At the BBC Proms in September, the Albert Hall will stage a concert performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s controversial 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
Based on Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella, it tells the story of the lonely Katerina Izmailova, who falls in love with one of her husband’s workers, Sergei, and is driven to murder. In his opera adaptation, Shostakovich inserted two shocking scenes: the first, an attack on the housekeeper Aksinya; the second, a violent sex scene between Katerina and Sergei.
Opening in Leningrad and Moscow in 1934, Lady Macbeth was a hit with Soviet audiences, and Stalin himself attended a performance in 1936. Deeply unimpressed by the music’s modern style, he walked out halfway through, allegedly saying: “This is a muddle, not music” – a phrase repeated in the headline of a ferocious editorial in the Pravda newspaper two days later.
All further performances were withdrawn and it was never heard again in Russia during Shostakovich’s lifetime. That we would again be listening to it today would have astonished Shostakovich.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich dusted down the score and revised it, renaming it Katerina Izmailova. Most of the revisions were minor, except one: he removed the sex scene involving Katerina completely.
The updated version was well received in the Soviet Union – but when Katerina Izmailova toured Europe in the 1960s, critics were lukewarm. In the depths of the cold war, there was little appetite for acclaiming Shostakovich as a genius.
Lady Macbeth recast
But in 1979, exiled Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich located a score of the original Lady Macbeth in Europe and recorded it with EMI. Opera houses quickly expressed a desire to stage it, bypassing the Katerina Izmailova version.
In the same year, the book claimed as Shostakovich’s memoir, Testimony, was published, eliciting more interest in the composer. However, its authenticity was immediately queried, and subsequent research has further discredited its claim to be genuine.
But few would dispute Testimony’s overall message: Shostakovich hated the Soviet regime and suffered deep psychological trauma during the Stalin years. From this point on, the way in which people listened to Shostakovich’s music changed. His political disaffection, some claimed, was audible in the notes themselves.
Where critics had yawned at Katerina Izmailova, they were electrified by this new-old, sexy Lady Macbeth. With Testimony’s revelations in mind, the act of staging sex in Soviet Russia of the 1930s – the decade of Stalin’s purges – seemed excitingly radical. Critics even assumed this was why Stalin had been so offended by the opera. Consequently, directors began to stage both the scene of assault on the housekeeper Aksinya and the sex scene between Katerina and Sergei in as shocking a way as possible.
Stage directions for Leningrad and Moscow in 1934 had Sergei rolling Aksinya in a barrel, but in modern productions she is often gang-raped, stripped partially naked and horribly humiliated.