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.
