Guest Lecture: Simon Morrison will present
Margarita and the Master:
What We Know, and Don’t Know, About Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Marriage
In the late 1950s, Shostakovich’s musical style changed, shifting toward a lighter, more playful idiom in the score to the movie The First Echelon, his operetta about the Cheryomushki housing development, his Sixth String Quartet, and his Romances to texts by Yevgeny Dolmatovsky. These works were composed during his second marriage to Margarita Kainova, a senior Komsomol official and (later) director of the RSFSR museum system. The first part of this paper considers Shostakovich’s Komsomol musical aesthetic and whether the marriage might have influenced his new style.
The second part is more explicitly political. The marriage lasted from 1956 to 1959 and is described in the Shostakovich literature as a bad decision. But who was Kainova and what were her ambitions? Did she meet Shostakovich by chance, or was the encounter contrived? Kainova was in the Komsomol hierarchy when she married Shostakovich: did she need political permission for the relationship? A final, more disquieting question: Kainova must have reported on Shostakovich to security officials when they traveled abroad. As a Party activist, she would have done so with enthusiasm. It would have been a condition of her, and his, authorization to travel. Did this matter to Shostakovich? Should it matter to us?
Bio:
Simon Morrison is Professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His history of Moscow, A Kingdom and a Village, was published by Knopf last spring.
This event is free and open to the public.