Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Savage satire, outrageous black comedy, or heart-rending tragedy? Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is all those things, but even that does not tell the whole story. The opera centers on the character of Katerina, who, trapped in a loveless marriage and imprisoned in the remote Russian countryside, plots, connives, and eventually murders her way into apparent freedom with her lover Sergei. But her crimes come to light, and she ends up exchanging one kind of prison for another, more grimly literal one, where, betrayed by Sergei, she chooses death over further humiliation. While Katerina is hardly a poster girl for emancipated Soviet womanhood, Shostakovich wanted to get away from traditional operatic depictions of women as saints or whores and show us a complicated heroine who, for all her glaring faults, might still command our sympathy. At first, he succeeded: Lady Macbeth was a smash hit at its 1934 premiere, ran for two years continuously in Leningrad, and was staged all over the world. Then Stalin saw it and was apparently incensed by the music’s harsh grotesquerie and the vivid sex scene. Savage official denunciation followed, and the opera had to wait until 1961 to be heard again, in a somewhat bowdlerized version. More recently, however, Lady Macbeth has been re-embraced as one of the most vivid, original, and uncomfortably moving operas of the 20th century.