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FROM THE CREATORS
Chekhov wrote, “When a person is born, he can
embark on only one of three roads in life: if you
go to the right, the wolves will eat you; if you
go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight,
you’ll eat yourself.” This is a perfect description
of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, as well as the
character Kovrin in Chekhov’s story “The Black
Monk.”
I didn’t know this Chekhov story until my
friend Gerard McBurney mentioned it years
ago during our work together with his brother,
Simon, on another music theater collaboration
about Shostakovich,
The Noise of Time.
Gerard
told me that Shostakovich loved the story and
had long planned to write an opera based on
it—a project that never came to fruition. I filed
this information in the “that might be interest-
ing to explore someday” part of my brain.
I have admired James Glossman’s work as a di-
rector, writer, and actor for many years. In the
course of our friendship, we’ve often talked
about wanting to collaborate on something. Two
years ago, I told him about “Shostakovich and
The Black Monk,” and he loved the idea of try-
ing to create something together. Jim gives me
much more credit than my role in this project
warrants. I may have planted the seed, but he
took that idea and wrote a brilliant script, mas-
terfully interweaving Shostakovich’s life with the
Chekhov story.
When I first read “The Black Monk,” I was
struck by the fact that Chekhov refers to some-
one singing Braga’s “Angel’s Serenade” at a party.
I also read that Shostakovich referred in a letter
to “that Italian thing” in the slow movement of
his String Quartet No. 14; this material returns
near the end of the whole quartet. I discovered
that he had made an arrangement of the piece by
Braga, which he clearly intended to incorporate
into his opera. And then I thought of the swirl-
ing passages of fast notes in the String Quartet
No. 15 and realized: This music could represent
“The Black Monk.” That was a key moment in
the process of linking the composer’s music to
Chekhov’s story.
In
The Noise of Time
, we performed the Quartet
No. 15. “Shostakovich and The Black Monk” fea-
tures the Quartet No. 14. We will play the whole
quartet over the course of the evening, but not
in one stretch; the complete story of “The Black
Monk” will also unfold, interspersed with other
dramatic and musical elements. The first move-
ment functions as an overture; the slow sec-
ond movement as an accompaniment to Irina
Shostakovich’s monologue, breaking off at the
end of her spoken “aria.” The slow movement re-
sumes later, near the end of the Chekhov story.
The actors listen to the third movement for sev-
eral minutes before the final dramatic action co-
incides with the nostalgic concluding measures
of the quartet.
We perform the “Angel’s Serenade” in our own
version for soprano and string quartet. Other
excerpts from the Shostakovich string quartets
are drawn upon to complement both stories—
Shostakovich’s and Chekhov’s. I tried carefully
to weave those passages into the complex tap-
estry that Jim had created. Sometimes the music
functions symbolically. For example, the three
percussive chords from the String Quartet No. 8
recur often in the early stages of the drama.
According to cellist/conductor Mstislav Ros-
tropovich and others, if a person who couldn’t
be trusted entered a café or restaurant, someone
would knock three times under the table—“Be
careful what you say!” Elsewhere the music un-
derscores the action, as it does in opera and film.
To the great composer, Dmitri Shostakovich: I
hope we have managed, in our own modest and
respectful way, to pay homage to the opera you
dreamed of writing.
– © 2018 Philip Setzer, Co-Creator and
violinist of the Emerson String Quartet
When Philip Setzer first approached me about
collaborating on a music theater piece for actors
and the Emerson Quartet about Dmitri Shosta-
kovich’s decades-long quest to create an opera
from Anton Chekhov’s classic story “The Black
Monk,” I was, of course, immediately intrigued.
I am deeply moved by Shostakovich’s quartets,
and although I love and have as often as pos-
sible worked with Chekhov’s plays—both the
full-length masterpieces as well as the brilliant,
sometimes underappreciated one-act come-
dies—it had been decades since I had read many
of the stories. What I remembered of “The Black
Monk” was a very 19th-century tale of a seduc-
tively gothic atmosphere luring a promising ac-
ademic into delusion and madness.
What I found upon my return to this text was
a sharp and deeply moving parable about free-
dom and conformity, love and fear, and the
ruthlessly high cost of getting along by going
along—making art and living life, and how haz-
ardous the contradictions can grow. It is a narra-
tive both deeply and profoundly unsettling, and
at the same time thrillingly, even joyously the-
atrical in its exuberant embrace of the “highs”
of creation and the “lows” of terror and of the
unknown. For someone who has been adapting
and directing prose fiction for the stage for over
30 years, this piece seemed to practically leap off
the page.
At the same time, as I began to enhance my gen-
eral knowledge of Shostakovich’s life and career
by beginning to more thoroughly investigate his
personal narrative, decade by decade, from his
growing fame in the late ’20s and early ’30s until
his death in 1975, I became struck by just how
closely the themes of Chekhov’s story seemed to
both parallel and converse with the events and
arc of the composer’s often direly threatened
creative—and physical—life.
First the tremendous reception, both at home
and abroad, to Shostakovich’s opera
Lady Mac-
beth of the Mtsensk District
, helping to raise him
to a suddenly new level of celebrity, of sky’s-the-
limit artistic freedom—followed by the sudden
and unexpected thunderbolt of the front-page
editorial in
Pravda
.
Rumored to have been written by Stalin him-
self—headed “Muddle, Not Music,” which con-
demned his work as “bourgeois formalism”—it
was the sort of public words that often tended
to cause artists in the Soviet Union to disappear,
sometimes forever.
The opera was withdrawn everywhere. Shosta-
kovich’s commissions vanished, and he report-
edly slept for some nights on his landing, in a
coat, with a packed suitcase, waiting to be taken
away to the Lubyanka prison by Stalin’s secret
police, just as friends of his had been so taken.
And yet, somehow, he survived.
And kept composing.
He always kept in favor just enough with
Dmitri Shostakovich (1958)
Anton Chekhov by Osip Braz (1898)