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Dmitri Schostakowitsch

LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK

The composer on his opera, premiered in 1934

"...I do feel however, that Shostakovich has great talent. Perhaps it is not his mistake 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 it's not something you can demand." This is how Arnold Schoenberg judged the 38-year-old composer in 1944.
Shostakovich wrote about his work on Lady Macbeth in his memoirs:

Three years work on Lady Macbeth

I worked for about three years on Lady Macbeth. I had planned it as a trilogy about the situation of women in various epochs of Russian history. It was based on Leskov's story Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The unusual succinctness and richness of this narrative carry the reader away. It is the truthful and tragic portrayal of the fate of a talented, intelligent and extraordinary woman who fails
in life because of the nightmarish conditions in pre-revolutionary Russia. I think that this story is one of the best of its kind.

Stage director Peter Mussbach discussing the production Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Photos: Monika Rittershaus

Gorki said at the celebration of his 60th birthday, "One has to learn. One has to become acquainted with one's country, one's past, one's present and one's future." And Leskov's story corresponds to Gorki's demand more than any other. It is a tremendously strong representation of one of the darkest periods of pre-revolutionary Russia. Lady Macbeth is a real treasure for a composer. The characters are described so vividly, the dramatic conflicts - I was strongly attracted to all of this. Alexander Preiss, a young dramaturge from Leningrad, wrote the libretto together with me. It is based almost exclusively on Leskov, apart from the third act which deviates in its sharper social statement from Leskov. We added an introductory scene at the police station and omitted the murder of Katerina Lvovna Ismailovna's nephew.
I planned Lady Macbeth as a tragic opera, or rather as a tragic and satirical opera. Even though Katerina Lvovna is a murderess, she does not belong to the dregs of humanity. She is tortured by
her conscience. She thinks about the people she has killed. I can sympathise with her. This is hard to portray. And I heard a lot of objections. However, I wanted to show this woman dominating her surroundings. Katerina Lvovna lives in the midst of robbers. She suffers - as in prison - for five years. Anyone who categorically condemns Katerina Lvovna, assumes that everyone who has committed a crime is also guilty. This is the general opinion.
For me, however, the person is the most important.

Conductor Valery Gergiev

I think that Leskov probably felt this way too. For him there are no generally standardised behavioural norms. Everything depends on the situation, on the people. An unexpected change is perfectly possible, whereby the murderer is not the guilty person. You cannot measure everything by the same yardstick.

Love is often destroyed by the surroundings

Katerina Lvovna is a very special and strong personality. Her life is depressing and uninteresting. Then love comes into her life. And this life means so much to her that she commits a crime. For her there is no sense in life without the man she loves ...
I dedicated Lady Macbeth to my fiancée, to my future wife. It's obvious therefore that the opera is about love but that is not the only theme. It is also about how love could be if it were not surrounded by badness. Love is destroyed by all the surrounding badness - laws, possessiveness, avarice, by the police machinery. If conditions were different, love would be different too. Love is one of Sollertinsky's favourite subjects.

Stage designer (background)

He could talk about it for hours - from the various levels, from the highest as well as from the lowest. Sollertinsky helped me a great deal in my attempts to express my ideas in Lady Macbeth. He spoke about how sexuality is expressed in the two great operas Wozzeck and Carmen, and regretted that nothing comparable had been created in Russian opera. There is nothing of this kind for instance in Tchaikovsky. And that is not a coincidence. Sollertinsky regarded love as a great talent. Anyone who can love has a talent like someone who can construct ships or write novels. In this sense Katerina Lvovna was a genius, inspired in her passion: for the sake of love she was capable of doing anything, even committing murder. Sollertinsky did not regard our present life conditions as suitable for the flourishing of talents of this kind.

Everything round about moaned that love was withering away. It is probably always like that. Every generation believes that the last hour has come for love. At any rate people always believe that nowadays this question is raised differently from yesterday. And tomorrow it will not be asked in the same way as today. How - nobody knows; but it will certainly be different.

Dmitri Shostakovich in his Memoirs, published by S. Wolkow, Propyläen Verlag (c) 2000 by Econ Ullstein List Verlag GmbH&Co, Berlin-Munich

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

For the premiere on 31 July tickets are still available for ATS 2,800 and 3,600; for the performances on 4, 22 and 30 August there are also tickets in the ATS 4,600 category.

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