William Kentridge has made a film based on the 10th symphony of the great Russian composer. At the premiere in Lucerne, the highly artificial images compete with the live music. One statement by the conductor is particularly memorable.
Marionettes with long shadows: Characters from the film “Oh, to Believe in Another World” by William Kentridge based on Dmitri Shostakovich’s 10th symphony.
The demand by high-ranking representatives of Ukraine for a boycott of Russian culture mostly hits the wrong people in music. In the case of two of the country’s most important composers, it seems downright paradoxical: Anyone who, in view of the war, calls for works by Peter Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich to be banned from the programs (in individual cases, this is unfortunately implemented by western organizers) fails to recognize the crucial point: namely that on closer inspection, these two in particular do not fit into Putin’s beautiful new world of the tsars.
Today, as a gay artist, Tchaikovsky would come into conflict with the local anti-homosexual legislation, which is why references to his relationships with young men are usually suppressed. However, the position of Shostakovich appears to be completely precarious: the Soviet Union’s repeatedly severely disciplined state artist wrote the majority of his works, which are firmly established in the repertoire, under the impression of the existential threat posed by Stalin. Under Putin, however, his atrocities and the terror of his totalitarian system are increasingly being put into perspective.
The most recent concert project by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra (LSO) was therefore an important cultural-political statement: on Wednesday evening, the world premiere of a film by William Kentridge based on Shostakovich’s 10th symphony was shown in the KKL. The hour-long work was also performed live under the direction of the new LSO chief conductor, Michael Sanderling. In his visualization, Kentridge addresses the fear, but also the absurdities of existence in the Soviet state.
At the same time, he reflects the living situation of the composer and the origin of the tenth, which was created in 1953 as a reaction to Stalin’s death. However, the symphony is the opposite of a tragedy: with the help of allusions and tone ciphers, it expresses Shostakovich’s personal triumph at having survived the dictator.
miniature communism
Kentridge, one of the most famous artists from South Africa and also successful as an opera director, does not make a documentary or a biopic out of this story. His film, entitled «Oh, to Believe in Another World», is set in an imaginary Soviet-era museum that he designed during the lockdown periods over the past two years and built on a miniature scale together with set designer Sabine Theunissen.
He then skilfully filmed the rooms, which were decorated with historical images and communist kitsch, with a camera the size of a mobile phone, creating the illusion of a real museum building. In some places, however, the illusion is deliberately broken when Kentridge visibly reaches into the scenes with the hand of God, so to speak. And something is also wrong with the visitors in this museum.
In addition to Shostakovich himself, the following appear in turn: Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, along with the poet Mayakovsky, deadly sobered by communism, with his girlfriend Lilya Brik, and the Azerbaijani composer Elmira Nasirova. She probably inspired Shostakovich in the Mahler-related third movement of the symphony. All of these figures act like marionettes, spellbound in bizarre arrangements, symbolic dances of death on the downfall of an ideology. In truth, they are actors who wear well-known photographs of the sitters in front of their faces; they were subsequently digitally shrunk and transplanted into the fake museum.
However, little is said in concrete terms. The more than eighty individual scenes, which are synchronized live with the music during the performance, are short and linked to one another primarily through recurring color patterns, costume and scenery details. On top of that, like in a silent film, the scenes are separated by text overlays that reproduce quotes from Mayakovsky’s poems. With this highly artificial setting, Kentridge underscores the fact that he neither wants to directly illustrate Shostakovich’s symphony nor additionally burden it with narrative. Rather, the film is intended to open up a wide range of association spaces for the imagination.
Multimedia overkill
At the same time, with the stylized shortness of breath in the scenes, Kentridge wanted to counteract the danger of the visual overlaying the reproduction of the music too much – as is well known, humans are visual animals. This well-known problem of visualizing musical works that actually stand for themselves recently occurred in a similar way in David Marton’s impressive film production of Pergolesi’s “Olimpiade” at the Zurich Opera House. The danger has not been averted in Lucerne either. And so, in the dual role of listening listener and spectator, one soon feels downright torn between the two media of sound and image.
In any case, the multimedia overkill noticeably reduces the effect of the music on Wednesday evening (the performance will be repeated on Thursday). That’s a pity, because Michael Sanderling and the LSO, playing with a large cast, succeed in a distinctive, technically almost flawless reading of the symphony, which sounds very poetic and internalized in places. In order to come up against the fireworks of the pictures, however, a stronger escalation would probably have been necessary.
Bugs in the dacha
Significantly, in addition to all sorts of diffuse image sequences, one sentence is remembered from the evening, which the conductor casually dropped after the performance during an artist talk with Kentridge and the project initiator Numa Bischof Ullmann, the director of the LSO. He remembers an encounter with the composer, Michael Sanderling said, to which his father, the important Shostakovich interpreter and confidant Kurt Sanderling, took him when he was just six years old.
At that time, a good two years before Shostakovich’s death in 1975, the composer appeared to him as a “bitter, almost depressive man” whose reticence frightened him. His father and Shostakovich then went to the door of the dacha for their conversation. Why? “Because of the bugs,” says Sanderling, adding dryly: “I don’t mean the bugs.”