The Liceu opened the season with Lady Macbeth of Mtsenskby Dmitri Shostakovich, and this Friday and Saturday he will once again focus his attention on the Russian composer with the help of William Kentridge. The South African artist presents Oh to Believe in Another World, a film about the musician that is projected while, in this case, the Great Liceu Orchestra performs, under the baton of its director, Josep Pons, Shostakovich’s tenth symphony, premiered in 1953, months after Stalin’s death. Kentridge wanted with this film to offer a retrospective view of the Soviet government and a tribute to the composer, of whom the writer Julian Barnes says in the novel The noise of time that he lived at home with a suitcase packed in case the KGB came looking for him. The performance is presented this Friday for those under 35 years of age and this Saturday.
Kentridge will stage the opera in 2022 at the Liceu Wozzeck, the story of an antihero of the First World Cup composed by Alban Berg, and has now returned to Barcelona with this “subversive and ironic” film, in the words of Víctor García de Gomar, artistic director of the theater, who comes to do justice to the Russian musician . “1953 is a key year in his biography because Stalin and his other enemy, Prokofiev, die and that gives air to his biography,” he says. Kentridge agrees that his film is a tribute to the composer and a way to remember that “there are things that we cannot forget depending on the political context,” he says. The visual artist has not limited his presence in Barcelona to the Liceu: he has been at the CCCB debating with Barnes and at an event answering questions from 400 high school students. The Sorigué Foundation also presents an exhibition in Lleida with his works, one of the best collections of the artist in Europe.
Pons said in the presentation of Lady Mcbeth that Shostakovich’s music was very cinematic and Kentridge shares that vision. His main objective in conceiving the film has been to achieve the balance so that the 55-minute symphony was not simple “background music” nor for the film to be “a screensaver” for the music. “It has been taking these two dangers into account and navigating,” he says. The film evokes an abandoned Soviet museum, made of papier-mâché, and seven protagonists parade: the composer, his student, Elmira Nasirova, the poet Mayakovsky (he ended up committing suicide), his lover Lilya Brik Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky. “It is a piece that alludes to the political context. After 70 years, we are left mainly with Shostakovich, who is the one who has survived them all. His music is what has survived.”
Commissioned by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, the project has been presented in Johannesburg, London, New York and Vienna, among other cities. It was not always easy: Kentridge has revealed that he completed it just after the start of the Ukrainian War and that there were theaters that then refused to show works by Russian composers, from Shostakovich himself to Tchaikovsky. “It seemed shortsighted to me. The most interesting thing is to understand what the music says,” he points out, pointing out that Putin tries to reinvent Stalin’s last phase and that there are “echoes” of it in the work, but not a direct reference.
The film includes archival images of Russia from the 1920s and 1930s, in which optimism is appreciated – pianist, ballets – and little by little it fades and a moment in which Shostakovich himself is seen conducting. The second movement, just four minutes long, is, for Kentridge, the best. “It is very explosive and spectacular. With all the energy and strength”, he describes the work of a composer who lived tortured and who stopped composing operas after Pravda condemned Mtsenks’ Lady Macbeth in an editorial.
