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Philippe Dollo

Opera

New

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Dmitri Chostakovitch

Opéra Bastille

from 06 to 25 April 2019

3h13 no interval

Certain scenes may be inappropriate for the young and the easily offended.

Synopsis

Of Shostakovich’s initial undertaking – a trilogy on the tragic destinies of Russian women through the ages – only one opera was ever written: the hard-hitting Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Although one of the mainsprings of the work, the Shakespearean parallel is here bitterly ironic: unlike Lady Macbeth, Katerina Ismaïlova who, in the remote reaches of rural 19th century Russia, falls in love with one of her husband’s employees and is finally forced to commit suicide, is less a manipulator than a victim of a violent and patriarchal society. Krzysztof Warlikowski liberates all the subversive power of this scorching and scandalous work, which marked the early years of the Opéra Bastille.

Duration : 3h13 no interval

Language : Russian

Surtitle : French / English

  • Opening

  • First part 100 min

  • Intermission 30 min

  • Second part 63 min

  • End

Artists

Opera in four acts and nine parts


Creative team

Cast

Orchestre et Chœurs de l’Opéra national de Paris

In Russian
French and English surtitles

Media

  • Red Lady

    Red Lady

    Read the article

  • Draw-me Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

    Draw-me Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

    Watch the video

  • Requiem for a Russian woman

    Requiem for a Russian woman

    Watch the video

  • Sergei, the villain

    Sergei, the villain

    Watch the video

  • Podcast Lady Macbeth de Mzensk

    Podcast Lady Macbeth de Mzensk

    Listen the podcast

  • Katerina or passion

    Katerina or passion

    Watch the video

  • “Brother humans who live after us”

    “Brother humans who live after us”

    Read the article

  • Transgression in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

    Transgression in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

    Read the article

© Thibaut Chapotot pour la Rmn-Grand Palais

Red Lady

Read the article

An interview with Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov

05 min

Red Lady

By Simon Hatab

A fascinating opera that reflected the thinking of the time but also incurred the wrath of the Soviet regime, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is currently on the bill at the Opéra Bastille in a pro-duction by Krzysztof Warlikowski. Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, the curator of the exhibition Red. Art and utopia Soviet country which runs from March 20 until July 1 2019 at the Grand Palais, sheds some light on the historical context of the work.


Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was first performed on January 22, 1934. Can you tell us something about the political context of that Premiere?

Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov: During the 1920s, a degree of cultural pluralism accompanied the power struggle that raged between the different factions of the party. Trotsky and Bukharin were among those who considered that it was not up to the party to impose one particular form of art over another. That situation changed after 1929. Joseph Stalin eliminated all opposition. He wanted to control and direct artistic creation. In 1932, artistic groups were dissolved in favour of professional unions. In 1934, a few months after the premiere of “Lady Macbeth”, one of Stalin’s henchmen, Andrei Zhdanov advanced the mantra of socialist realism, a doctrine that although still vague was destined to hold sway over all the arts. The extraordinary period of experimentation triggered by the Revolution came to a close.

What was Shostakovich’s relationship with the Soviet regime?

N. L.-G.: Shostakovich was one of the so-called “Leftist artists”, heirs to the avant-gardists whose work developed frenetically during the heady enthusiasm of the 1920s when the future seemed full of possibilities. He collaborated with numerous artists of note. As such, the play The Bedbug enabled the young composer, who was barely 23 years old, to collaborate with author Vladimir Mayakovsky, director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and stage designer Alexander Rodchenko. But a cruel fate awaited many of the Leftist artists: Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930 and Meyerhold was executed in 1940. For Shostakovich, like Rodchenko, it was now, for better or worse, a question of composing in accordance with the wishes of the authorities.

“Lady Macbeth” depicts the difficult social condition of a Russian woman. How does that theme sit with the political concerns of those times?

N. L.-G.: The years following the October Revolution saw a genuine relaxation in terms of customs and mores: divorce became widespread, conventional family structures were fragmenting, sexual freedom was asserting itself, and women were becoming emancipated. The Stalinist period, by contrast, were years of intense conservatism: the regime promoted the return of lifestyles that were ultimately more bourgeois. It celebrated the virtues of marriage and promoted the return of traditional family values. Shostakovich’s opera, composed during the first years of the Stalinist era, stands at the cusp of two epochs.

We know that after its initial success, performances of the work were banned for thirty years. How do you explain that about-turn?

N. L.-G.: On January 28, 1936, an article masterminded by Stalin appeared in Pravda, entitled “Chaos replaces Music”. It assailed “Lady Macbeth” both in terms of substance—a plot narrative deemed scandalous—and in terms of form—the work was dismissed as “formalistic”. At that time, the word had extremely negative connotations. Formalism was looked upon as a “bourgeois” sickness which gave rise to works that were incomprehensible to the masses. The article in Pravda unleashed an extremely virulent campaign that would touch all the artistic disciplines. It was only after Nikita Khrushchev came to power that the State’s grip would ease slightly and the scope for experimentation would reappear for artists, albeit in a limited way. The version of “Lady Macbeth” performed during this period was renamed Katerina Ismailova and toned down considerably.


Red… About the exhibition

The exhibition Red. Art and Utopia in the Land of Soviets presents a collection of over 400 works conceived in a specific social and political context. Its chronological timeline begins in 1917 with the October Revolution and ends in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death.

It explores the way in which Communist society spawned specific forms of art. From the 1920s, which were marked by a large number of avant-garde concepts, to the 1930s which saw the affirmation of an aesthetic dogma, the exhibition covers all genres of the visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, cinema, design, and the graphic arts with works that, for the most part, have never been previously displayed in France.

Through their works, artists such as Rodchenko, Malevich, and Klutsis wanted to help build socialism and contribute to the transformation of the lives of the masses. It is that history, its tensions, its fervour and its reversals which the exhibition presents by exploring the question of the potential politicisation of the arts.

Exhibition organised by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais and the Centre Pompidou Musée d’art moderne. Grand Palais, Galeries Nationales, from March 20 through July 1, 2019

Curator of the exhibition : Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov - scenography : Valentina Dodi and Nicolas Groult

Draw-me Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Watch the video

Understand the plot in 1 minute

1:15 min

Draw-me Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

By Octave

Of Shostakovich’s initial undertaking – a trilogy on the tragic destinies of Russian women through the ages – only one opera was ever written: the hard-hitting Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Although one of the mainsprings of the work, the Shakespearean parallel is here bitterly ironic: unlike Lady Macbeth, Katerina Ismaïlova who, in the remote reaches of rural 19th century Russia, falls in love with one of her husband’s employees and is finally forced to commit suicide, is less a manipulator than a victim of a violent and patriarchal society. Krzysztof Warlikowski liberates all the subversive power of this scorching and scandalous work, which marked the early years of the Opéra Bastille.

© Markus Werner / OnP

Requiem for a Russian woman

Watch the video

Interview with Ingo Metzmacher

6:52 min

Requiem for a Russian woman

By Marion Mirande

Inspired by the profile of an adulterous and murderous woman, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" is a work whose sexual energy did not escape Stalin when he discovered it in 1936. From then onwards, publicly accused of pornography, Dmitry Shostakovich lived in fear of being deported to Siberia, just like his heroine Katerina Izmailov. Ingo Metzmacher, conducting this new production, discusses the score's subversive force and his choice to punctuate the third and fourth acts with the Soviet composer's Quartet No. 8.

© DR

Sergei, the villain

Watch the video

Meet with Pavel Černoch

3:16 min

Sergei, the villain

By Cyril Pesenti

In Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an opera by Dmitri Chostakovitch, Sergei is an object of desire. In this subversive production by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Pavel Černoch has free rein to interpret a powerful and passionate Sergei. The Czech tenor, normally best known for his prince roles, seems delighted to play this evil character.

Podcast Lady Macbeth de Mzensk

Listen the podcast

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" - by France Musique

07 min

Podcast Lady Macbeth de Mzensk

By Nathalie Moller, France Musique

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" offers original incursions into the season thanks to broadcasts produced by France Musique and the Paris Opera. For each opera or ballet production, Nathalie Moller (opera) and Jean-Baptiste Urbain (dance), present the works and artists you are going to discover when you attend performances in our theatres. 

© Bernd Uhlig / OnP

Katerina or passion

Watch the video

Interview with Aušrinė Stundytė

5:38 min

Katerina or passion

By Marion Mirande

Shostakovich claimed to see a profound humanity in his criminal character Katerina Ismailova. When the burden of a degrading patriarchal society becomes too great, is there any feeling more human than that of wanting to be passionately loved and desired? Guided by Krzysztof Warlikowski, the flamboyant Lithuanian soprano makes her Paris Opera debut in the title role of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk .

© FineArtImages/Leemage

“Brother humans who live after us”

Read the article

Lady Macbeth, the reasons for a scandal

06 min

“Brother humans who live after us”

By Charlotte Ginot-Slacik

The text remains famous: On January 28, 1936, the newspaper Pravda (Truth) published an editorial entitled “Chaos replaces music” which took aim at Dmitri Shostakovich’s latest opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Dissonant modernity and neurasthenic amorality were cited as proof of the young composer’s “petit-bourgeois” spirit. Behind these moralistic and aesthetic attacks, was Stalin’s rush to curg the composer based more on intrinsically political considerations?


Let us go back in time.
1932: The young composer had just completed his second opera, a tale of the violent liberation of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage and left to suffocate in her world of provincial merchants. “I saw in Katerina Ismailova a beautiful, talented and energetic woman who dies in the midst of a morbid and oppressive family environment in bourgeoise and feudal Russia1 ” (Shostakovich).
That same year, the Communist Party dissolved the artistic associations that until then had guaranteed a certain aesthetic tolerance and transformed them into a system of unions which would henceforth govern all aspects of musical life.
1934: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District premieres simultaneously in Moscow and Leningrad. That same year, the Moscow trials trigger the elimination of Stalin’s presumed and known political opponents.
1936: The publication of “Chaos replaces music”.
That same year, the Great Purges form a mass-elimination within the Soviet Union’s civilian population.

The closeness of the dates is striking. As the work was gaining momentum, the vice was tightening in the U.S.S.R. “We are like rabbits in a boa constrictor’s cage. In the blink of an eye, someone else disappears. We feel that the circle is tightening and tightening. At first, it was only people we distantly knew. Then it became friends, then my husband and Witek. Now it’s my father and Doulia. Every day, someone disappears. It doesn’t stop.” (Diary of Emma Korzeniowska, September 19372)
Undeniably, Katerina Ismailova, a triple-murdering adulteress, dominated by her carnal desires, remained alien to the new ideal of the strong, positive, altruistic Soviet woman. “No man will hold me by the waist, no man will put his lips on mine / no man will caress my white breast, no man will exhaust me with his passionate desire…” so sings the heroine in the first act. To read Shostakovich, this yearning for desire has a political dimension: “In Lady Macbeth, I sought to create a satire that could reveal, unmask and spawn contempt towards the appalling arbitrariness and oppression of the way of life of the merchant classes3.” The work was also part of a much larger project that the musician wanted to devote to the Russian woman, leading to the evocation of female emancipation in the Soviet Union. Lady Macbeth was to have been the first component, focusing on the oppression of women in the Tsarist era. Shostakovich hereby reveals himself to be a reader of Dostoevsky who, from the middle of the 19th century, was calling for the emancipation of women: “The more society evolves correctly, the more it will normalise and the closer we will get to the ideal of humanity and our attitude towards women will be determined by itself, without preliminary projects and utopian imagination4 .” By subversively ridiculing the moral and political authority (police officers, judges…), the heroine’s desires and their murderous consequences destabilise the entire domestic and social order.
Even more than the explicit portrayal of the love act at the end of Act I, it is the carnal desire that has become a factor in the destruction of moral values and social authority which for us seems extremely shocking. At a time when Soviet society was reinforcing familiar principles (family stability, patriotic nationalism), Shostakovich’s unbridled individualism in hindsight seemed like a reckless provocation.

Dmitri Chostakovitch dirigeant un orchestre (URSS), 1930. Photographie de Boris Ignatovitch
Dmitri Chostakovitch dirigeant un orchestre (URSS), 1930. Photographie de Boris Ignatovitch © Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône / adoc-photos

The Gulags—a second scandal
The creative process of Lady Macbeth ran counter to the policy shifts initiated by the Soviet authorities. The disappearance of individuals and arbitrary arrests became increasingly common. In that sense, the work was a tragic augur of the Great Purges. The portrait of the prison outlined by the musician is all the more unbearable. Wretched were the prisoners who were forced down that road. Almost six years after Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, Shostakovich’s portrayal of prison life again reminds us of Dostoevsky’s writings: “Every human being, whoever he may be, however base he may be, instinctively and unconsciously retains a demand: that his human dignity be respected. The prisoner knows that he is a prisoner, a pariah, and he knows his place in the hierarchy: however, no red-hot iron, no chain can make him forget that he is a human being. And since it is a fact that he is a human being we must therefore treat him as such5.”

Following the heroine’s final murder, spawned out of jealousy for her former lover’s preference for a younger inmate, the prisoners resume their journey, singing of the vastness of the Siberian steppes. Shostakovich embellishes this tragic denouement (which incidentally remains incompatible with the optimism of socialist realism!) with one of the most celebrated chorales by Bach, “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” BWV 639: “I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ”. The convicts are transformed into universal figures, namely, prisoners with pathos. The moving chant borrowed from Bach turns the “human brothers” into culprits whose crimes cannot overshadow the suffering. The prison ethic according to Shostakovich is one of compassion. Was this not the work’s inexpiable crime during the dark days of the Great Purges?


1.  SHOSTAKOVITCH, (Dimitri), in “Soviet Art”, 14 December 1933, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Paris, Avant-Scène Opéra N° 141, April 2011, p. 71   
2. KIZNY (Tomasz), The Great Terror in the USSR, 1937-1938, Paris, Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2013, p.87 
3. SHOSTAKOVITCH (Dimitri), Ibid., p. 70.    
4. DOSTOEVSKY (Fédor), Récits, chroniques et polémiques, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 1144.   
5.  DOSTOEVSKY (Fédor), Carnets de la maison des morts, Actes-Sud, Babel, 1999    . 

© plainpicture/Millennium/Benedetta Casagrande

Transgression in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Read the article

How music violated Soviet morality

07 min

Transgression in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

By Etienne Barilier

Composed under Stalin, Shostakovich’s opera is a cry of carnal passion. But perhaps more than the idea of sensuality, exacerbated by the orchestra, it is that of liberty that the composer seemed to have wished to express.

In the edition of Pravda that, on 28th January 1936, condemned Shostakovich’s opera to public obloquy, stupidity really wore the visage of a bull ready to charge. The article denounced and threatened the composer as an enemy of the people. Enough to make anyone tremble, all the more so in that it had been directly inspired if not written by Stalin in person, who had been present at the performance. The tirade reproached the composer for two reasons: he had written a cacophonie (the word was in French in the original text), and he had represented love “in its most vulgar form”. But these two criticism were one and the same: “The music clucks, rumbles, gasps and puffs to represent the love scenes with realism”. Or again: “This is musical noise called upon to express passion”. On this point, the article was right: the transgression was, in effect, two-fold. Words and music.
In the libretto, Shostakovich dared to speak of love and depict love in the crudest manner. And to that end, he did not hesitate to modify the text of the novella from which he drew his inspiration. Witness this sequence in which, in Leskov, Katerina’s servant has herself weighed in a barrel, a scene that, under Shostakovich’s pen becomes a collective rape. Witness also the character of the father-in-law, even more libidinous than he is pitiless; he whips the lover before his daughter-in-law’s eyes, experiencing through this action genuine sexual pleasure. Witness yet again the manner in which the husband’s impotence is announced, not to mention the scenes in which the desire that inhabits the heroine is expressed in its raw state, without the slightest circumlocution: “The stallion hastens to join the mare, the tom howls for the she-cat, the pigeon seeks the dove. But no one rushes towards me [...] No one presses his lips against mine, nobody caresses my white bosom, no one arouses me with a passionate caress.”
So much for the text. As for the music, it never fails to express desire in all its fullness, sexual passion in all its fury. It conveys such violence to the impulses that inhabit the characters that the murders they commit seem natural to us: the paroxysms of a savage, almost raging love. This is not to suggest that Shostakovich does not offer us passages of tenderness and lyricism. Thus, at the very beginning, Katerina’s song which recounts her boredom at having nothing to do, an almost romantic ennui; one is reminded, for a moment, of Emma Bovary. Here the music seems innocent, evoking a Russian folk song. However, an insistent pounding in the bass provides a dark counter-rhythm to the melody: the nagging throb of desire.
At the end of the first act, Katerina, in her tortured solitude, groans her need for a lover. A moment before, when her father-in-law orders her to go to bed, a recurring motif can be heard in the strings, soft but obsessive. Then follow drum rolls and a creeping figure in the bass clarinet. Then in the vocal line the sexually explicit “The stallion hastens to join the mare” emerges, accompanied by sumptuous strings, whilst the latent threat in the bass clarinet persists. Little by little, the vocal line becomes a desperate cry, which is not without evoking the fury of Salome. This is the music of imbalance and frustration.
Soon the harp can be heard, followed by the celesta, shreds of innocence. Sergei approaches, accompanied ironically by the piccolo, drum rolls in the timpani and derisory notes in the celesta. The melody has an ironic, skipping lilt. Its false gaiety teeters above the abyss; hypocritical flirting, before desire is unleashed in all its stark reality. The least one can say is that the music is worthy of the text. It soon supplants it, gasping with the characters’ bodies, in an amorous struggle that is a struggle for life itself. A terrifying, suffocating progression, which could be that of an act of carnage, or which is precisely that, for does not the very word carnage signify the consummation of the flesh, the ravaging of the flesh? Explosions in the brass, spiralling motifs in the strings, maniacal glissandi in the trombones and bombarding percussion. Literally, with rare ferocity, shots are fired. Then everything breaks down and collapses, in an abrupt post-orgasmic detumescence.
At the very end of the opera, the same percussion instruments that expressed desire beat out the march towards death, that of the convicts in the steppe. Only Wozzeck had previously explored these remote regions – and we know that Shostakovich had been strongly impressed by Alban Berg’s opera. The music then is as transgressive as the libretto. Not only because it accompanies with its precise hurricanes the violence of the text, but also because Shostakovich combined in it all kinds of musical languages (tonal, modal, plurimodal, chromatic and atonal), whilst making use of unusual combinations of instruments and timbres and of constant changes of atmosphere in a sort of vertiginous iridescence: enough to provoke cries of “left-wing chaos” from Pravda.

Dmitri Chostakovitch lisant La Pravda
Dmitri Chostakovitch lisant La Pravda © akg-images / Sputnik

But perhaps there was still more, something that is the real mark of Shostakovich, of whom we are never sure if his music represents a mask or a face: an inextricable mixture of tragedy and satire, of lyricism and sarcasm, of emotion and irony, of gravity and laughter. A work of extreme pliability and emotional complexity. And, in addition, a fundamentally ambiguous vision of the human soul. This ambiguity could well have been both the cause and the consequence of the oppression the composer endured during his life. The cause, because even despite his most desperate endeavours, the composer remained incapable of writing music that was simple, realist and socialist. The consequence because his inherent richness and subtlety, under the influence of fear, were perhaps constrained to become dissimulation, a salutary ambivalence, as in the famous Symphony no. 5, acknowledged by the establishment the year after his condemnation in Pravda (in 1937) as a song of triumph and a sign of the composer’s repentance, but one can also find it cruelly and deliberately hollow. At the beginning of the thirties, when Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was written, the complexity, the indefinability of Shostakovich was certainly not the result of dissimulation. Except perhaps in the scene in which the police sergeant expresses a wish to search Katerina’s house simply because he has not been invited to her wedding. “We need a reason” he ruminates cynically, “but a reason, that can always be found”. A denunciation of Czarist arbitrariness, it would seem. Shostakovich was thus irreproachable. But it doubtless fooled nobody, least of all Stalin, a past master in the art of “finding reasons”.
This allusion, however, despite its mortal insolence, cannot have irritated the father of the people as much as the opera’s music, which was guilty of the ultimate crime, that of saying: no, the world is not as simple as a despot’s dream. Taken all in all, the erotic transgression of the work, and the impression it gave of saying and showing everything immodestly, masked an even graver transgression, that of complexity, of ambiguity. A true artist, the eternal enemy of those terrible agents of simplification, never ceases to suggest that, although the human body can be stripped bare, the soul never will be entirely.

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Get samples of the operas and ballets at the Paris Opera gift shops: programmes, books, recordings, and also stationery, jewellery, shirts, homeware and honey from Paris Opera.

Opéra Bastille
  • Open 1h before performances and until performances end
  • Get in from within the theatre’s public areas
  • For more information: +33 1 40 01 17 82

Opéra Bastille

Place de la Bastille

75012 Paris

Public transport

Underground Bastille (lignes 1, 5 et 8), Gare de Lyon (RER)

Bus 29, 69, 76, 86, 87, 91, N01, N02, N11, N16

Calculate my route
Car park

Q-Park Opéra Bastille 34, rue de Lyon 75012 Paris

Book your parking spot

In both our venues, discounted tickets are sold at the box offices from 30 minutes before the show:

  • €35 tickets for under-28s, unemployed people (with documentary proof less than 3 months old) and senior citizens over 65 with non-taxable income (proof of tax exemption for the current year required)
  • €70 tickets for senior citizens over 65

Get samples of the operas and ballets at the Paris Opera gift shops: programmes, books, recordings, and also stationery, jewellery, shirts, homeware and honey from Paris Opera.

Opéra Bastille
  • Open 1h before performances and until performances end
  • Get in from within the theatre’s public areas
  • For more information: +33 1 40 01 17 82

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