In Testimony, the book that claims to be the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the character of Shostakovich makes a few pertinent and penitent remarks about Nikolai Akimov's 1932 production of Hamlet: "I ended up writing music for a Hamlet anyway, for a most formalistic one. I'm very unlucky with that formalism. An artistic project is planned, I'm asked to be the composer, and then there's always a scandal....The production was scandalous, the most scandalous, they say, in the history of Shakespeare..." (Testimony, The Memories of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, p. 83).

If that was Shostakovich speaking, he was not exaggerating. Apparently, Akimov's Hamlet was a most sodden Hamlet: Ophelia drowns while drunk, Hamlet himself was a fat drunk who made up the story of the ghost just to spook his mother and uncle, and the main character in this production was not Hamlet but a drunken and scheming Polonius. Needless to say, the production was banned by the Communist Party, and all that remained was Shostakovich's score.

It is a dilly: with its parodies of light music, its parodies of serious music, its parodies of even the Dies Irae chant, Shostakovich's score sounds like nothing so much as Offenbach done up to date in Soviet Russia. By the time he composed the incidental music for Akimov's Hamlet in 1932, Shostakovich was an old hand at turning out ironic farces: from his satirical opera The Nose (1928) through his music for the burlesque ballet The Age of Gold and his travesty of a music hall revue Conditionally Killed, Shostakovich knew just how to balance irony and sarcasm with popular music so as to make the most appealing possible mixture. That this mixture did not appeal to the Communist Party says more about its lack of humor then it does about Shostakovich's music.

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