Wagner in Russia (6/9)
Wagner in the Soviet Union : Lohengrin as enemy of "progressive" socialist art. Part 2
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LOHENGRIN in Moscow (1923)
The premiere of the second post-revolutionary Moscow production of Lohengrin took place on March 29, 1923 at the Bolshoi Theatre. It was realized under different political circumstances than the first. The years of war communism 1918-1921 were followed by the phase of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the years 1921-1928. The NEP was introduced primarily as a forced compromise to stabilize the country's catastrophic humanitarian situation. An important feature of the NEP was the Bolsheviks' cooperation with "bourgeois specialists" in various areas of society, which many supporters of the revolution saw as a betrayal. Cultural policy between 1922 and 1927 was also based on winning over bourgeois specialists to the Bolshevik cause. The NEP was culturally a pluralistic, dynamic era, characterized by different ideas about art, which despite everything had a common goal, namely to revolutionize art. On one side of the artistic front after the revolution were the modernists, futurists and constructivists, on the other were the advocates of the new realistic and proletarian culture. The latter despised modernist endeavors such as the "Theateroktober" initiated by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Among other things, they accused the Futurists and Constructivists of having developed their ideology and aesthetics before the revolution and that they were therefore not truly revolutionary.
The cultural-political dynamic within the NEP has often been characterized by the dichotomy between the soft and the hard line. The soft line, embodied by Lunacharsky, was the official stance of the party after the proclamation of the NEP. It was not liberal, but it was relatively tolerant towards different conceptions of art, as it was recognized that the emergence of a new proletarian art would take time. The soft line drew on pre-revolutionary traditions, cultivated established cultural institutions such as the Bolshoi Theater, opposed iconoclasm and sought cooperation with the "bourgeois specialists". The hard line was that of class struggle, and it was represented by the lower levels of the party hierarchy. These were committed to a new proletarian culture and advocated a militant policy towards the "bourgeois specialists". From the hard line, institutions such as the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) as well as various proletarian writers and militant atheists should be mentioned. Both lines were already on a collision course at the very beginning of the revolution. In October 1917, some militant supporters of proletarian art announced that they wanted to renounce any kind of cooperation with the "bourgeoisie" and destroy the old art altogether.
The years from 1917 to 1929 should be seen as a phase in which totalitarian, Orwellian censorship bodies were established in Soviet Russia. Censorship of the print media was introduced immediately after the October Revolution, even though the Bolsheviks had promised freedom of expression in distancing themselves from the long tsarist tradition of censorship. Although censorship was a normal measure during the Civil War, the real breach of their promise was that the Bolsheviks refused to abolish censorship even after their victory. The NEP was ambivalent about freedom of expression. Although private publishers were permitted again, the Glawlit, the Main Administration for Literature and Publishing, was founded on June 6, 1922. This meant the introduction of total pre-censorship in the newspaper and publishing industry. The Glawlit worked closely with the secret police GUP and saw itself as a continuation of the revolution as well as a fighting body against "bourgeois remnants". The censorship body grew rapidly, and on February 9, 1923, the main repertoire committee Glawrepertkom was created in the Glawlit, with the areas of performing arts, cinema, music and sound recording. What made the situation complicated was the fact that the Glawlit and the Glawrepertkom were nominally subordinate to the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros), whose head Lunacharsky, unlike Lenin, was opposed to censorship on principle. Despite this, the censorship authorities worked practically independently. The heads of the Glawlit and the Glawrepertkom, Pavel Ivanovich Lebedev-Polyansky and Ilya P. Trainin, had been known for their activities on behalf of proletarian culture even before the revolution. It is therefore not surprising that the ideology of the two censorship authorities corresponded to the hard utilitarian line of the radical left. One of the first initiatives carried out by the Glawrepertkom was the accusation against the Bolshoi Theater of miscalculations in the repertoire. Five opera classics from the previous season were attacked for spreading "monarchist propaganda". In addition to Russian operas in which, according to the Glawrepertkom, the Tsar had appeared almost like a demigod, Lohengrin was also criticized, and the Glawrepertkom also announced that the planned Faust by Gounod should not be performed because the music was too saccharine and the libretto was of poor quality.
As mentioned, the premiere of the second post-revolutionary Lohengrin production in Moscow took place on March 29, 1923 at the Bolshoi Theatre. After Meyerhold's appointment as head of the "Academic Theatres" department, a series of radical constructivist Wagner productions were put on the repertoire in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Lohengrin was directed by Vladimir Lossky and the stage design was by Fyodor Fyodorovski. The whole production - the richness of color, the constructivist stage design, the static chorus - was reminiscent of the 1918 production in terms of its reading and aesthetics.
A cast of some 300 embodied the utopian optimism of the early revolutionary years. The stage rose in levels towards the back and was framed by wedge-like planes, geometric screens and rudimentary pillars and arches. Positioned in the centre of the stage was a rectangular platform on which the soloists stood to perform their solos, like statues on pedestals. Light and color played a major role in the production’s view of the work as a struggle between good and evil. White, silver and gold symbolized the qualities of goodness, innocence and purity assiciated with Lohengrin and Elsa, while black and dark colours for Telramund and Ortrud represented the powers of darkness. Costumes were highly stylized, the futuristic-looking, spiky outfits with their elaborate head-dresses surely the most unconventional ever designed for the opera at that time. But the helmets and huge shields were also rather heavy, which made moving and singing at the same time something of a challenge, as the male chorus found to their cost, and in 1925 they finally petitioned to have the march from the last act removed. The soloists’ costumes were also cumbersome: the singer performing the role of Ortrud complained that her costume for act one weighed twenty kilograms.
Lossky and Fyodorovsky sought to create a symphony of light and colour which could merge with the symphony of sound in Wagner’s score. During the prelude the front-curtain was flooded with a pure silver-coloured light during the motif of the Swan-Knight drowning out the knights of darkness, but became suddenly ablaze with shades of crimson and violet at the appearance in the score of the motif of the evil Telramund, causing the image of Elsa to grow dim. The conductor, Nikolai Golovanov, was not alone in complaining that the dazzling impression detracted from Wagner’s score. The German medical specialists who had come to Russia to treat the ailing Lenin and attended every performance, claimed that ‘they had never seen anything like it in Germany’. From the point of view of the hard line, neither Lohengrin as an opera nor the form of the new production had anything to do with the desired realistic proletarian culture, which is why the opera and its staging offered areas of criticism.
The offensive against the Bolshoi Theatre for alleged mistakes in the repertoire was led by a representative figure of the cultural-political hard line, the theater critic Vladimir Ivanovich Blyum, who headed the musical theater department of the Glawrepertkom. According to Lunacharsky, his and Blyum's views on the theater were always diametrically opposed. In a lecture from September 1923, Blyum criticized the opera management for their choice of Lohengrin and other "monarchist" Russian operas. He was of the opinion that the directors of the Bolshoi Theater should have opted for another opera by Wagner instead of Lohengrin, such as Rienzi. The Glawrepertkom went so far in its criticism that the director Ilya P. Trainin asked the artistic management of the Bolshoi Theater to resign because of the repertoire mistake. Despite the threatening tone, the Glawrepertkom finally announced that the criticized operas could remain on stage, although it seemed questionable that "a tsar is celebrated almost every night" on the country's main opera stage. This decision shows that around 1923 the Glawrepertkom was not yet powerful enough to unilaterally enforce its arbitrary censorship, which is why its campaigns were mainly limited to harsh rhetoric. As a result of the dispute, Lunacharsky later invited the Glawrepertkom and the artistic management of the Bolshoi Theater to a round table. At the meeting, Ilya P. Trainin demanded that the Bolshoi Theatre renew itself and therefore proposed that the Ring and Die Meistersinger be added to the repertoire.
To understand the connection between this offensive and the broader cultural-political context around 1923, it is useful to evaluate Lohengrin according to the criteria of the cultural-political hard line. First of all, the abstract revolutionary idea of Lohengrin should be mentioned.The fact that an unorthodox or metaphysical approach to the revolution had already been taboo was experienced by the poet Alexander Voloshin, among others, in March 1922. Secondly, and in connection with the first point, there was the accusation by the Glawrepertkom of alleged monarchist propaganda. The characters of King Henry and above all Lohengrin reflect Wagner's ideas of popular kingship. The two charismatic war leaders have a close relationship with the people, who in turn are uncritically and enthusiastically prepared to follow their rulers into war. This could be one reason why Blyum suggested that Rienzi be included in the Bolshoi Theater's repertoire instead of Lohengrin. Unlike in Lohengrin, where the people obey the orders of their masters unconditionally and thus show no initiative, the popular rebellion in Rienzi is a spontaneous action "from below" - just as the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917 had been, according to the Soviet historical myth. Thirdly, nationalism should be mentioned. In the 1922 decree on the Glawlit, works that could provoke nationalist fanaticism were banned. If one thinks only of the emotional German nationalist verses of King Henry in Acts I and III, the opera can easily be rejected under this principle. Fourthly, the entire metaphysical content of the opera can be described as religiosity, idealism and mysticism. The same decree also condemned the spread of religious fanaticism. The idea of a supernatural Grail kingdom was undoubtedly in line with what the Glawlit rejected due to its "vividly idealistic tendencies" and "religious sectarianism". One can assume that the religious and supernatural elements in Lohengrin had played a major role in the hard-line criticism of the work, because only a few months after the offensive against the Bolshoi Theatre, the Glawrepertkom launched a campaign in December 1923 with the aim of banning the performance of religious music. The fact that religious works by Orlando di Lasso, Bach and Beethoven were also affected by this plan is a good example of the dogmatic approach of the Glawrepertkom to censorship, following the logic that religious music is pointless because religion is useless.
In addition to these aspects, attention should also be paid to the staging itself. The abstract-constructivist form of the staging had nothing to do with the demands for general comprehensibility or realism that the hard line demanded of art. Later, in the 1930s, Lossky and Fyodorowski's production could easily have been accused of "formalism". It was also reported that the production was a success with the public. According to one English reporter, tickets for Lohengrin sold out quickly. He was also impressed by how well the performance was attended by ordinary people. This may have irritated or even worried the representatives of the new proletarian art. In general, the hard line was disappointed by the fact that the public still seemed to appreciate the classics, while the new proletarian art remained unsuccessful.
The controversy surrounding the Bolshoi Theater's repertoire reflected a striking change in the way cultural heritage was treated. This time it was not contemporary works that were attacked, but classics from the previous century. Cultural heritage was expected to have similar useful qualities for the production of socialist man as contemporary art. Lohengrin was not banned, however, and remained on the repertoire until 1936. The reasons for this are not known, but in general the Glawrepertkom considered the ideological impact of operas to be less than that of plays. It was quite possible that Lohengrin was allowed to live on after some questionable passages had been deleted by the censors.
The trend that art was merely a means of strengthening socialist consciousness finally took hold during the Cultural Revolution of 1928-1932. In 1927, Stalin had secured his position of power. The introduction of the first five-year plan in 1928 made the victory of the cultural-political hard line final. The revolutionary class struggle against the bourgeois specialists was propagated in all areas of society, and Lunacharsky came under fire for his cooperative attitude. In April 1928, a discussion about Wagner's complete works was held at the Bolshoi Theater. The fact that of Wagner's works only Die Meistersinger, his only "realistic" opera, was described as an "ideologically suitable" piece suggests that the only correct mode of presentation was now realism. For example, the finale was described as "beautifully optimistic"; it was "cheerful, happy and full of joy".