Those of you without a sense of purpose in your lives may have noticed two photographs at the bottom of Football in the GULag’s homepage. On the right is a collection of ‘raving sorts’ enjoying a football match in the Soviet Union (I imagine in Leningrad in the 1930s). Front-right, squinting through Bauhaus spectacles, is Dmitrii Shostakovich, coolly ardent football fan and self-conscious colossus of twentieth-century classical music.
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| Nerd |
That Shostakovich adored football is well documented; it was he who coined the phrase, ‘the ballet of the masses’. He would often take in two matches on Sunday afternoons, in support of the Dynamo and Zenit Leningrad teams of his hometown. His letters to his friend Isaak Glikman, which have been translated into English, furnish us with touching and trivial insights into his quirkily obsessive relationship to the game: quotations from matchday programmes, newspaper clippings, eulogies and curses for the fluctuating form of Dynamo/Zenit stalwarts. Glikman remembers how Shostakovich was coaxed into football by the artist (and professional boxing referee) Vladimir Lebedev; how, in contrast to Lebedev’s and his own ‘extraordinarily uninhibited’ matchday fashion, Dmitrii would sit through matches in a state of intensely quiet excitement; how he would procure a dacha for himself and Glikman in the provinces, only to abandon their rural idyll after a few days in order to return to Leningrad for a match; how, with his wife absent one weekend, Shostakovich invited the entire Zenit team to his apartment for dinner, and ended up playing his latest compositions on the piano for the increasingly drunk and accommodating players. There is a sense too in Glikman’s nostalgia of the proximity of football to dance. The football of Shostakovich’s reveries was characterised by ‘elegant and intricate movements and a special kind of football choreography: not for nothing was one of the Dynamo stars, Pyotr Dementiyev, affectionately known locally as ‘The Ballerina’.’ ‘In those days,’ Glikman ponders in a brilliantly succinct dismissal of all football since Hitler, ‘the actual process of play was very important’.[1] Yet despite this alignment of interests, the one formal conjoinment of his private passion to his professional art that Shostakovich realised in his long career – the 1930 ballet, The Golden Age (Zolotoi vek) – was a private and professional failure.
The Golden Age was the first of Shostakovich’s only three ballet scores, composed between 1930 and 1935 (followed by The Bolt (Bolt), 1931; The Limpid Stream (Svetlyi ruchei), 1935), all of which sunk into critical and popular anonymity – and Shostakovich’s own disfavour – as a result of the shifting Soviet cultural politics of the 1930s. All three were revived only after the composer’s death. The libretto, originally titled Dinamiada, the work of Aleksandr Ivanovskii, was the winning entry in an officially-sponsored competition aimed at promoting ‘Soviet ballet’; it called for ‘new forms of dance, such as acrobatics, gymnastics, et al.’.[2] The narrative concerns the travails of a football team of bright young things, who travel from the USSR to a composite bourgeois country referred to as ‘Faschland’ to take part in an industrial exhibition, the eponymous Golden Age. A frisky female native of Faschland falls for the strapping captain of the team, and attempts to seduce him, incurring the wrath of her boyfriend (named, succinctly, ‘Fascist’). The capitalist pigs in charge of the exhibition see their blossoming romance as an opportunity to stage some phoney ‘class harmony’, and advertise a forthcoming dance between the captain and his belle. The captain, his mind properly focused on the morality of labour and zonal marking, declines the invitation, and he and his team are promptly arrested on trumped up charges. ‘Fascist’ dons the Soviets’ uniform instead to act out the dance with Diva, only for the workers of Faschland to free their Soviet brethren and initiate a final ‘Dance of Solidarity’.
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| A long way from Bolton |
Beyond the nerdy thrill of one of the century’s finest composers scoring for football, there is much to enjoy about The Golden Age in this original conception. This is the brash young Shostakovich of the deranged opera of Gogol’s The Nose and the cantankerous early symphonies; allowed to act the part of a 1920s avant-gardist by the relative creative and economic freedom of the New Economic Plan, alive to twitchings from Berlin and Paris. A tale of youthful and muscular class solidarity is enlivened by trappings of urban, bourgeois, and popular culture. Action takes place in a music hall; football is made dance; Diva seduces with a sultry foxtrot. Even the scene titles are fun: ‘Dance of the Black Man and 2 Soviet Football Players’; ‘A Rare Case of Mass Hysteria’; ‘The Touching Coalition of the Masses, Slightly Fradulent’; ‘Total Unveiling of the Conspiracy – The Bourgeoisie in Panic’. In the spirit of Kurt Weill in Weimar Germany, or Charles Ives in New York, the classical was being rejuvenated by streaks of city life and populist melody. The ballet’s production team embarked on an equally polystylistic crusade to keep pace with Ivanovskii’s and Shostakovich’s energy. The young choreographers, Vasilii Vainonen and Leonid Iakobson, undaunted by their first commission, included folk and popular dances, acrobatics, puppetry, boxing, and a satirical polka about the Geneva Peace Convention; designer Valentina Khodasevich created a set of dynamic, Constructivist angles and distinctly ‘civilian’ costumes. After its première at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad on 26th October, 1930, the ballet enjoyed 19 showings throughout the 1930-31 season, was exported to Kiev and Odessa, and was scheduled for performance before the city Soviet; overall, a ‘noisy success’, by all accounts popular amongst its urban audiences. I have been unable to find any footage of this original production (for reasons outlined below), although the finale from this 1980s, perestroika-era revival does give a somewhat mollified sense of the appeal of the original.
That despite all this The Golden Age is little-known, we can put down to chronological misfortune. As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, so a process of artistic centralisation and prescription spread through the Soviet Union.[3] ‘Bourgeois’, ‘formalist’, avant-garde works fell from favour as the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward to Socialism, and the Cultural Revolution that characterised (some would say caricatured) Stalin’s reign kicked in. A refined impulse towards formal traditionalism in the arts, an attempt to solidify claims of a grand Soviet culture by making that culture as stolid and granite as possible, did not bode well for a production such as Vainonen’s and Iakobson’s; the golden age of experimentation itself was grinding to a recriminatory halt. On the eve of the scheduled performance for the Leningrad Soviet, a piece by Iurii Brodersen in The Worker and Theatre journal began the backlash. ‘How could it happen that the ideology of the bourgeois music hall, that urbanist mongrel, that ideology so hostile to the Soviet theatre, how could it penetrate to the stage of the state theatre, and what is more, in such an excessive dose?’ he hollered.[4] The score and the staging proved too modern, too urban, erotic, athletic, and too involved for the new traditionalists. As the production was quietly withdrawn, the initial enthusiasm of the audience became lost in the historiography, until it was possible for later conservative revisionists to dismiss the ballet as an unfortunate symptom of its infected era. An example of ‘the measles of formalism’ that stymied Soviet ballet’s development, according to Leningradskaia Pravda in April 1936; ‘musical cacophony, piling up alien orchestral stunts… [that] have had an extremely negative effect on the genuinely Soviet, realistic ballet’,[5] noted a commentator in 1950. Perhaps the best blindside to Shostakovich’s 1920s bravado came in 1948, again in The Worker and Theatre: ‘the aesthetic taste of the Soviet audience proved to be better than that of Shostakovich, and his ballets flopped one after the other.’[6] Harsh words, yet Ivanovskii and his colleagues perhaps had fair warning, when the veteran opera singer Ivan Ershov happened upon rehearsals for the ballet, and was appalled. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he asked Ivanovskii. ‘Surely you know that ballet is a fairy tale, a fiction?’
