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Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District: Thriller and Psychodrama

“... Still I believe Shostakovich is a man of great talent. Perhaps it’s not his fault that he allowed politics to influence his compositional style. … It’s like this: there are heroes and there are composers. Heroes can be composers and vice versa, but that's not something that can be required.“ That was Arnold Schönberg’s assessment of the 38-year-old composer in 1938. His words reflect a typical dilemma. In the western world Dmitry Shostokavich was long considered a composer who toed the line of state politics. This view changed when Solomon Volkov published his Memoirs. Shostakovich was looked upon as extraordinarily gifted, a genius, until well into the 1930s.

Conductor Valery Gergiev

A murderess and adulteress

That such a profound change took place in the appraisal of the composer is due not least to the events that surrounded Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Though the 1934 world premiere was a great international success, the opera was savagely attacked in Pravda in 1936 and further performances prohibited. The composer was made an example of and he only escaped the full brunt of political fury – which could easily have ended in hard labour for him – by complying with the requirements of “Criticism and Self-Criticism”. That the rage should have been engendered precisely by Lady Macbeth can hardly be seen as a coincidence. The tone of the music in the work is too extreme, too roughened up. Grotesquely penetrating in parts, it is too dissonant, too graphic. Above all, the eponymous heroine, Katerina Izmaylova, has too few positive qualities.

Director Peter Mussbach Photos: Monika Rittershaus

The murderess and adulteress did not at all fit the picture of the “new human being” as envisaged by the propagandists of Stalin’s cultural politics. This latter was a human being who might indeed be possessed of many features that accorded with the aesthetic principles of “Social Realism” but should have as few real ones as possible. What was required was exemplary characters on stage who would edify the zealous observers of norms and prescriptions and keep them satisfied. That this opera was so utterly unsuitable for the achievement of such goals was something that Stalin hardly failed to observe: he undoubtedly did not like it when he saw it in 1935.

Models of the stage sets for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district

Out of sheer desperation

The title the composer chose for his first version is taken from a story written by Nikola Leskov in 1865, which is based on a true murder. But whereas the protagonist in Leskov really possesses features of the power-hungry Lady in Shakespeare, Shostakovich endeavours to present Katerina's motives in an understandable light and even to depict her as a “positive personality”.

Models of the stage sets for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district

Finding herself in a primitive and brutal world, she sees the murders she commits as sheer acts of desperation. With an impotent and weakling husband, Sonovi, on one side and a lascivious father-in-law, Boris Timofeyevitch, on the other, the merchant’s wife in her sexual frustration is an easy prey to the servant Sergei, a charismatic macho who has already shown in the collective rape of the servant girl, Aksinia, what we are to think of him. The wretched affair is for Katerina a way of escaping from the tedium and brutality that characterize her everyday life. When the lecherous Boris discovers the affair, she poisons the old man in panic. Now tormented by the crime she has committed, her anguish increases when her husband returns and catches her in the act with Sergei.

Models of the stage sets for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district

They kill Sinovi and hide his corpse in the cellar. This turns out to be a fatal mistake, for the body is discovered at the wedding of Katerina and Sergei. They are both condemned to hard labour for life and transported to Siberia. Sergei puts all the blame on Katerina and he even uses her to help him make a new conquest, the young Sonetka. Exposed to ridicule and deeply hurt, Katerina gathers up strength to commit one final act of desperation. She pushes her rival into the ice-cold waters and throws herself in after, thus putting an end to her own soul's tragedy.