Highs and Lows

By Patricia Blake

GALINA by Galina Vishnevskaya Translated by Guy Daniels Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 519 pages; $19.95

For two decades, Galina Vishnevskaya reigned supreme at the Bolshoi Theater. No other soprano could match her sumptuous voice and dramatic presence or challenge her vibrant interpretations of Russian opera.

But that was before 1969, when she and her husband, Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, offered sanctuary to the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Many Soviet musicians joined in the official chorus denouncing Solzhenitsyn; the couple remained unyielding in his defense. As a result, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich found that their concert and recording dates had been canceled by the Soviet authorities. After these two celebrated Soviet performers had emigrated to the West in desperation, their names were systematically expunged from the annals of Russian music.

Once in exile and facing the prospect of flagging vocal powers, Vishnevskaya, 58, turned to writing her autobiography with the same fevered intensity she invested in her operatic roles. These are no ghostwritten and-then-I-sang memoirs. Not since Dmitri Shostakovich's posthumously published confessional Testimony has a musician so convincingly portrayed a totalitarian state that spawns great artists, then despises the art they go on to produce.

Vishnevskaya joined the Bolshoi Theater in 1952 when Stalin still acted as the opera's imperial patron. Millions of rubles were spent on the opulent sets and costumes for spectacles like Prince Igor and Boris Godunov. Seated in a heavily guarded box, Stalin reveled in the gilt-and-rhinestone production numbers as he munched on hard-boiled eggs. He had no knowledge of music. Once at an intermission he summoned to his loge the distinguished Bolshoi conductor Samuil Samosud and told him strongly that the performance "is lacking flats." Samosud had the wit to reply: "Good, Comrade Stalin. Thank you for your comment. We will not fail to pay attention to that."

The generalissimo's taste in opera left a legacy that has thus far proved ineradicable. His concept of the genre as patriotic spectacle has hindered the development of a knowledgeable and devoted opera public. Today the state encourages Soviet visitors to the Bolshoi but, says the author, it gives them little help in understanding what they see. Without condescension, Vishnevskaya recalls one typical group of prizewinning collective farmers rewarded with tickets in the front row of the Bolshoi. A peasant woman directly behind the conductor grew restive during the overture. She leaned over the orchestra pit and bawled out the man with the baton: "Why are you waving your arms around like a windmill? Get out of the way! You're blocking my view!"

The book's most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming of a bedroom scene: "My lover, who was in full uniform, crawled in after me. I put a thick blanket between us, and announced that we were ready to shoot." As the cameras moved in for a closeup, the director shouted: "Pull the quilt over your breast . . . Artem, don't touch her . . . Galina, your shoulder is bare again .. . Stop! Stop! His shirt is unbuttoned ... His chest is all hairy! Shave it immediately. We're making a film for the laboring masses, not for sex maniacs!"

In spite of such difficulties, the completed movie was pronounced the best of all filmed operas by Conductor Herbert von Karajan. The Russian people have been deprived of seeing even one scene. Like all films and recordings of Vishnevskaya's performances, Katerina Izmailova is banned in its native country. So is this book. Westerners are not so unfortunate. --By Patricia Blake