On Saturday we heard Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" at the BSO. It underlined elements of Asya Partan's account in the Boston Globe of living in Russia and, disturbingly, to my mind, about living in the United States in 2024. I've been a subscriber for almost 40 years and this performance was one of the most impressive I've ever attended by the BSO. The conductor, the singers, the musicians, the Tanglewood Chorus, came together at the highest level of beauty and artistry. When it was first performed in 1934 it became an artistic sensation and Shostakovich was hailed in Russia and by fellow artists around the world. But, when Stalin went to a performance a couple of years after its first performance...he didn't like it. He thought it portrayed too many flaws in the Russian soul. It was not sufficiently heroic to raise the spirit of the Russian people. The music was dissonant. It was banned in Russia from 1936 to 1961. And look now at where some of our leaders here in the United States would take us. Book bans in Florida and Texas. Attacks on the notion of diversity when we know--or at least Trump tells us-- that the purity of American blood is threatened by "those people." I wish I was more confident that we would get through this year without the chaos that Trump, Bannon, and their friends seek as a remedy to free, undisciplined and unamerican education currently leading to opinions with which they disagree. They haven't had a book burning yet but it could be on the agenda as the Republican Congress prepares to cleanse our greatest universities of commies, free-thinkers and "those people."
