Opera Note: The Nose

I suppose you could say I've saved the best for last, but I do have to put in a good word for the best opera performance I saw last week: the The Nose, by Shostakovich with staging by William Kentridge. It is everything everybody says it is and I don't have a lot to add.

With, I guess, one exception: people keep talking about The Nose as if it were some kind of response to Stalinism. But not really. The Nose premiered (in Leningrad) in 1928, which is to say, long before Stalin had locked the place down. Granted the Bolsheviks had enjoyed a 10-year run, and granted that Shostakovich took some flac from "the Russian Association of Prolertartian Musicians," still Russia remained a pretty loose-jointed venue at that point, and Russian continued to enjoy something of a bright sunny afternoon. The liquidation of the kulaks, the great purge, the Moscow trials, the dectator's menace against Shostakovich himself--these were still all years away. Recall that The Nose is rooted (and pretty firmly, at that) in a story that Gogol published in 1836. If there is criticism of Bolshevism here, it is that nothing has changed very much.

The Nose is a young man's work, with a young man's excess (Mrs. B found it a bit long at three hours). But as better critics than I have asserted, Shostakovich seems to have thought every note, and to have poured himself into it with a young man's passion. Critics have also been saying that the Kentridge is excessive, too busy. I suppose I can see their point; still busy-ness sis the theme of the evening, and it may be Kentridge (though not himself a young man) is doing his best to keep with the spirit of the occasion.