A Small Soul, and Not Immortal

I just watched EMI's DVD recording of a Gran Teatre del Liceu production of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, since it recently became available on Netflix. I should have more to say about it shortly, as well as about some other Shostakovich-related media -- this being the composer's centennial year (he was born in 1906) there's a modest glut of stuff newly available, plus a crop of somewhat older stuff I've noticed while looking for the new stuff.

For now, though, I just want to share one of my favorite minor episodes in the opera. (The text is lifted from Joan Pemberton Smith's translation of the libretto, as included in EMI's 1990 CD edition of their Vishnevskaya/ Gedda/ Rostropovich recording -- I'm not sure if it's in their more recent mid-price reissue.) In Scene 7, a bunch of dangerously bored Czarist policemen briefly amuse themselves by interrogating a socialist schoolteacher. The teacher, singing in a tremulous voice underscored by a wailing flexatone, is pressed into explaining an experiment he performed on a frog:

Teacher:
I started wondering why only man should possess a soul, and why frogs
shouldn't have one too. So I took a frog and examined it.

Sergeant:
Well?

Teacher:
It has a soul, only a very small one, and not immortal...

Sergeant:
Lock him up!

Teacher:
Sorry, God does exist, God does exist!

...Setting aside the propagandistic attitude of this exchange, I like the roundabout way that the teacher poses his statement of humankind's spiritual condition, if only because I agree with his viewpoint.