The Nose,
an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich
based on a story by Nikolai Gogol,
directed by William Kentridge.
Metropolitan Opera House,
New York, Spring 2010.
Any theatrical collaboration between a visual artist, a composer, and a writer is bound to be a chancy affair, filled with potential pitfalls and fraught with the possibility of failure. When the three sensibilities are very strong ones, each with its own prominent obsessions, the likelihood that they will mesh easily and fruitfully seems especially small. And then, if each of the collaborators in turn happens to die before the next one takes over the project—well, in that case disaster is almost a foregone conclusion.
Yet the joint venture of Gogol, Shostakovich, and Kentridge that was on display last spring in the Met’s production of The Nose is a complete and utter success. There are moments one might quibble with—places where the visual extravagance threatens to overwhelm the music, or brief passages where the costumes, sets, or acting manage to obscure the sound of the singing voice—but these are fleeting. From start to finish, the three-act, ten-scene, intermissionless hundred-minute opera goes like gangbusters—or rather, like some delirious dream or truly three-dimensional movie that envelops you in its implausible but profoundly affecting world.
The project started with Nikolai Gogol, out of whose overcoat, according to Dostoyevsky, all other modern Russian literature emerged. Gogol was inherently interested in the subject of noses, for—as Vladimir Nabokov puts it in his fascinating little book on the man and the writer—he had “a nose of such length and mobility that in the days of his youth he had been able…to bring its tip and his underlip in ghoulish contact; this nose was his keenest and most essential outer part.” He wrote his story “The Nose” in the mid-1830s, a period when Russia was firmly under Tsarist rule, when wealthy and even moderately comfortable people owned serfs, and when finely drawn class distinctions between the various levels of the civil service and the army dominated metropolitan life. In Gogol’s Kafkaesque tale, a “Collegiate Assessor of the eighth rank” named Kovalyov—who pretentiously calls himself a Major, and who is constantly trying to rise ever higher in Petersburg society—wakes up one morning to discover that he is missing his nose. There is no gaping wound in his face; between his cheeks is simply a featureless space, “flat as a pancake,” and he has no idea how it got that way. He is distressed, of course, but mainly because of the effect this marked irregularity will have on his social ascent, so he desperately seeks to get his nose back by trying to place an ad for it in the newspapers, complaining heatedly to the police, and engaging in other useless activities.
Meanwhile, the local barber has found Kovalyov’s nose in a loaf of bread baked by his wife; he hastily gets rid of it by throwing it in the Neva, because he fears (correctly, as it turns out) that he will be accused of having sliced it off during a shave. Soon after, the nose is seen parading around town “in the guise of a State Councillor”—a higher rank than Kovalyov’s, which enables it, or him (the two pronouns are the same in Russian) to cut Kovalyov contemptuously when they meet in a cathedral. Eventually the nose is captured attempting to leave town on someone else’s passport, and is returned by the police to its rightful owner, but even a doctor cannot help Kovalyov stick in back on. Finally, however, it reappears on his face all by itself, and everything is as it was before.
One can see why the young Dmitri Shostakovich (he was only twenty-two when he finished writing this opera in 1928) would have been attracted to this tale of absurdity and bad behavior. Nonsensical as it is, it is also extremely pointed, and the social pretensions and fears it mocked in 1836 would only have come to seem more pertinent by the late 1920s, when the brave new experiment of socialist revolution was starting to harden into the overwhelming stratifications of the Communist state. The libretto, which Shostakovich wrote himself—possibly with the help of others, although the credited co-author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, apparently contributed nothing to the final version—consists largely of dialogue lifted directly from the story. One misses the voice of the quietly confidential Gogolian narrator, but that is partly made up for by the searing intensity of the music, which changes from satiric to tender so rapidly that it sometimes seems to combine both moods at once.
Shostakovich’s score occupies and exploits the strange borderline on which he found himself located in the Russia of 1928—between the wildly experimental and the frighteningly trapped, between chaos and rigidity, between a popular stage on which anything could be presented and one on which censorship kept a firm and troubling hand. The score for The Nose is still, over eighty years later, somewhat shocking in its disregard for normal operatic conventions: the main character, for example, first appears onstage emitting vulgar grunts and groans rather than a fetching aria; the cathedral music is a strange, wordless mimicry of religious singing; and the overall texture is so jazzy that there is barely a scene that doesn’t rely heavily on brass, percussion, and vocal or instrumental dissonance. Given the strenuous novelty of this music, Shostakovich must on some level have felt free to do pretty much as he liked. Yet he must also have been well aware of the potential for offending more staid sensibilities, for he didn’t want to risk a concert performance of the work, which he thought would only provoke bewilderment in its listeners—as proved to be the case when Leningrad’s Maly Theater nonetheless put on such a concert in 1929.
The following year, when the full theatrical production premiered, the reviews from the so-called proletarian critics were largely negative. But that didn’t prevent The Nose from having a respectable run of sixteen performances over the course of the two seasons. And Shostakovich remained undaunted, apparently, for by 1934 he had produced a second and even more ambitious opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which garnered enormous popular acclaim. Only then did he come in for the full brunt of officialdom’s wrath: in 1936, after Lady Macbeth had received over two hundred performances in Moscow, Leningrad, and abroad, a vicious review in Pravda, famously titled “Muddle Instead of Music,” not only closed the show but destroyed forever the youthful composer’s career in opera. Though he went on to complete fifteen occasionally remarkable symphonies, fifteen string quartets of almost uniformly high quality, and numerous song cycles, chamber works, movie scores, and patriotic anthems, Shostakovich never again finished a work in the genre in which, at twenty-two, he had seemed potentially more promising than even Mozart or Rossini had been at that age.
That is our loss. But some losses, at least in music, can be redeemed eventually, and William Kentridge has now given this youthfully exuberant opera—forsaken in 1930 and only revived in 1974, when Shostakovich himself was near death—a restoration that is also a new view. Kentridge has approached The Nose from the perspective of a middle-aged man at the turn of the twenty-first century, and in doing so he has lent it a gravitas and a pathos, though also a kind of visual playfulness and excitement, that were not necessarily there in the original. A South African artist with deep roots in the anti-apartheid movement as well as a theatrical affinity for forms like mime, dance, film, and puppet-theater, Kentridge is the perfect person to appreciate both Shostakovich’s dour sense of humor and his frenetic sadness. As a director, he is clearly drawn to the showmanship of Shostakovich’s music—the virtuosic three-minute percussion interlude, for instance, which separates the second scene from the third, or the zany, noise-making instruments and bellowing trombones that lend a circus-like atmosphere to some of the proceedings—but he is equally attracted to what Grigori Kozintsev (a movie director who worked with Shostakovich over the course of both their lives) called his “feeling for tragedy” and his “virulent hatred of all that degrades man.” By using his own personal obsessions to bring out the darker side of Shostakovich, Kentridge also takes us closer to Gogol, as if each artist’s vision became multiplied and enlarged, the more refractions it went through.
Kentridge is obsessed, first and foremost, with rhythm: with how a drawn line stops and starts, or how a curve twirls around itself; with the way a dancer’s movement echoes but also seems to give rise to the music behind it, and the way stillness in dance corresponds to silence; with the fact that our bodies love speed and motion, twirling and leaping, but our minds need intermittent repose. And this preoccupation with rhythm, it turns out, is also at the heart of Shostakovich’s opera (not to mention Gogol’s story, where, even in translation, the deceptively flat prose style depends on rhythmic fluctuations and feints to convey its true import). In just about all the sections of the score that are choral or heavily instrumental, a driving, forward-moving impulse infuses the music and thereby infuses us, so that we may find ourselves invisibly bouncing in our seats with a combination of nervousness and excitement. And then, in the recitative sections of the opera—some of which, despite the apparent satire, are quite touching—we are made to pause, and rest, and feel, and think; our forward movement is held up for a time, so that we can fully sense the pleasure of its resumption. Kentridge follows every one of these minute shifts of pace in his visual accompaniments to the music, that profuse swirl of film images and hand-drawn cartoons and constructivist shapes and Russian or English words which he projects onto the backdrop (only in this case it is more like a foredrop) that surrounds the human singers in this performance.
He used a similar technique in his Magic Flute, which played a couple of years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but there I found it nowhere near as persuasive. Partly this was a matter of appropriate scale, as I learned when I saw the puppet-theater-sized Magic Flute in Kentridge’s show at SFMOMA (the same show which, in slightly altered form, later traveled to New York’s MoMA); in their reduced format, the music of Mozart’s opera and the projections of Kentridge’s antic line felt much more convincingly connected. The discrepancy also had to do with the skill levels of the human performers. The BAM singers just weren’t good enough, whereas the singers at the Met—particularly Paolo Szot in the demanding role of Kovalyov, Sergei Skorokhodov as his servant Ivan, and Andrei Popov as the police inspector—were terrific, for the most part holding their own against the powerful sound of the Met orchestra under Valery Gergiev’s baton. But mainly, I think, the flaws of that earlier production stemmed from an insufficient mesh between Mozart’s obsessions and Kentridge’s. Kentridge may be interested in Masonic lore and dark-versus-light imagery and the relationship between knowledge and goodness, but that interest does not run as deep as his feelings about snobbery and cruelty, beauty and ridiculousness, political hopes and political absurdities, and the arbitrary exercise of power in the face of life’s even more arbitrary demands. These concerns, which lie at the heart of the Gogol story and the Shostakovich opera, also lie at the heart of Kentridge’s aesthetic, emotional, and political beliefs (which in his case all seem to be tied up together). And because he cares about the same things these old, dead Russians do, he is able to add something of himself to their work without in any way rending the essential fabric.
Take, for example, the use of the Kentridge horse in this production. When this cartoonishly humanoid, rather noble, but also somewhat comic drawing of a horse first gets projected onto the set of The Nose, he seems slightly out of place (though soon we see him dragging a piece of scenery onstage, so at least he is doing something useful—very much in the manner of the serf-like humans, the barber’s wife and so on, who are never allowed to leave the stage without pushing some heavy piece of scenery before them). But then we may notice that the music during which he takes center stage, bearing the nose prominently on his back, is called a “gallop.” This pun is worthy of Shostakovich, who delighted in all sorts of word games, and it’s true that the dancing pace of this musical form actually does conjure up the rhythm of a horse in motion. At this point, too, we might recall Kentridge’s 2008 installation I am not me, the horse is not mine—itself inspired by his work on The Nose—whose title is based on a Russian peasant proverb used to evade accusations of guilt. When we take into account the other specifically Russian connotations of a horse (the famous St. Petersburg bronzes, for instance, or Dostoyevsky’s memorable image of the cruelly beaten cart-horse, whose sad fate is recapitulated in one of the opera’s projections), along with all the art-historical equine associations—Muybridge’s cantering steeds, Picasso’s Guernica figure, and so on—we can begin to appreciate what a lot of work the horse is doing in this opera.
But we don’t really need to understand every image, every connection. Inexplicable mysteries are a given in this plot, so the additional complications or confusions introduced by Kentridge’s design don’t necessarily distort it. In fact, Shostakovich had already added in a few extra mysteries of his own, one of them in the interpolated stage-coach scene where the nose is captured by the police. (In the Gogol story, this happens offstage.) Here, among other things, Shostakovich shows us the officers’ boorish treatment of a comely bagel-selling wench; there is also a strange old lady who, surrounded and contradicted by her female servants, lugubriously predicts her own death. I understand what the brutal officers are doing here: Shostakovich had a lifelong terror of anyone in uniform (not an unreasonable attitude, in the Soviet Union), and the threatening police presence is already built into “The Nose.” But I can’t for the life of me figure out what that old woman represents. What did this episode mean to him, and why did he think it belonged in this particular plot? Never mind, though; Kentridge has skillfully costumed the woman in a long, doleful mask that links her to other masked characters in the crowd scenes, and this makes her seem a natural part of the overall carnivalesque, chaotic atmosphere. The chaos is charming—I especially loved the twirling of the fan-shaped red inserts in the officers’ gray coats—but it can also be intimidating and even frightening, and that doubleness perfectly suits the opera’s mood.
There were only a few places, I felt, where Kentridge’s visual obsessiveness might have led him slightly astray. I would have preferred to listen to the marvelous percussion interlude without seeing a film of Shostakovich at the piano projected over it, even though I’ll admit that the respective rhythms did fit neatly together. And why, I wondered, did the scene in which Kovalyov writes a letter to Mrs. Podtochina (a first lieutenant’s widow whose pretty daughter he alternately flirts with and rejects) echo so strongly Manet’s painting The Balcony, which in turn refers to Goya’s Two Majas on a Balcony? Kentridge’s need to evoke these paintings was so powerful that he used Manet’s characteristic blue-green on the shutters of Mrs. Podtochina’s window, even though it was totally out of place in the otherwise Russian-constructivist, black-red-and-off-white color scheme of the rest of the opera. Clearly the painting means something to him in this context, but what?
The Kovalyov-Podtochina scene is particularly important because it contains what I would guess is the seed of Kentridge’s whole theatrical conception. In the libretto, in one of the few stage directions Shostakovich offers, he suggests that Podtochina’s house and Kovalyov’s rooms should both be onstage at once, but that at first, when one is spotlit, the other should be “swallowed up in darkness”; eventually, though, when the two households read aloud each other’s letters, both dwellings are to be simultaneously lit up. In Kentridge’s production, this is accomplished by having two brightly lit boxes of activity, at different heights, set within the flat rectangular screen on which the projections appear throughout the show. Picture two little rooms on different levels in a dollhouse or, better yet, two flaps opening in an Advent calendar: that is the effect this technique creates. But by the time we get to this method in Scene Eight (the only scene in which Shostakovich specifies the lighting), we are already extremely familiar with it, because Kentridge has been using it since the Prologue, where he first showed us the barber’s room as a small, raised, lighted rectangle set within the larger, darker plane of the proscenium-filling “curtain.” Each subsequent location—Kovalyov’s flat, the house of the police chief, even the newspaper office—is similarly portrayed as a three-dimensional box that only takes up a fraction of the set; and even in those scenes that occupy the whole stage (in the cathedral, for example, or on the public streets at the end), we are still very aware of the segregation of space into smaller units.
Disjointed, disconnected scenes placed in discontinous boxes work beautifully in The Nose, because the whole opera is a series of events which happen one after the other without rhyme or reason. The nose grows from small to large without explanation and reverts back to its original size almost as spontaneously; nothing makes logical sense anyway, so cause is not expected to lead to effect, and action does not lead to reaction (or to punishment, or to knowledge). What makes The Nose a comic opera, finally, is that Kovalyov gets his lost nose back again in the end. What are the chances of that? What is the likelihood that everything should come right as easily and as inexplicably as it goes wrong? “Improbable,” to say the least—or at any rate that’s the word Gogol himself uses.
“Only now, on thinking it all over, we can see that there is a great deal that is improbable in it…,” this deadpan narrator says of his own tale as it is drawing to a close:
Quite apart from the really strange fact of the supernatural disappearance of the nose and its appearance in various parts of town in the guise of a State Councillor, how did Kovalyov fail to realise that he could not advertise about his nose in a newspaper?… But what is even stranger and more incomprehensible than anything is that authors should choose such subjects… In the first place it’s of no benefit whatever to our country, and in the second place—but even in the second place there’s no benefit whatsoever… All the same, on second thoughts, there really is something in it. Say what you like, but such things do happen—not often, but they do happen.
And on this characteristically suspended, utterly irreducible note, somewhere between assertion and doubt, mockery and seriousness, the Gogol story ends.
When I first read the Shostakovich libretto (which I did while listening to the excellent Mariinsky recording of The Nose, also conducted by Gergiev), I was disappointed to see that he had left this ending out of his opera. That happened mainly, I suppose, because his libretto borrowed only from the story’s dialogue and not from the narrative voice; but perhaps another cause was that even Shostakovich, reckless as he was in his youth, might have hesitated to sound such a skeptical note in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In any case, because I had noticed and regretted the omission, I was particularly delighted to see these sentences reappear toward the end of Kentridge’s production.
The narrator’s words are delivered by speaking rather than singing characters who wear “modern” dress—that is, 1920s Soviet-style clothing, to go with the other Soviet-era elements that Kentridge has introduced into this production—and they are delivered from above, with the speakers standing on a kind of bridge or walkway over the temporarily stilled action. I had thought this was yet another example of Kentridge’s special genius at work, but Laurel Fay (who, as Shostakovich’s most thorough and rigorous biographer, knows more about him than anyone else) told me that Kentridge did not introduce the Gogolian narration into the opera; that had been done earlier, in the 1974 Moscow Chamber Opera Theater production directed by Boris Pokrovsky. Still, Kentridge did have the option of keeping the innovation or leaving it out—as we can see from the fact that Gergiev, in his recent Mariinsky production, left it out.
We know that Shostakovich attended and, one presumes, approved that 1974 production. As I view it, Kentridge’s inclusion of these crucial lines from the end of the Gogol story is not only a tip of the hat to the original author, but also a rueful tribute to his other collaborator, Shostakovich. He is acknowledging the bittersweet pleasure it must have brought to the composer when, at the very end of his life, after years of silence and suppression, he was finally able to see his great opera restored to the stage, with a small but important addition that made the whole work even stronger and more virulently Gogolian than ever.
Wendy Lesser’s ninth book, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, will be published by Yale in the spring. An abridged version of this essay on The Nose appears in the fall issue of New Music Connoisseur.
