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It is a mystery why Shostakovich\u2019s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk<\/i>\u00a0is performed so rarely. This wild opera was written in 1932 and it only premiered at the Met in 1994 with a production by Graham Vick that returned last Monday. The production remains silly, the opera magnificent.<\/p>\n
The superb cast stars Eva-Maria Westbroek as a captivating and indefatigable Ledi<\/i>, Katerina Ismailova. We meet her dozing in front of a TV, and when she gets up to look for something to do in the fridge, it is with a petulant wiggle. Anatoli Kotscherga is preposterously menacing as her leering father-in-law Boris; vulgarity pokes out of him like hair, and if I don\u2019t especially recall Brandon Jovanovich\u2019s Sergei or Raymond Very\u2019s Vinovy, it must be because the first two were so good. Some supporting singers stood out, like Vladimir Ognovenko, who was almost too beautiful as the Police Sargeant, Dmitry Belosselskiy as a kind old convict, and Oksana Volkova as the purring Sonetka.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth dealing with US Customs\u2014”Opera? Ooh.” He said, and spat on the floor\u2014just to hear this Ledi<\/i>, which continues through November 29<\/span><\/a>, but it\u2019s ironic that the opera is difficult to see (the COC last performed it in 2007) since its incredible popularity was part of the reason the Soviets banned it from 1936 until 1961. It\u2019s a well-known story: Shostakovich and librettist Alexander Preis write an opera based on Nikolai Leskov\u2019s famous story of 1865, itself based on real events of a provincial murderess; the opera premieres in 1934, is performed nearly 200 times in the USSR, and becomes an international sensation before Stalin sees it in Moscow in 1936 and walks out. Two days later, an editorial in Pravda attacks Shostakovich for musical inaccessibility and\u2014more bizarrely\u2014misreads Katerina\u2019s murders as motivated by the greed of a \u201cbourgeois huntress\u201d.<\/p>\n This is weird. It\u2019s actually an easier charge to level at Leskov\u2019s story, which is definitely pre-revolutionary and includes the horrific murder of a child who threatens Katerina\u2019s claim to her husband\u2019s property. Shostakovich and Pries cut this murder, number three, because it is hard to sympathize with a woman who suffocates a nine-year old with a pillow between her breasts. In the opera, she is just lonely and horny; nothing suggests she cares about money.<\/p>\n She is not, however, passive. Katerina poisons her father in law and strangles her husband when they get in the way of her relationship with one of their workers, Sergei. But she does not initiate the affair. Sergei\u2019s idea of an icebreaker is standing around thrusting, and this mute Elvis only opens his mouth after Katerina interrupts a gang rape, and then only to mock her. When he comes to her that night, uninvited, she resists him. Shostakovich cut her most sexually charged aria, \u201cThe Foal Runs After The Filly\u201d before Sergei\u2019s arrival, perhaps to make his advances appear less welcome. This production restores it, but their encounter continues in the key of sexual aggression anyway. Then she takes the lead in violence for a while.<\/p>\n So, as Rostropovich put it, \u201cis she a swine or not a swine?\u201d<\/p>\n This ambiguity needs careful tending or it collapses in the opera\u2019s satirical abundance. Shostakovich\u2019s music mocks all the characters except Katerina, who has the only earnest, folksy arias. Until Ledi<\/i>, Shostakovich\u2019s stage works were grotesques modelled on Gogol, an “industrial ballet” called The Bolt<\/i>, another about a football team, Golden Age<\/i>, and finally The Nose<\/i>, actually based on Gogol\u2019s story. Lady Macbeth isn\u2019t as jagged as The Nose<\/i>, but it\u2019s still carried by the manic vitality of the music rather than by dramatic consistency.<\/p>\n Ledi<\/i> was intended to be a very Soviet critique of pre-revolutionary culture, focused on the life of women. Shostakovich wrote that \u201cI want to write a Soviet Ring<\/i>. The first operatic tetralogy about women, of which Lady Macbeth<\/i> will be the Rheingold<\/i>. This will be followed by an opera around the heroine of the People’s Will Movement [the assassins of Alexander II]. Then a woman of our century; and finally I will create our Soviet heroine, who will combine in her character the qualities of the woman of today and tomorrow.”<\/p>\n This project was probably incompatible with official Soviet culture before 1934\u2014it\u2019s not coincidental that Stalin banned non-therapeutic abortions the same year he banned Ledi<\/i>. Mores were changing, and he would change them even more. World war and a civil war increased the number of orphaned and abandoned children to about 7 million by 1921; the divorce rate tripled in the USSR between 1924 and 1927; and the arc of revolutionary attitudes towards sex can be traced in the career of Central-Committee member and feminist Alexandra Kollontai, who struggled against reactionaries including a \u201cMarxist Psychoneurologist\u201d called Zalkand and his \u201cTwelve Commandments\u201d against things like sexual activity before twenty-five, attraction to a class enemy, and too-frequent sex. (This paragraph and more brought to you by Elizabeth A. Well\u2019s fascinating article<\/span><\/a>.)<\/p>\n The Pravda editorial made it clear that sexual politics were a big part of the problem. \u201cThe composer has tried, with all the musical and dramatic means at his command, to arouse the sympathy of the spectators for the coarse and vulgar inclinations and behaviour of the merchant woman Katerina Ismailova.\u201d But Vick\u2019s production is too cartoonish to sustain the sympathy, and it seems to mock Shostakovich as he makes fun of his cretinous characters. This risks turning the opera into a farce\u2014a game that can end very badly.<\/p>\n Visual clich\u00e9s from Socialist Realism to Surrealism and Pop are thrown together in a 50s setting that could be the USSR or the United States. Later imagery and costumes suggest the former, but it doesn\u2019t seem to matter much. Scene changes are inexplicably sexed up with workers showering and brides fondling vacuum cleaners; police strip to reveal superhero underwear; Katerina and Sergei\u2019s wedding becomes a pornorama. None of this is totally alien to the music, which includes circus motifs and plenty of obscene noises, but the exaggeration is artless.<\/p>\n The latrine hurts most of all. Like Chekhov\u2019s gun on the mantlepiece, a pit latrine is onstage for a long time before Katerina hides there to snatch Sonetka\u2014Sergei\u2019s new prison lover\u2014by the heel and drown them both. This degradation buries her as a slave to her needs for sex and love, but Shostakovich intended an ending after Leskov, who wrote admiringly that Katerina tackles Sonetka overboard like \u201ca strong pike on a soft-finned little roach\u201d. This ambiguity is central to the opera and should be restored.<\/p>\n The production has its strengths, too, beyond the astonishing vocal talent. In an early scene, Boris orders to Katerina to bed, and he remains onstage watching TV and swilling beer while she sings suggestively about her loneliness. He\u2019s \u2018the man\u2019 nearby, and this visual replacement of son by father reinforces Boris\u2019 unpleasantly sexual role in the opera. At one point he sings about what he\u2019d do to Katerina if he were younger. Then there\u2019s the terrifying three-story rose that rises behind the set like a nuclear cloud when Sergei first visits Katerina. It\u2019s so big that they literally couple in its shadow, a distraction that increases the shock of the famous ejaculatory trombones.<\/p>\n Conlon worked the pit with laid back finesse and produced a performance that sounded much more sophisticated than it looked. But productions come and go, and Ledi<\/i>\u00a0will always be a tragedy if you know her story. There are few works that so ferociously convey an individual spirit and leave you mourning, not for Katerina, but for the operas Shostakovich never wrote.<\/p>\n