Four Poems of Captain Lebyadkin Op.146 (1974)

Liubov’ kapitana Lebiadkina

Tarakan

Bal v pol’zu governantok

Svetlaya lichnost’

It must be difficult for a great composer to write bad music, but that is what Shostakovich aspired to do in his last song cycle. What is more, in his efforts to equal the atrocious quality of the verse associated with Captain Lebyadkin in Dostoyeveky’s The Devils, he succeeded in masterly fashion. His settings are intended not just as parody but also, it seems, as an equaivalent of the pain cased by Lebyadkin’s arrogant artlessness. As Shostakovich remarked, “I think I’ve managed to capture the spirit of Dostoyevsky… Lebyadkin is of course a buffon but from time to time he becomes terrifying.”

Not content with matching the Lebyadkin doggerel in the first song, an ugly waltz, Shostakovich sets the drunken poet’s asides as well as his repeated failure to pronounce the word “aristokraticheskiy.” In Tarakan, a ballad crudely based on a nursery tune, he unsparingly refers to the interruptions from his incredulous audience. The third song is an insufferably ill-mannered address (in quintuple time) at a ball for the benefit of governesses. Svetlaya lichnost’is not actually attributed to Lebyadkin in The Devils but is entirely worthy of him – as, of course, is Shostakovich’s setting.