Correspondence of Literary Text and Musical Phraseology in Shostakovich's Opera the Nose and Gogol's Fantastic Tale

Abstract

The adaptation of literary texts to music, especially when it takes place between such genres as drama and opera, poem and art song and often prose and opera, offers ample material for comparative studies on literature and music. The present study will examine problems related to the adaptation of the literary text to music in Dmitrii Shostakovich's opera The Nose (Nos). We will attempt to find out what, if any, influences of the literary and other artistic trends of the time had been exerted on the opera's conception and realization. This will involve the comparative analysis of (1) literary-linguistic and musical phraseology; (2) the literary source text as it corresponds to the musical text in terms of its textual implications; and (3) the correlations of aesthetic values in the source text and in its musical adaptation that reflect the artistic historical process. The case selected is the beginning of Act I of Shostakovich's opera Nos and the corresponding section of Nikolai Gogol's story of the same name. Such an analysis requires the examination of the complex circumstances which surround the making of an opera, that is, the literary, musical and aesthetic climate of the times as well as the personality of the composer himself. Shostakovich's opera Nos, written in 1928, was first staged in January 1930 in the Leningrad Maly Opera Theater. The American musical historian Nicholas Slonimsky describes the circumstances accompanying the first performance: