadkin describes the old servant as an "allegory of nature".[16][2]
Lebyadkin attacks the institution of marriage in the third song, "The Charity Ball of the Governesses". He refers to virtuous young women from the upper classes as "governesses", who despite their surface affectation of chastity conceal the capacity to become a "little George Sand".[17]
"A Pure Soul" is a strophic song that utilizes an anonymous text referred to in Demons,[10] which satirizes the revolutionary-themed poetry of Nikolay Ogarev.[18] The only song in the cycle with a key signature, B major, it retells the life of a man, "not a gentleman by birth", compelled to leave Russia in order to escape Tsarist persecution and declare "fraternity, equality, and liberty". The song concludes with a rebuke of organized religion, marriage, and the nuclear family.[17]
According to Dorothea Redepenning, the work's form suggests that of a "four-movement symphony, but [with] a total renunciation of motivic interrelationship".[19]
A typical performance lasts approximately 10 minutes.[10] The manuscript score is preserved in the Shostakovich family archives.[20]
Orchestration
After Shostakovich's death, Boris Tishchenko arranged the piano part for chamber orchestra.[10] This was subsequently published as Op. 146a.[10]
