Mieczyslaw Weinberg
Lady Magnesia, op.112, opera in one act (1975),
(World Premiere)
4 voices
children's chorus, women's chorus, men's chorus
1.0.2.asx.0/1010/perc.dmkit/gtr(egtr).bgtrpf.hmn/str (2.1.1.1.1)
Hans Sikorski, editor

Lady Magnesia is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 comedy Passion, Poison and Petrifaction.
It will be performed in English with a new translation drawing on Shaw’s play by biographer David Fanning.

Wednesday, 18 November 2009 - 7.30pm
The Cornerstone, Liverpool Hope University at Everton

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Clark Rundell, conductor
Emma Morwood soprano
Carolina Krogius mezzo-soprano
Tom Raskin, tenor 
Phil Smith, baritone

Stephen Pratt, Lovebytes
Adam Gorb, Wedding Breakfast
Matthew Fairclough, Stages

Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) Lady Magnesia, Op.112 (world premiere)
Opera in one act after George Bernard Shaw’s Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, or the Fatal Gazogene

Having discovered his voice as an opera composer only in the late 1960s, Weinberg produced a spate of four operas in the early 1970s, of which Lady Magnesia (1973) is the last. It seems likely that he conceived it as part of a comic double bill, together with the immediately preceding Pozdravlyayem! (Greetings!, or better, Mazl tov!), to Sholom Aleichem’s tale of courtship among Jewish servants. In each case Weinberg himself fashioned the libretto, and each uses a cast of four or five singers, including parts for a maidservant and a lackey. Lady Magnesia is closely based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 tragi-comic melodrama Passion, Poison and Petrification. Weinberg worked from the translation by Vera Stanevich, poetess and friend of Boris Pasternak. The opera was dedicated to Rodion Shchedrin, who more than most Soviet composers of the time might have been expected to enjoy its light-farcical elements. Shaw’s play was a pot-boiler written largely on train journeys, and it has never been one on which his reputation as a dramatist, social satirist and wit has crucially rested. Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction or The Fatal Gazogene (i.e. soda syphon) in its full original title, is a satire not only on the vapid main characters but also on the conventions of Victorian/Edwardian melodrama, including the title and stage directions.

Synopsis

The action plays out in the bedsitting room of Sir George and Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache (who have fallen on hard times). In his jealousy of the lackey Adolphus Bastable, his wife’s lover, Sir George tries to stab her; but she awakens, and he hastily explains that the knife he carries is a present from her mother. When Adolphus enters, George gleefully poisons him with soda water from the ‘gazogene’. Having unexpectedly won back his wife’s love through this crime of passion (shades of Oscar Wilde’s fragmentary play, A Florentine Tragedy, but with heavier irony), George is persuaded to administer the only known antidote. This turns out to be lime (i.e. calcium oxide), which he and Magnesia obtain from plaster in the ceiling and from her bust (i.e. her head-and-shoulders statuette, though Shaw is not above using the obvious mildly smutty pun). Adolphus’s attempts to ingest this substance give him a desperate thirst, in the slaking of which he at length turns into a statue, thus becoming a comic realisation of the Stone Guest (Shaw’s Man and Superman contains another, more explicit parody of the same Mozart/Da Ponte scene). Weinberg omits Shaw’s bit-parts for a landlord, policeman and doctor, all of whom are killed off in the original by a thunderbolt. Instead he has the lightning strike the maidservant, Phyllis, neatly fulfilling Magnesia’s premonitions of death and giving point to the associated heavenly choirs (which Weinberg suggests may be pre-recorded on tape). Shaw’s play ends with George and Magnesia standing Adolphus upright – he has now become ‘his own statue’. Weinberg adds to this a pitiful plaint from Adolphus-as-statue, telling Magnesia to remember but not to weep for him, accompanied by male chorus in funeral march rhythm. This epilogue is in fact a setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71, here given comic resonance because of the line ‘When I perhaps compounded am with clay’, derived from Weinberg’s voice-and-piano version in his Six Shakespeare Sonnets, Op.33 (1946).

The Music

Apart from these modifications to the denouement, Weinberg sets Shaw’s text almost entirely line-for-line, in the continuous arioso manner established by Dargomïzhsky’s The Stone Guest and continued by Musorgsky’s The Marriage, several of Prokofiev’s operas, and Shostakovich’s incomplete The Gamblers. The singing translation, of course, cannot reproduce much of Shaw’s original, since it needs to follow the rhythms of Weinberg’s Russian setting. Weinberg’s musical idiom is here far removed from the folksy lyricism of his Mazl tov! His 19-piece chamber orchestra consists of flute, two clarinets (one doubling bass), alto saxophone, horn, trumpet, jazz kit, three tomtoms, guitar and electric guitar, bass guitar, piano, harmonium and string sextet, not so outré as one might think, in a country that had already been through a passionate, albeit semi-underground, obsession with The Beatles. The instrumental ensemble creates an atmosphere of tangy triviality, established in the opening scene by the two electric guitars. Tonal passages appear exclusively for purposes of pastiche (the ridiculous heavenly choir is close to a paraphrase of the deadly serious ‘Black Wall’ chorus from his first opera, the Auschwitz-based The Passenger), while the dance genres with off-key harmonisation serve to bring out the superficiality of the characters’ emotional worlds. Most extreme is the extended free improvisation for electric guitar and jazz percussion that accompanies Adolphus’s pre-poisoning music, where he dances to show off his new silk waistcoat. This extended section is balanced by a frightened tarantella once the act of poisoning has been revealed, and offset by gruesomely triumphant waltz and march music for George. The exotic instrumental colours do as much as the harmonic invention to keep the ear engaged, and the continuous arioso allows plenty of scope for imaginative singer-actors to project the comedy of George and Magnesia’s reconciliation and their farcical administering of the antidote, during which the characters’ exchanges are spoken rather than sung.

David Fanning © 2009

Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw, and his early musical activities were as pianist and ensemble leader at the Jewish theatre where his father was composer and violinist. From the age of 12 he took piano lessons at the Warsaw Conservatoire, and in later life his fluency as a sight-reader and score-reader was much vaunted; among his several fine recordings is his own Piano Quintet with the Borodin Quartet. In 1939 he fled the German occupation (in which his parents and sister were murdered) to Belorussia, where a border guard reportedly inscribed his documents with the stereotypically Jewish first name, Moisey. This became  the name by which all official sources thereafter referred to him (his friends and family used the pet-name Metek). In the Belorussian capital of Minsk from 1939 to 1941, he attended the composition classes of Vasily Zolotaryov, one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s numerous pupils, acquiring a solid technical grounding. Following the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Weinberg moved further east to Tashkent, capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Then at the direct invitation of Shostakovich, who had been impressed with the score of his First Symphony, he settled in Moscow, where he lived from 1943 until his death. There were to be many more encounters with Shostakovich, including premiere performances as pianist and a famous recording of the duet version of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony alongside the composer. When Weinberg was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in February 1953, as a consequence of family connections at the height of Stalin’s anti-semitic purges, Shostakovich took it upon himself to write to Lavrenty Beriya, the feared head of the MGB (which became the KGB a year later), and Weinberg was released at the end of April, not long after the death of Stalin. Interestingly, throughout the succeeding years of the Khrushchev Thaw, Brezhnev’s stagnation, Gorbachev’s glasnost and the break-up of the Soviet Union, Weinberg declined to exploit any image of victimhood, preferring to recall with pride that his music had been championed by many of the starriest musicians and conductors in his adopted country. Official recognition came in the form of honorary titles, in ascending order of prestige: ‘Honoured Artist of the Russian Republic’ in 1971, ‘People’s Artist of the Russian Republic’ in 1980, and ‘State Prize of the USSR’ in 1990. Though never enrolled as one of Shostakovich’s official pupils, Weinberg readily acknowledged the inspiration, reportedly declaring: ‘I count myself as his pupil, his flesh and blood.’ And Shostakovich lost no opportunity to commend Weinberg’s music to friends and colleagues. Both composers worked across a wide range of genres and in a gamut of styles from folk idioms (including, especially for Weinberg, Jewish ones) to twelve-note elements. Yet for all the unmistakable echoes of his revered role-model, Weinberg retained a higher level of independence than many of his Soviet colleagues, distancing himself both from official academic conservatism and, in the 1960s and after, from the younger generation’s fervent embrace of formerly forbidden Western-style modernism. In fact, respect and influence between Shostakovich and Weinberg were mutual. Both left an imposing body of symphonies and string quartets - in Weinberg’s case numbering 26 and 17, respectively. In addition Weinberg composed six concertos, seven operas, three ballets, four cantatas, some 23 sonatas and upwards of 200 songs. His more than 60 film scores, together with a good deal of theatre and even circus music, were a principal source of income, enabling him to avoid teaching or administrative posts that he did not feel drawn to. Among champions of Weinberg’s work in his lifetime he could count the likes of David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich, Emil Gilels, the Borodin Quartet, and conductors Kirill Kondrashin and Vladimir Fedoseyev. Yet it was not in his nature to self-promote or seek publicity. Because of this and his atypical Polish-Jewish background he was never groomed as a marketable export by the Soviet authorities. Hence his music was not promoted internationally, even when he was at the height of his powers in the 1960s. Following the death of Shostakovich in 1975, Weinberg’s physical energies declined, though creatively he still worked at a rapid pace. Sadly for him, at this time interest among audiences, performers and critics turned towards the equivalent of radical chic in Soviet music – embodied by the likes of Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov and Sofya Gubaydulina. In the West their music also had the cachet of greater exoticism, thanks to a mixture of technical and conceptual features, somewhat casually deemed progressive. The growth of Weinberg’s reputation outside Russia has largely been a posthumous phenomenon. But it has been steady and exponential, and it reaches a peak in 2009-10 with major celebrations in Manchester, Liverpool and Bregenz. One aspect of his work, inevitably brought out in these retrospective celebrations, deserves to be flagged here. Weinberg’s music commemorating Nazi atrocities, especially in his native Poland, is – to put it soberly – among the most powerful of its kind. It culminates in two works from the late 1960s: his first opera, Passazhirka (The Passenger) and his Requiem. Both works were too hot for Soviet authorities to handle at that time and had to wait until 2006 and 2009 respectively for their premieres, 2010 in the case of the staging of the opera. Together with a number of symphonies and other vocal works, they represent direct engagement with the ethical issues at the heart of the ‘short twentieth century’. Yet their marginalisation in Weinberg’s adopted homeland cannot be put down to anything remotely anti-Soviet on Weinberg’s part. On the contrary, their anti-fascist, internationalist humanism was – or at least should have been – entirely in accord with declared Soviet ideals. More than that, Weinberg regarded the Soviet Union in general, and the Red Army in particular, as his saviours. And for all his occasionally dire personal suffering at the hands of that system, there is no evidence that he lost faith in its core values or that his occasional ventures into folk-based idioms and celebratory pièces d’occasion were made in any kind of cynical or capitulatory spirit. That is not to say that he condoned the system in all its manifestations, still less that he actively worked on its behalf; unlike the majority of his composer colleagues, he never sought a teaching or administrative position. Any political views he held, beyond those implicit in his music, were kept strictly to himself. When Mstislav Rostropovich is quoted as referring to Weinberg’s ‘party affiliation’, this can only be put down to the great cellist’s well-known taste for mischievous story-telling, plus a rift with Weinberg, the origins and details of which have not been clarified. Weinberg’s loyalty and gratitude towards, yet also distance from, the organs of power in the Soviet Union, is one indication of the complexity of his persona. Also more complex than they might seem are the preponderance of traditional genres in his output and the language of moderated modernism, akin to that of Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten, plus the fact that the great majority of his works – not speaking now of the boldly commemorative ones mentioned above – make no explicit socio-political statement. In the West, even in his native Poland, all these features could have been viewed as symptoms of straightforward conservatism. Even in the Soviet Union some would have taken them for the same thing. In fact, however, they represent not so much an act of conservatism as one of cultural preservation. By his very disengagement from the events and institutions of the outside world, Weinberg went against the grain, indeed against two grains. He was resisting both the careerist Socialist Realist establishment and, from the 1960s on, the clubbish mentality of the Soviet avant-garde. His output thus takes on a bold ethical dimension – of a different kind from a more obviously maverick artist, but of no less enduring significance.

David Fanning © 2009