The operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki was first performed in October 1959 at the Moscow Operetta Theater, conducted by Grigori Stolyarov, a professional friend of Shostakovich who had previously conducted Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

At this point, Russian culture was experiencing the sociopolitical phenomenon of “Khrushchev's Thaw.” Nikita Krushchev, who took over as the first secretary of the Community Party of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin’s death, loosened restrictions on creatives and journalists. Though there wasn’t full freedom, the demand for creatives to endue their work with strictly pro-state propaganda, and the shunning of certain “bourgeoisie aesthetics,” wasn’t as strictly enforced. Previously banned musical genres and composers were now accessible to Russian citizens. Amongst creatives, there was some hope — after all, the loosening up of censorship, especially in the realms of journalism and entertainment, allowed Russian journalism and art to “breathe” a bit more. With this newfound level of freedom, Stolyarov asked Shostakovich to create a new work, in order to shake up the stale repertoire that had been performed during that time.

A general ethos emerged amongst the people, who started to “air out” many of the absurdities of Soviet light. In this opera particularly, certain Soviet stock characters are present but slightly exaggerated. The mood is funny but hinting toward a darker feeling associated with the USSR. This implied darkness would have been much more apparent to Soviet audiences than modern-day American viewers.

In the article “Not a Cherry Tree in Sight!” (in Music & Letters, August 2005), Gerard McBurney — the arranger and adaptor of Moscow, Cheryomushki — writes a fictional letter “to” Shostakovich. In this letter, he explains the choices he made for this piece, and delves into why he made the choices he did. After all, McBurney arranged the music of Moscow, Cheryomushki for the first “European” production (which was translated to English by David Poutney) at the Lyric Theatre, by the Pimlico Opera, in Hammersmith, London. The music was specifically adapted for a “dance band,” which inevitably took away some of the “preposterous swagger and glitz” (in McBurney’s own words) of the orchestral accompaniment, dance sequences, and fantasies, lost to a 14-piece band. 
McBurney argues, however, that in the west, pieces like this are performed with a band, compared to Soviet Russia, where the composer often had at their disposal an orchestra, chorus, resident actor-singers, and a corps de ballet.

In fact, McBurney goes on to say, the cultural differences between Russian/Soviet citizens and Westerners leads to more than one misunderstanding of this operetta. People of the West hadn’t been exposed to this operetta in its fullness — it had only been performed once off-off Broadway, or a few showcases of the movie version. Many Western listeners did not understand the irony, the cross-references, or the meaning of the original Russian. They “sneered” at it, but McBurney thinks this isn’t due to the work being poor, but due to a combination of a lackluster, diluted presentation of the original work and the lack of understanding of the Russian/Soviet political landscape — and the ironic humor therein — that the libretto is representing.

Enveloped in the libretto are hard-hitting themes that may not be immediately evident to Westerners in the humorous dialogue. The topic of Anti-Semitism was indirectly approached through the subtopics of forced relocation for accommodation, poverty, and even modest dreams being unattainable by regular people. The propaganda and lies of the Soviet Union, and the space between dreams of a better life versus the grinding reality of lived experience, are the melancholy themes underpinning the funny and sometimes even “genuinely corny and sentimental bits” (McBurney) on the surface.

Even the “bad guys” were meant to be immediately recognizable to cynical Soviet citizens — reference to the political structure without naming it directly. Drebedniov — his name comes from the word for “rubbish.”

The libretto — which McBurney finds sharply satirical and genuinely funny — was written by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky, two Soviet humorists. In fact, that’s exactly how Shostakovich described them to his wife: “They were just a couple of Soviet humourists!” Apparently, he wasn’t very impressed. Conversely, Elizabeth Wilson argues that the type of writing in the  libretto can be placed amongst humorists like Zoshchenko, who Shostakovich did like.

The drama of the libretto — and the intention behind it — can be one of misunderstanding as well. In the story, Muscovites move into a housing district called Cheryomushki, literally the “Cherry Tree District,” outside of Moscow. Westerners sometimes misinterpret (at least, as McBurney sees it) that Shostakovich was “praising” and glorifying the housing developments — essentially, capitulating to the Soviet government. This isn’t necessarily a supported claim.

But why specifically did McBurney take to this work? “[B]ecause I find such good music in these pieces.” This musical comedy — a “Soviet operetta” — is a hodgepodge of agitprop, nineteenth century operetta, and twentieth century musical. When English musicologist and music critic Arthur Jacobs saw the performance in July 1960, he noted that musically many popular styles were represented: waltzes, a tango, and (in his own words) a “bad parody” of hot jazz. He wrote: “I was tickled by Shostakovich's brilliant orchestration and mildly taken by two or three tunes; but what a waste for the composer of Shostakovich's symphonies!” But McBurney doesn’t see it that way. The “charm and scabrous humor” of The Nose and Lacy MacBeth became “sharper and more intense.”

Within the score are plenty of Easter Eggs, including parodies of Swan Lake, Polovtsian dances, Russian pop songs, and Russian folk songs, as well as a number of musical allusions. The dance of the two “bad guys”  borrows musically from the “Dance of the Bureaucrats” from the ballet Bolt and the fanfares greeted Stalin in Rayok. Lydia’s song was a rewriting of his “Song of the Counterplan” with text so against its original meaning that it has to be ironic. Jacobs caught this reference during his own viewing.

Specifically, the irony (and the “irony within irony”) was quintessential to Shostakovich’s work. This irony takes on multiple levels in this work, according to McBurney:

“putting to more frivolous use some of the same qualities that drive forward your symphonies and operas, your feeling for pastiche and parody, your acute and sometimes waspish, sometimes despairing sensitivity to the way in which we feel music playing in our collective memories.” 

Often Shostakovich would play with the difference between what was literally represented versus what the audience would intuit that it meant. For example, in his fifth symphony, in the supposedly “patriotic” march, we can “hear” a sense of terror and rage. In this opera, there’s a sort of “ambivalence,” a “half-guilty fondness” of “Soviet kitsch” — half cynical, half delighted.