Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

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Shostakovich's initial idea was to write a trilogy of operas about the tragic fates of Russian women over the centuries. He only succeeded in writing one: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

A masterpiece of 20th century musical composition, it's a bleak, existential drama based on a story by Nikolai Leskov from 1865, a time when Russian literature was making its way into the world through authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The score was a critical success and immediately became popular in the Soviet Union, but fell out of favor dramatically after Stalin attended one of the performances in Moscow in 1936. He apparently didn’t like it, especially because an anonymous article in Pravda denouncing the play caused Shostakovich to fear for his life. 

It did not return to the stage until 1970. Since that time, it has regained its rightful place as an admired work.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is a piece that, both musically and narratively, is very cinematic, while politically it is a bizarre aesthetic anomaly during Stalinism. Aside from the glorification of the proletariat to the taste of the ideologists of the time, this is a real "thriller". The story takes place deep in the Russian countryside in the 19th century (Mtsensk, about 300 km from Moscow, is the region to which criminals have traditionally been banished throughout history.) The main character is Katerina, a merchant's wife who, psychologically wiped out, bored with her husband and subjected to the tyranny of her father-in-law, is seduced by a depraved worker in the family factory, and ends up murdering first her father-in-law and then her husband, believing that by doing so she can achieve freedom.   

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