The composer and his opera

Born in 1932, Shchedrin is one of the stars of the second generation of Soviet composers, and today, is one of the most celebrated living composers in contemporary Russia. Both his political and artistic manoeuvres throughout the Soviet period established him to inherit this position. From his earliest days at the Moscow Conservatory, he was recognised by his teachers and the musical community as prodigiously talented: while he was still a student, the Bolshoi Theatre commissioned him to write his first ballet, Konek-gorbunok (The Little Humpbacked Horse) when he was barely twenty years old; it was premiered in 1960. During the rehearsals of the ballet, he first saw and began courting the woman who would become his wife, the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. The marriage would become important not just personally, but for their careers: Shchedrin and Plisetskaya would each bolster the status of the other; as one fell out of favour, the other could often use their standing to improve the position of the spouse.Footnote ¹⁴

Aesthetically, Shchedrin is a polyglot. While he is best known as a centrist or moderate, who was neither too Socialist Realist nor too avant-garde, he did, in fact, go through a whole spectrum of artistic phases.Footnote ¹⁵ He has written soundtracks and a musical, a Socialist Realist oratorio, but also serialist concerti and symphonies alongside his more ‘avant-garde’ colleagues (Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov). The musical language of his operas and ballets, however, could broadly be described as folk-inspired modernism. His first ballet and first opera – The Little Humpbacked Horse (1960) and Not Love Alone (1961) – lean heavily on folk themes, with minimal modernist conflict. While his output of the 1970s and 1980s still included folk themes, these tended to be obscured under dense, atonal orchestral material. By the 2010s, the sound of his operas had rebounded to be much closer to his earliest compositions than to his mid-career style. If his stylistic variety is impressive, however, his longevity is even more so: His seven operas and six ballets span fifty-five years of Soviet and post-Soviet history, from 1960 to 2015, and were written under the varied gazes of Russian leaders including Stalin, Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin.

Politically, Shchedrin has demonstrated a savvy unparalleled by most of his colleagues. He generally avoided conflict with the state, but, in the few instances when he did offend, found ways to mollify the outraged (some notable examples are his scuffles with authorities over his opera Not Love Alone, and his ballets Carmen and Anna Karenina, as well as his refusal to sign the letter in favour of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968).Footnote ¹⁶ He held a number of official positions as well: already in 1962, Shchedrin held the position of Secretary of the Board of the Composers’ Union of the RSFSR, and in 1973, Shchedrin succeeded Grigorii Sviridov and Shostakovich in the role of First Secretary of the Composers’ Union of the RSFSR. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that much of the literature about Shchedrin, in both Russian and English, focuses on his ability to walk the tightrope of acceptability: Valentina Kholopova’s 2000 volume is one such example (Put′ po tsentru: Kompozitor Rodion Shchedrin [Path Through the Middle: The Composer Rodion Shchedrin]), and Boris Schwarz, Levon Hakobian and, more recently, Schmelz all chose similar tacks.Footnote ¹⁷

But something significant is lost when we look at his career only as a whole, as if we could take an average of his extremes that would amount to some sort of musical and political middle ground – rather than examining the fascinating and complex incidents that represent these extremes, and these dangerous moments, of his career. Not Love Alone was one of those incidents. The muddled timeline of the opera’s production is a public clue to backstage conflict that until now has not been explained.

The Thaw: political parameters for opera

Not Love Alone appeared during the frenzied years following Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s denunciation of the former leader in the so-called ‘Secret Speech’ (1956): events which began the period that became known as ‘The Thaw’ (ottopel′), though could be defined more accurately as a series of thaws and freezes lasting roughly from 1956 to 1974.Footnote ¹⁸ As every sector of society scrambled to determine the norms of Khrushchev’s rapidly evolving regime, artists experimented and tested to find the limits of the new leadership’s tolerance – only to discover there was little logic to the rapid reverses in policy, and inconsistency in the behaviours of the policymakers.Footnote ¹⁹ Some domains, such as film, quickly started to exhibit new, previously unthinkable possibilities, like open parody of Soviet officialdom (as in El′dar Riazanov’s 1956 musical comedy Karnaval′naia noch′ [Carnival Night]).Footnote ²⁰ For opera, however, change was slower. Official policy under Khrushchev was almost entirely continuous with that under Stalin, so the exploration of new interpretations of this policy required caution and delicacy for composers. Beginning in the 1930s, Stalin had become increasingly concerned about the content of the operas shown in the Soviet Union, and he recognised the genre as a powerful weapon that the Soviet Union could wield as propaganda.Footnote ²¹ His interference with Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936 is well known, and from that time on, his quest for ideologically appropriate operas only intensified. By the 1950s, creating worthy Soviet operas was a dominant artistic preoccupation of the Party; as one Soviet scholar explained in 1955, ‘Opera […] is one of the most meaningful forms of musical creation […] it is no accident that the majority of artistic papers published by the Party focus on the problems of creating an artistic and worthy Soviet opera.’Footnote ²²

The most successful opera of the late Stalin period, and the one upheld by authorities as an example of what opera should be through the 1960s, was Iurii Shaporin’s The Decembrists, mentioned briefly above.Footnote ²³ The Decembrists is an essential case study for Stalin-era opera because it was one of the few that was revised to Socialist Realist ‘perfection’: it was mercilessly and constantly rewritten over the course of twenty-eight years – from 1925 to 1953 – until it finally met the approval of all of the committees involved in ensuring its ideological and musical correctness.Footnote ²⁴ Shaporin’s initial approach to this opera focused on the romance of two historical Decembrists, but what began as a lyrical love story set against the backdrop of grand historical events was deemed too personal and not epic enough.Footnote ²⁵ Eventually, Shaporin rewrote the opera using fictional characters that better lived up to the ideals of Decembrism than had the historical Decembrists themselves.Footnote ²⁶ The music of The Decembrists matched this grand ideological goal. It opens with a militaristic fanfare, and proceeds with pompous roles for the chorus, where the peasants sing of revolutionary consciousness, and the revolutionaries sing a rousing chorus which is now frequently recorded and performed as a choral concert piece.Footnote ²⁷

Finally, The Decembrists premiered on 23 June 1953 – a few months after Stalin’s death on 5 March, probably because his death was needed to settle on a final version.Footnote ²⁸ From then on, in Svetlanov’s words, ‘the triumph of The Decembrists reigned in the Bolshoi Theatre’.Footnote ²⁹ The triumph was so significant that not even the connection with Stalin – at a moment when the government was attempting to distance itself from the former leader – could besmirch the opera: after all, as it was based on a historical event that was equally important to Khrushchev as it was to Stalin, and represented the only successful epic opera created by a Soviet composer, it was not to be dismissed flippantly. It was still being shown regularly in the 1960s, so Shchedrin would have seen and known the approved recipe for success.Footnote ³⁰

At first, nothing perceptibly changed about the Party’s operatic priorities after the Secret Speech; the standards expected of The Decembrists remained in place. If anything, their importance was only heightened. In 1958, the Ministry of Culture once again declared the development and production of ‘operas on contemporary themes’ a top priority.Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, between 1959 and 1961, hundreds of pages of proposals, mandates and reprimands were written by the Department of Musical Institutions within the Ministry addressing the need to produce more Soviet operas.Footnote ³² The Minister of Culture herself, Ekaterina Furtseva, insisted in a 1960 letter to her colleagues that it was of utmost importance ‘to increase the propaganda of Soviet images through opera’.Footnote ³³ She wrote this letter even after the encouraging statistics of 1959, the year in which productions of Soviet operas had overtaken the classics: fifty-four per cent of operas performed in theatres around the country were by Soviet composers – 101 out of 187 total produced.Footnote ³⁴ And yet, she was not satisfied. Every few months between 1959 and 1961, Furtseva requested more proposals from her subordinates about how to rectify this inadequacy, as well as requiring frequent progress reports. An initial suggestion included raising the pay for composers from a range of 30,000–80,000 roubles for a commission, to a range 50,000–100,000, with the possibility of a bonus should the opera fit the proper ideological categories.Footnote ³⁵ A similar proposal was added for the librettists.Footnote ³⁶ Money as a panacea must have failed, however, because a few months later, Furtseva heightened the priority level again in a resolution written to her colleagues at the Ministry of Culture, stating, ‘the creation of new outstanding operas on contemporary themes is the primary task, above all of our other musical art forms’.Footnote ³⁷ An updated plan outlined more expansive action, including education projects, recruitment tours, and penalties for composers for late completion of Soviet-themed work.Footnote ³⁸ As a subsequent report to Furtseva laments, however, despite these measures, established masters such as Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian were avoiding the genre altogether, as were the (unnamed) ‘talented youth’.Footnote ³⁹ The obvious reason why composers avoided opera was not voiced in these files: the task of writing an opera that was artistically palatable to the creator and politically palatable for the Ministry was nearly impossible. Nevertheless, Shchedrin would try his hand at filling this void.

Not love alone: the solution?

Amidst this reinvigorated drive for contemporary-themed Soviet opera, the Bolshoi Theatre commissioned Shchedrin to compose a new opera, Not Love Alone, in late 1960.Footnote ⁴⁰ The composer built the foundation of the plot from a recently published short story which intrigued him, ‘Tetia Lusha’ (‘Auntie Lusha’), by Sergei Antonov, and enlisted his friend Vasilii Katanian as librettist. The plot is simple but unusual for Soviet literature, let alone opera: just after World War II, the young Volodia Gavrilov returns with his family to a kolkhoz (a collective farm) that is presided over by a woman, Auntie Lusha, whom the composer and librettist rename ‘Varvara’. Varvara, who is no longer young, is attracted to this boy, and dreams of seducing him to end her loneliness. Ultimately, she is rejected by Volodia. The boy marries his younger fiancée, Natasha, and Varvara is left to run the farm.Footnote ⁴¹ While this topic was officially acceptable because it was set in the modern day and its characters were common Soviet folk, it was also risky, because it dealt with some of the unpleasant realities of Soviet life. According to Shchedrin, the tale struck him for its relevance and realism:

In contrast to Shaporin’s approach, then, Shchedrin focused on the human drama, rather than the political. Commenting on the core of the plot, he explained:

Shchedrin and Katanian collaborated on a version that did not shy away from the scandalous elements of Antonov’s story, but embraced and enhanced them. In the short story, the Freudian attraction is one-sided, and the affair does not materialise. In the libretto, however, the authors ensure the attraction is mutual.Footnote ⁴⁴ The crux of the drama in the opera is Varvara’s internal battle between her feelings and her duty. In a heart-rending aria, she agonises over her dilemma. She begins, ‘how can I go on living without joy?’, but finally decides, ‘no, they placed me here to care for others, to answer for the people’.Footnote ⁴⁵ She must forsake her own happiness in order to fulfil her duty. While in the short story there is only misunderstanding, in the opera, there is only sacrifice: love must give way to the greater good. The final message of Not Love Alone was that Varvara’s loyalty and sense of duty cost her the only joy she had left. It was not the triumphant portrayal of Soviet life that the Ministry of Culture had envisioned, but, as the archival evidence demonstrates, this was not the only cause for concern.

New evidence

Three sets of never-before-accessed primary sources reveal the root of the conflict over this opera from the perspective of the artists, the officials and the audience. They are: first, a transcript of a debate about the opera by a Bolshoi Theatre committee after the first dress rehearsal (22 December 1961); second, the archival stenographic reports of the editorial board meetings of the Bolshoi’s internal magazine, Sovetskii artist, about how to review the opera (6 January–19 March 1962); third, the above-described audience surveys taken about the opera by Sovetskii artist (8 March 1962) and followed up by an editorial debriefing (19 March 1962).Footnote ⁴⁶ These sources unfold as a societal conversation about the nature of opera and what it ought to become in this new Soviet era.

On 22 December 1961 a meeting was assembled to evaluate Not Love Alone after the dress rehearsal, and it is this gathering that exposes the principal debates and political pressures encumbering opera at the beginning of the Thaw.Footnote ⁴⁷ The first clue to the difficulties the opera would face is in the structure of the meeting itself, and the representatives present. This meeting embodied the new kind of committee that the Ministry of Culture had formed in the previous decade. In 1955, the Ministry opted to manipulate the makeup of artistic councils within Soviet theatres to reinvigorate the landscape of Soviet opera.Footnote ⁴⁸ The theatres were ordered to widen the membership of artistic councils – from a small group of artistic leaders within the theatres, to more inclusive bodies comprising bureaucrats from other branches of government.Footnote ⁴⁹ This wider body is the kind of council represented in this transcript: fifteen people were assigned to attend the final dress rehearsal and to meet to offer their suggestions. In addition to the creators, Shchedrin, Katanian and Georgii Ansimov (the stage director), these included composers Tikhon Khrennikov and Khachaturian, representatives from the Ministry of Culture Tat′iana Leontovskaia and Zaven Vartanian, musicologists Semen Shlifstein and Aleksandr Medvedev, director of the Bolshoi Theatre Museum Viktorina Krieger, stage directors Vadim Ryndin and Boris Pokrovskii, and the executive director of the Bolshoi, Vladimir Pakhomov.Footnote ⁵⁰

The transcript of this meeting confirms that two opposing camps had formed regarding this opera: those who were enamoured with the creation – the artists – and those who espoused a cautious, and even hostile attitude, namely the bureaucrats and government representatives. The meeting minutes further reveal the primary concern about the production from the standpoint of the Ministry of Culture: the portrayal of the kolkhoz. The dominant opposition from the Ministry of Culture focused on the pessimistic picture of life on the kolkhoz, led by Krieger and Leontovskaia. Krieger was offended by what she considered a flippant picture of the kolkhoz, and balked at the fact that the characters are not shown working. In her understanding, this also meant the title was a misnomer:

Leontovskaia reinforced Krieger’s concern, admitting that she doubted ‘whether this is the right way to portray a kolkhoz’.Footnote ⁵² She supported her trepidation with a few examples of scenes that portray the workers as lazy. For instance, after Varvara’s self-denial in relinquishing Volodia, when the chorus makes its entrance, it appears as if they are doing so only to nosily observe Varvara; it is these kinds of details, she argues, that ‘make it seem as if in the kolkhoz people are only concerned with love, and that there is a heightened awareness of intimate questions’ rather than a knowledge of labour.Footnote ⁵³ Shlifstein concurred, insisting that the second two acts needed to be rewritten, because ‘We want to show that Volodia is a Bolshevik, and he needs to be shown labouring and overfulfilling demands.’Footnote ⁵⁴

The criticisms of Leontovskaia, Krieger and Shlifstein underpin why it was so difficult to write a Soviet opera: the characters had to be Soviet, but all Soviet characters had to be good, and life had to be displayed in a realistic manner (which meant including labour), but not so realistic a manner that the characters be shown as unhappy or that it becomes dull to watch. The opera that Krieger seems to have imagined is one in which good Soviets all work in harmony on a collective farm without too much talk of emotion. At least one member of the committee, the stage director Ryndin, pointed out that such an opera as his colleagues envisioned would be doomed to fail. What they viewed as a flaw, he recognised as the opera’s greatest asset:

Ryndin recognised the appeal of the kolkhoz shown through an intimate, personal lens.

Though Ryndin’s defence of the opera made sense – and would be validated by the responses of audience members – Krieger’s and Leontovskaia’s dissatisfaction with the portrayal of collective farming was the view that was justified by contemporary politics. In fact, they were fulfilling their explicit duty as members of the committee: synthesising the political mood of the time and translating it into what would be appropriate for opera. In this case, they likely took their ideological cues from the Twenty-Second Party Congress, when Khrushchev made the promotion and praise of farming a top priority.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the same speech where he outlined his priorities, he demanded that literature and art should play a role ‘in deepening and expanding the Party’s ideological influence on the masses’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Subsequently, Furtseva suggested creating Socialist Realist productions to show the ‘heroic’ labours of agricultural workers,Footnote ⁵⁸ and even the director of the Bolshoi Theatre acknowledged the importance of taking the agenda of the Twenty-Second Party Congress into account when determining repertoire choices.Footnote ⁵⁹

Not Love Alone would be the first opera that would adhere to Furtseva’s explicit request to portray agricultural workers, and yet, it displayed a grimmer picture of Soviet life than the one that Khrushchev had so passionately promoted. And more than any other opera produced that year, it contradicted his ideology. There is evidence to suggest that Khrushchev himself was more forgiving of artistic experimentation than his watchdogs;Footnote ⁶⁰ but since it was only the lower-level officials who saw this production, they erred on the side of caution to avoid potential embarrassment for the regime. They were aware this was not the ideal moment for an opera exposing the human cost of Khrushchev’s pet agricultural project, especially when the industry was in dramatic decline after the disaster of the Virgin Lands programme.Footnote ⁶¹

This type of artistic criticism grounded in political realities was not unique: it was based on precedent. To name only one composer as an example, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich was involved in three separate ballet collaborations revolving around contemporary Soviet themes – one about a Soviet football team, one about factory workers and one set on a collective farm. All three were criticised by the press and by officials for presenting underdeveloped, two-dimensional heroes, or for giving the best music and dance numbers to the bourgeois capitalist villains.Footnote ⁶² Similar critiques haunted ballet and opera during the Thaw. In 1963, during a similar artistic meeting, the secretary of the Kirov Theatre’s Party Bureau criticised Leonid Iakobson’s ballet Klop (The Bedbug), based on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem, for the same shortcomings – failing to develop the theme of labour, and failing to develop inspiring heroes.Footnote ⁶³ By the 1960s, therefore, Soviet composers had been consistently trying – and failing – for decades to create characters that met the standards of flawless, heroic socialism. Even so, officials refused to concede that these standards might be impossible to meet, and clung tightly to the hope that the perfect Soviet opera was just waiting to be written – until, that is, after the failure of Not Love Alone.

The 22 December committee did all agree, however, on what they considered to be a triumph: the music. The composer Khrennikov praised the subtlety, creativity and contemplative nature of the musical material, while also adding:

Khachaturian agreed musically and ideologically:

The same opinion was voiced a week later at a meeting of the Composers Union of the USSR on 13 January 1962, when composers gathered to discuss Not Love Alone and Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s Sud’ba cheloveka (The Fate of Man).Footnote ⁶⁶ Those present unanimously praised the music of Not Love Alone, especially in comparison to that of The Fate of Man. Liudmila Poliakova, for example, commented, ‘In contrast to The Fate of Man, Shchedrin’s Not Love Alone impressed firstly with the music […] the music is fresh, simple, lyrical, adorned with a deep psychological subtext and delicate humour, text, and it is sincerely folk-like.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Dmitrii Kabalevsky hailed Shchedrin’s opera as ‘a superb composition which brings a fundamentally new stream – no, I would say which even opens up a new page in Soviet music’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Fate of Man, on the other hand, was condemned for its weak music and poor dramaturgy; overall they agreed it was a mistake that the opera was produced at all.Footnote ⁶⁹ A few months later, in September 1962, author E. Dobrynina would echo the praises of Not Love Alone in an article published in Sovetskaia muzyka. Recalling her reaction to a rehearsal she had observed, she commented: ‘I didn’t expect to hear anything of such freshness, strength of inspiration, and most importantly, inarguably Soviet in its music, and its scenic situations.’Footnote ⁷⁰ She then expressed her indignation at the resistance and negative comments the opera received later, even from its own director, Ansimov, especially when she deemed this work to be a ‘revelation’ compared to the ‘primitive’ opera The Fate of Man. Footnote ⁷¹ And yet, it would be Not Love Alone that was dismissed from the repertoire, while The Fate of Man remained.

For those present at the 22 December meeting, however, the perfection of Love Not Alone’s music did not atone for its weak portrayal of Soviet people and institutions. The prevailing opinion was that the opera should be granted a delayed premiere, but only after significant revision. Medvedev explained, ‘This is a necessary and grand work for the Bolshoi Theatre as a matter of principle […] but you oughtn’t think that work on this opera is done.’Footnote ⁷² This was a sentiment Leontovskaia shared: ‘it is necessary to keep working on this production so that it can earn in its entirety and in all of its components its needed place’.Footnote ⁷³ Vartanian summed up the general opinion:

The opinion of the Ministry of Culture had been voiced. A delayed premiere and repeat of the twenty-eight-year Decembrists saga might have been on the horizon, had it not been for a piece of logistical luck. The director of the Bolshoi, Vladimir Pakhomov, agreed that a rewrite was necessary, but there was a dilemma: in the early months of 1962 the theatre rehearsal schedule was packed, and there were neither resources nor time available to dedicate to reformulating this opera.Footnote ⁷⁵ Pakhomov ruled that the only solution was to premiere the opera but be open to the possibility of continued editing. Even if a production is premiered, he explained, ‘that does not mean it is complete. A production can be adjusted even after it has started to be shown.’Footnote ⁷⁶ He noted recent examples of such post-premiere editing with The Fate of Man, and also Stranitsy zhizni (The Pages of Life, which was edited for ten whole years).Footnote ⁷⁷

The creators, however, had no intention of revising their opera. Instead, Katanian, Ansimov and Shchedrin defended their work as it was, a choice that would have been untenable during Stalin’s lifetime when artists had reason to fear serious repercussions for dissent. Shchedrin’s speech, his only one during this meeting, exposes his fierce conviction about the opera’s worth, in much stronger terms than he has publicly conveyed elsewhere:

Shchedrin had voiced his opinion: he would not rewrite the opera after its premiere. As a result, he would see its run at the Bolshoi Theatre cancelled just three months after the premiere.Footnote ⁷⁹

The audience

Two weeks after the premiere, the debate around Not Love Alone was still raging, as evidenced by the heated meetings of the editorial board of Sovetskii artist. On 6 and 12 January 1962, the meetings of the editors of the Bolshoi Theatre’s internal newspaper included discussions on the appropriate ideological stance for reviewing the opera.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although many of the editors disliked it, they acknowledged that they needed to pay it special attention because, as one of the editors summarised, ‘an opera on a contemporary theme must be honoured with some serious parsing’.Footnote ⁸¹ Since the editors were divided on the question of the opera’s merit, however, they decided to solicit views from the audience: during the next performances, the public would be given the chance to settle the question of whether or not it was a suitable opera for the Bolshoi.Footnote ⁸² On 8 March 1962, Sovetskii artist surveyed the attendees of Not Love Alone. While the responses were not published, they were preserved in the archives, and prove to be another revelation as to why the opera was cancelled.

The survey, left on each individual seat, comprised the following text:

The responses to this survey elucidate one of the paradoxes of developing a contemporary opera: if you are creating an opera about the people who will be watching, it is certain they will scrutinise rigorously how their own society is portrayed. While they would likely not mind – or even notice – a slight historical inaccuracy or creative licence in Aida or La Traviata, the main attraction of Not Love Alone was purported to be its contemporary relevance, and so it was judged accordingly. As we will see, the opinions mirrored those of the 22 December committee: the single most criticised element of the production was the portrayal of the kolkhoz, while its most praised element was the music.

There are 153 surveys preserved in the archives; accounting for the surveys that conclude with multiple signatures, or multiple responses on one page, these represent the opinions of approximately 184 individuals.Footnote ⁸⁴ Of the respondents, fifty-nine were female, fifty-three male, and seventy-two did not specify gender.Footnote ⁸⁵ Of those who left their addresses (less than a quarter), a wide geographical spread is nonetheless represented. In addition to Moscow, attendees’ addresses included the cities and regions of Shakhty, Reutov, Voronezh, Vladivostok, Zakarpattia, Zaporozh′e, Kuibyshev, Sakhalin and Friazino.

It is striking that despite the request in question number four to report name, profession and address, nearly half of the respondents omitted some or all of this information: eighty-four omitted their professions, and the signatures and professions were illegible for an additional twelve. This suggests that some may have still feared repercussions for ideologically incorrect responses: despite the decreasing severity of punishments since Stalin’s death, some may have thought it better to mitigate risk by omitting identifying information when afforded the opportunity. The eighty-seven who did legibly record professions, however, represent a wide swath of society – from factory workers to a curator from the Tretyakov Gallery, to a British diplomat. Table 1 represents the complete list.Footnote ⁸⁶

Table 1.

Declared professions of survey respondents

The prevailing impression of the opera was negative: 118 respondents were decidedly dissatisfied with at least one component of the opera. Twenty-one offered mixed opinions, while forty were unambiguously positive.Footnote ⁸⁷ The critiques fit into seven common categories, as demonstrated in Figure 1. They are the following: polemical; terse/general; inaccurate portrayal of kolkhoz; not worthy of the Bolshoi Theatre; music; plot or content; wrong choice for International Women’s Day. The positive responses were less varied (after all, ‘All happy families are alike’), and fall into three common categories: music; portrayal of the kolkhoz; general approval. This is demonstrated in Figure 2. In my count of the occurrences of these comments, one survey may represent several categories. For example, a survey that disapproves of the plot may be in favour of the music, in which case one count would be given to the negative category (for plot/content) and one to the positive category (music).

Figure 1.

Critical comments by category.

Figure 2.

Occurrence of complimentary comments by category.

As noted above, the single element of the production that ignited the most ire in the audience, and gave rise to the most common specific criticism, was its portrayal of the kolkhoz. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the specific fears of the committee about the image of collective farming were validated by the public’s reactions. First, many respondents echoed the general fear of flippancy voiced by Krieger and Leontovskaia. One author who left no signature even thought up the same alternative title that Krieger had proffered in the dress rehearsal meeting: this respondent suggested, ‘the theme is too trivial – “Love Alone”: that would have been a more fitting title for the content of the piece’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Echoing Krieger’s concern that the opera ‘does not afford the opportunity to see people in the kolkhoz working hard’,Footnote ⁸⁹ another audience member stated, ‘1. Life in our village is shown completely wrong. 2. Is it only love in agriculture? Where is the working life?’Footnote ⁹⁰ Another attendee agreed with Krieger’s indignation that the opera makes it ‘seem as if in the kolkhoz people are only concerned with love’,Footnote ⁹¹ asserting that, ‘what attracted the attention of all the audience in this performance […] was its unrealism. Such collective farm chairmen as Vasilievna, yearning for love, do not exist.’Footnote ⁹² An audience member from Kuibyshev, on the other hand, was troubled by the disparaging picture of the labour education of Soviet youth: he rejected the image of Volodia as lazy and incompetent, arguing that if he had actually gone to the city to study for a few years, as the plot indicates, he would have returned knowing how to work.Footnote ⁹³

Some plunged into the minutiae of the inaccuracies. An engineer from Donetsk clearly expected precision on stage, as she composed a detailed commentary on how the scenery and staging did not align with reality: ‘the production has flaws […] The scenery is bad – not a field, but futurism, has nature really begun to look worse [than it is in real life]?’Footnote ⁹⁴ She also dissected the scene of the village dance, complaining that there was no accordion, when ‘in the villages there is no dance without an accordion’.Footnote ⁹⁵ A gentleman agreed that ‘the staging, scenery does not show the modernity of the village, of collective farm life’,Footnote ⁹⁶ while another audience member specified why: ‘the scenery shows only silos, and not the houses of a collective farm village’.Footnote ⁹⁷ One Nikon Gnilobokov, a welder, complained about the inaccuracy of the costumes: ‘In pursuit of colours it departs from reality […] What drew attention was that the clothes, despite looking like they were taken from a store today, did not match reality.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Similarly, an agronomist and his companion were glad to see an opera about their own lives, but were critical about the costumes of the tractor drivers, which were ‘unrealistic’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The engineer from Donetsk offered a remedy for these maladies: ‘Send your artists to the village, let them get acquainted with the countryside.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The most common sentiment about the kolkhoz, however, was a general annoyance and suspicion that the creators of the opera had not spent any time on a collective farm themselves. A sampling of these include the following:

Only one respondent dared to use the word ‘propaganda’, though many hinted at it. This author blamed the opera of stretching the truth to fit a political agenda because it portrayed collective farming as more prosperous than it was in reality. Though the few words directly around the word ‘propaganda’ are illegible, the author’s sentiment is clear:

The second largest category of specific criticism regarded the status of the Bolshoi Theatre itself, and what kind of opera is worthy of its hallowed stage. Not Love Alone, according to this group, did not pass muster. Some examples include the following:

The largest category of critique overall is the polemical. This category is characterised by feelings of resentment over lost time and money, but an absence of specifics about the production. Some examples include:

While many expressed general dissatisfaction, however, a handful of others took aim at one particular failing of the opera: its unsuitability for 8 March, International Women’s Day. Some attendees took seriously the theatre’s responsibility to inspire on this occasion. For example, a female factory worker lamented, ‘I brought my mother to the Bolshoi Theatre on the international holiday of 8 March, and unsuccessfully […] we ask you for the next Women’s Day to have a happy production.’Footnote ¹¹² Two female employees at the Vishnevsky Institute of Surgeons in Moscow concurred: ‘It was possible to put another thing on Women’s Day that would really inspire […] We come to the theatre in order to relax after work, but the whole performance ends up being the reverse’.Footnote ¹¹³

Regarding the setting of the opera – the collective farm – the audience responses mirror the polarised opinions of the committee. While some were outraged by the inaccuracy of the portrayal of the kolkhoz, there was also a significant number who were pleased (twenty approved, thirty-two disapproved). Respondent Vitaliy Lukich from Reutov, for example, expressed an opinion nearly identical to that of Ryndin from the committee about his belief in the importance of presenting the kolkhoz worker as a person on stage,Footnote ¹¹⁴ explaining, ‘I generally liked the performance, understandably you’d like to ask me why? The fact is that it is unusual to listen to an opera from the life of the people of the earth – collective farmers on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ A sample of similarly enthusiastic responses include the following:

Still others were excited by the reflection of contemporary life demonstrated not just by the sets, but by the sounds. A pensioner from Moscow, who brought a seventeen-year-old Komsomolets with him, composed an ecstatic four-page essay – even inserting his own extra pages – praising the performances, the concept, the characters, but especially the music: ‘The music of Shchedrin is somehow especially close to life, to the person. It is very singable. Strong and bright, it reveals human feelings in their multi-layered nature, and sounds like it has opened a window on something real, which touches one with its genuine feelings’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ A student in the ninth year of school was similarly impressed, commenting, ‘in the opera, in the first place stands the music […] the music matches our contemporary times’.Footnote ¹²⁰

The music was the single most commented-on element of the opera, and as the previous comments suggest, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Of 184 respondents total, there were only eighteen critical comments made of the music, whereas there were fifty-nine in favour; even of those who disliked the opera overall for other reasons, twenty-seven still praised the music. Of the critiques, the most common was the absence of ‘memorable melodies’. For example: ‘I didn’t like it. There were few memorable melodies’; ‘We come to the theatre to see and listen to the beautiful. There need to be at least a few memorable themes’; ‘not a single memorable aria, duet’.Footnote ¹²¹ Other than these few detractions, however, the responses were glowing. A female construction worker from Zaporozh′e affirmed, ‘It’s hard to imagine better music for this.’Footnote ¹²² An artist-restorer at the Tretyakov Gallery also echoed, ‘The music is beautiful.’Footnote ¹²³ Others enjoyed the tone and style, stating, ‘The chorus is good, a lot of beautiful folk melodies,’ or ‘The opera is very new, fresh, and appealing.’Footnote ¹²⁴ William King, trade advisor to the British Ambassador in Moscow, was thoroughly impressed when he expressed, ‘The music beautifully demonstrates the feelings of the main character […] Excellent – we’ll of course come back a second and third time.’Footnote ¹²⁵ And ironically, one respondent even explicitly praised the opera for having, ‘a lot of memorable melodies’.Footnote ¹²⁶

What was this music like that so enchanted its listeners? In musical style, this opera departs significantly from Shchedrin’s only clear model of Soviet success, Shaporin’s The Decembrists. Shchedrin’s music pleased by being simultaneously accessible and familiar, and sophisticated and academic: it remained unquestionably in the genre of opera, unlike other Soviet ‘operas’ which veered into musical or even theatre (as The Decembrists did at times).Footnote ¹²⁷ He composed a score of three interweaving elements. The first is stylised folk melody, reminiscent of nineteenth-century pastoral intonations like those found in Tchaikovsky’s Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin). This sets the scene for the kolkhoz, an idyllic situation populated by happy farmers who sing the day away. This component, however, forms a base layer that becomes ironic when set against the distress of the heroine. The second element is the more strictly operatic: it is introduced to the audience through Varvara’s entrance and first aria, a dark and brooding soliloquy that has nothing in common with the lilting, memorable tunes of the first scenes. The third layer is diegetic music – that is, music of which the characters and the audience are equally aware. Much of the second act – which features a village dance – comprises this type of music, and the self-awareness of the performance allows the audience reactions to be guided by the reactions of the characters. Finally, Shchedrin imbues the opera with a sense of irony in combining these elements to bring out the incongruity of the cheerful folk songs juxtaposed with the heartfelt suffering exposed by the more operatic numbers. It is this mixture of high and low which captivated the majority of those who commented on the music.Footnote ¹²⁸

Conclusion: outcome and afterlife

On 19 March 1962, the editors of Sovetskii artist gathered to discuss the results of the survey, and whether they should publish them. What this meeting reveals, however, is that at some point between 8 March, when the surveys were administered, and 19 March, when the editors reconvened, a decision had already been taken by the leadership to remove the opera from the repertoire. As one editor explained, ‘Anyway, Not Love Alone will only be performed one more time, and then will be removed from the repertoire of the theatre for revisions.’Footnote ¹²⁹ They concluded that, in that case, ‘there is no point in publishing the reviews of this production’.Footnote ¹³⁰ While the surveys were not released to the public, however, the results certainly would have been circulated to the relevant officials internally between 8 and 19 March, especially since the fate and suitability of the opera was a question under open debate. The audience reactions would have confirmed the committee’s fears that the public was not being presented with an optimistic picture of Soviet life, despite the triumph of the music. As one of the editors summarised, ‘the negative reviews prevailed’.Footnote ¹³¹

While Not Love Alone was deemed unacceptable, the subject of the collective farm was still attractive to the authorities, and thus to the theatre. Just two months after Not Love Alone was finally cancelled, the Ministry of Culture signed a contract with Klara Katsman (1916–2006) – a Soviet composer and student of Shostakovich – for another opera about a collective farm.Footnote ¹³² The opera, entitled Polovod′e (High Water), was completed and approved by the Ministry of Culture on 25 September 1962, and the composer paid a handsome fee.Footnote ¹³³ The confirmation of the commission’s fulfilment was signed by Leontovskaia and Vartanian, the staunchest critics of Not Love Alone. Not coincidentally, all of their disappointed wishes about that opera were destined to be recompensed by High Water: Leontovskaia had been annoyed that Shchedrin’s opera portrayed kolkhoz people as only concerned with love and not work,Footnote ¹³⁴ while Krieger had been frustrated that the labour process was not shown.Footnote ¹³⁵ High Water addressed these concerns: set in a Soviet kolkhoz with a mill at its centre, the action revolves around a soldier, Sergei, who returns from the war to his village with his new wife. He is eager to get back to work, but she is unhappy and wants to return to the city to ‘live for myself!’, she declares.Footnote ¹³⁶ Meanwhile, Sergei rediscovers the sweetheart of his youth, Anfisa, and at first, they exhibit mutual affection.Footnote ¹³⁷ Eventually, Sergei’s wife Claudia packs up and leaves, but despite Sergei’s sudden change of marital status, Anfisa is not about to reunite with Sergei: it turns out romance was not her interest after all. ‘Everything Sergei opened my eyes to’, she sings in the final scene, as she gestures around her at the kolkhoz ‘is far greater than love could ever be!’Footnote ¹³⁸ Sergei, likewise, is too busy with work to miss his wife or be tempted by the beautiful Anfisa. In addition to these admirable sentiments, there are several choral numbers that show men at work near the mill while singing about their labour process, and women at work in the fields, singing reprimands to one of their comrades for shirking her duty to search for cranberries.Footnote ¹³⁹ It should have been the perfect formula.

High Water fitted all of the ideological requirements of the Thaw, and yet it did not fare well. It received only four performances before it was cancelled permanently.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As the story of Not Love Alone demonstrates, since a multitude of factors could account for a production’s cancelation, such a fate does not necessarily reflect on the quality of music or dramaturgy. Even so, in the case of High Water, it is hard to imagine that such wooden characters and such an implausible plot could have been compelling to anyone watching. While The Fate of Man fared far better, on the other hand, with sixty-one performances in 1962 alone, it would not stand the test of time. In fact, only Not Love Alone would live beyond its era: the very elements that condemned Not Love Alone in the first place imbued it with new life later, first in the 1970s and then in the twenty-first century: in addition to the quality of the music with its elevated folk style and appealing directness, its portrayal of the raw human emotion made it attractive beyond its political relevance. It is not an opera about Soviet labourers imagined as super-beings, whereas most Soviet operas and ballets were.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Rather, it is about people surviving the ordinary dramas of life in the Soviet Union. It is this humanity and accessibility that prompted Pokrovskii, who had participated in that first meeting after the dress rehearsal, to give Shchedrin’s opera one more chance in the Soviet Union (in 1971), and has led two different theatres to produce this opera in Russia in the 2010s.Footnote ¹⁴² To date, there have been three vastly different revivals, and a recording, of this opera since its cancellation in 1962 – The Moscow Chamber Opera in 1971, a recording by the label Melodiia with the chorus and orchestra of the State Theatre of Opera and Ballet of the Latvian SSR in 1976, the St Petersburg Opera in 2014, the Mariinsky Theatre in 2016 – but no revivals of The Decembrists, High Water or The Fate of Man.

If neither Not Love Alone nor High Water succeeded at the moment of their premieres, however, what did it mean to write a good opera in the post-war Soviet Union, and who had the power to make that judgement? The fact that High Water was removed so quickly – despite ideological perfection – suggests that the officials did not have all of the power in determining this question. Rather, officials cared about the opinions of the audiences, and the effect that the opera had on them, as the distribution of surveys demonstrates. This represents a shift in the balance of power since the Stalin era: operas that were unpopular with the public would not survive in the new Soviet era. The formula for a Soviet opera that pleased both officials and public was never discovered in the 1960s, and by the middle of the decade, after the failure of Shchedrin’s opera and High Water, theatre officials mostly abandoned the search for operas on contemporary themes. As a meeting of the Artistic Council of the Bolshoi Theatre to plan the repertoire for 1966–7 season reveals, the administration was so desperate to find something suitably Soviet to produce that they started casting about for any Soviet-themed operas, even historical ones rather than contemporary ones.Footnote ¹⁴³ Finally, they settled on Sergei Prokofiev’s Semen Kotko (composed 1940, set in 1918) – a bit outdated (they acknowledged), but at the very least, unquestionably Soviet. The Artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre, Mikhail Chulaki, explained that ‘an about face toward Prokofiev could be justified’, continuing:

And so Prokofiev began to come to the rescue of ‘contemporary’ opera.

If any more evidence was needed that the project of the 1960s had failed to produce the expected glorious output of Soviet opera, it could be noted that not a single opera written for the Bolshoi Theatre during the 1960s still held a place in the repertoire in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Instead, by the mid-1970s the torrent of rhetoric about Soviet operas had ebbed to a trickle. Since the Ministry of Culture had still been unable to persuade top composers to write new Soviet operas, they effectively surrendered: while they occasionally continued to fret over the fact that the circle of composers writing for the Bolshoi Theatre was too small and the quality of opera created was not high enough, the polemical speeches ceased, as did the attempts to adjust financial incentive structures to bait composers to write on contemporary themes.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ By the 1973–4 season at the Bolshoi Theatre, only twenty-two per cent of opera titles shown (six out of twenty-seven) were by Soviet composers, and only one of those was on a contemporary theme,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ a substantial decrease from fifty-four per cent of operas by Soviet composers in 1959.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

The opera project of the Thaw – to create a glorious new repertoire based on contemporary themes – stuttered to a halt, just as the political projects they were supposed to portray, like the Virgin Lands campaign, themselves faded into obsolescence. In its place a new concern arose: the diminishing quality and number of performances of the classics of Russian opera. Starting in the early 1970s, the term Zolotoi fond (golden vault) of Russian opera appeared with increasing frequency in Ministry of Culture meeting transcripts and repertoire planning documents. From 1974 to 1978, the declining quality and performance frequency of classical repertoire was raised in meetings as an increasingly urgent necessity for the major theatres to address, both in Moscow and in the provinces.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ By 1975, evidence of the shifting tide can be seen in the lists of radio broadcasts of Bolshoi productions, which included a few Soviet titles, such as Voina i mir (War and Peace) and Optimisticheskaia tragediia (An Optimistic Tragedy), both by Prokofiev, but had started to prioritise classics such as Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin, Skazka o Tsare-saltane (The Tale of Tsar Saltan), Kniaz′ Igor (Prince Igor), Ruslan i Liudmila and Rusalka. Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Even in ballet there was a new focus on the classics, as exemplified by the much-vaunted revival of Marius Petipa’s Spiashchaia krasavitsa (Sleeping Beauty) by Iurii Grigorovich in 1973.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Though still commissioning new Soviet pieces, a 1976 Ministry of Culture report stressed that the highest priority was remedying the problem that the ‘golden vault’ was still not shown frequently enough.Footnote ¹⁵² As a politically savvy composer, Shchedrin adapted to this new wave of interest in the classics just as he had adapted to earlier interest in collective farming. He did not attempt such an opera on contemporary themes again. And when he did compose another opera, fifteen years later, he would take refuge in a theme with established legitimacy: Nikolai Gogol’s classic epic poem, Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls).

The course that Khrushchev and Furtseva had imagined charting to create a new operatic style after Stalin’s death had failed. The saga of Not Love Alone demonstrates that though the administrators of the Khrushchev era were just as determined as their predecessors to enable the creation of ideologically inspiring opera, the added pressure of audience satisfaction tipped the scale: the project of writing a Soviet opera that pleased all parties concerned was unachievable, and eventually gave way to an era of revivals. Even though Shchedrin accepted that he would not succeed in convincing the authorities that his new style of Soviet opera would be the solution to their dilemma of inadequate contemporary compositions, Not Love Alone remains a curious example of an outlier. Shchedrin experimented with a style that none of his peers attempted, one that included settings of contemporary Soviet life, but with characters whose emotions and struggles resonated with those of the audience. The music managed to enchant audiences with its imbrication of folk melodies into more formally academic, operatic music – so much that it has earned itself a resurgence in the modern day. Perhaps if the example of Not Love Alone had been condoned in its time rather than censured, a more robust and compelling school of Soviet opera might have been born after all.