"No! In spite of the humor on the stage, the music is not comical" (Shostakovich: About Himself and his Times, compiled by Grigoryev and Platek. page 30). As noted Russian scholar Boris Schwartz said, "Here Shostakovich deludes himself." And then some. For listeners who think it is impossible to be atonal and funny at the same time, there is Shostakovich's The Nose. Setting literally word for word the dialogue from Gogol's tale of a nose that leaves its face in search of action and adventure, Shostakovich's The Nose is arguably the funniest opera of the twentieth century.

Written in a couple of months in 1928 when the composer was 21, The Nose is brilliantly composed in every detail, ingeniously scored for huge orchestra and ingeniously set for voices. In three short acts with a brief epilogue, Shostakovich's score with its canons and its counterpoint is as complex in its way as Berg's contemporaneous Wozzeck. The opera is a marvel of dazzling orchestral effects—instruments played in unusual registers, fantastic combinations of color, virtuoso solos for virtually every instrument, coruscating percussion writing including an extended percussion interlude in the first act that is a tour de force of the composer's art. And, incredibly, Shostakovich's writing for voices neatly solved every problem of text setting that had plagued Russian composers for 75 years: how to set a text so that it sounds both like melody and recitative. Shostakovich simply set Gogol's texts syllabically, lyrically, and, above all, hilariously.

The Nose ranks high in any list of Shostakovich's compositions, high in any list of Russian operas, and high in any list of operas in the twentieth century. And it is drop-dead funny.

© James Leonard, Rovi