p As in all his younger years, in 1931 Shostakovich was working concurrently on several compositions. In March he signed a contract with the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre in Moscow and started work on the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The first act of the opera was completed on 5 November.

p Meanwhile, work was finished on his ballet Bolt, which was premiered on 8 April in the Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet under the direction of Fyodor Lopukhov (conductor Alexander Gauk). The ballet did not prove to be popular, however, and performances were discontinued in the middle of June.

p Early May saw the premiere—by the Young Workers Theatre in Leningrad—of Piotrovskf s play Rule Britannia!, for which Shostakovich composed the music. The composer tried his hand at yet another genre: he wrote the full score (35 numbers) for a production of Condition ally Murdered, a play by Vsevolod Voyevodin and Yevgeny Ryss, at the Leningrad Music Hall. The premiere took place on 20 October, conducted by Isaak Dunayevsky: the cast included the famous musichall actors Leonid Utyosbv, Klavdia Shulzhenko and Vitaly Koralli.

p Continuing his work with Grigory Ko&nlsev and Leonid Trauberg, Shostakovich wrote music to accompany the’film Alone, which was released on 10 October. On 6 November—the eve of the anniversary of the Revolution—another film, Golden Mountains, was premiered in Moscow. This was the first Soviet sound film, and marked the start of a long collaboration between the composer and Sergei Tutkevich, a hading film director.

p In the summer, during a visit to Leningrad, the conductor Leopold Stokowski, a great populariser of Shostakovich’s music, met the composer, who presented him with the score of his Third Symphony. Meanwhile, Arturo Toscanini had included the composer”s First Symphony in his repertoire. Soon Shostakovich was visited by an American journalist, Rose Lee, a correspondent o/~The New York Times. On 20 December, her interview with Shostakovich (the first by a foreign journalist) and a detailed article about the composer and his music appeared in that paper. Shostakovich ended his conversation with the journali^with a reference to his interest in folk music as an important means of injecting new life into the language of music.

p The composer spent the autumn months of September and October in the Caucasus—in the towns of Gudauti, Batumi and Tbilisi—where he had time to relax and work on Lady Macbeth. He returned home towards the end of the year.

p During my two months holiday I thought a good deal about my work as a composer.

p For the past three years I have been working only as an ‘applied’ composer, writing music for plays and films. I have done a lot in this field: New Babylon (Eccentric Actors Factory), The Bed-Bug (Meyerhold Theatre), The Shot, Virgin Soil, Rule Britannia! (Leningrad Young Workers Theatre), Alone (Eccentric Actors), Golden Mountains (Yutkevich), Conditionally Murdered (Music Hall); I have signed contracts for Hamlet ( Vakhtangov Theatre, ’producer Akimov), The Concrete Sets (Moscow Film Studios, producer Macheret) and The Negro (operetta, lyrics by Gusman and Marienhof).

p During this time I have also written two ballets (The Golden Age and Bolt), and the May Day Symphony.

p Out of all these works, the only one which, to my mind, can lay claim to a place in the history of Soviet music is the May Day Symphony, despite all its imperfections. In saying this I do not wish to imply that all the other works mentioned above are worthless, but simply tha^t, being written for the theatre, they should not be considered as independentworks.

p Experience has shown that an opera or ballet should be complete before it is ever brought to the theatre. The theatre should then accept it (or reject it) in its entirety, and stage the work in its ready-made form. This was done with my opera The Nose and the result, thanks to the theatre’s first-rate performers, was an excellent production. Afinogenov and Kirshon also produced fine examples of proletarian drama without the ‘help’ of the theatre!

Let music play the leading role in the musical theatre! ^l

p There can be no music without ideology... The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes. Only Beethoven was a forerunner of the revolutionary movement. If you will read his letters you will see how often he wrote his friends that he wished to give new ideas to the public and rouse it to revolt against its masters.

p On the other hand, Wagner’s biographies show that he began his career as a radical and ended as a reactionary. His monarchistic patriotism had a bad effect on his mind.

p We, as revolutionists, have a different conception of music. Lenin himself said that music was a means of unifying broad masses of people. It is not a leader of the masses, perhaps, but certainly an organising force... Even the symphonic form, which appears more than any other to be divorced from literary elements, can be said to have a bearing on politics.

p Thus we regard Scriabin as our bitterest musical enemy. Why? Because Scriabin’s music tends to an unhealthy eroticism, mysticism, passivity and escape from the realities of life...

Music is no longer an end in itself, but a vital weapon in the struggle. Because of this, Soviet music will probably develop along different lines from any the world has ever known.

I consider that every artist who isolates himself from the world is doomed. I find it incredible that an artist should want to shut himself away from the people, who, in the end, form his audience. I think an artist should serve the greatest possible number of people. I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.^^2^^