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Topic: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (opera)

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	file_nav_name Encyclopedia Index
		Roberto Devereux is a tragedia lirica, or tragic opera, by Gaetano Donizetti.
		The GÃ¶teborgsOperan or Gothenburg Opera is an opera house in Gothenburg, Sweden.
		Dido and Aeneas is an opera by the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell, from a libretto by Nahum Tate.
	www.brainyencyclopedia.com /topics/opera.html (8648 words)

	Macbeth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		On the stage, Lady Macbeth is considered one of the more difficult female roles because of her intensity and varied emotions.
		Macbeth and Banquo with the witches by Johann Heinrich Füssli.
		Macbeth delivers a famous nihilistic soliloquy ("Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" etc.) upon learning of Lady Macbeth's death (the cause of it is unexplained although it is generally assumed that she committed suicide).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Macbeth (3897 words)

	Lady Macbeth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Lady Macbeth was the title of Queen Gruoch of Scotland (queen consort to King Macbeth of Scotland) before her husband ascended to the throne of Scotland.
		Lady Macbeth is the name of a fictional character in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, based on the historical Scottish queen.
		Lady Macbeth in the Andrzej Wajda film Siberian Lady Macbeth, also based on the Leskov novel.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Lady_Macbeth (191 words)

	Opera Chronology - Multimedia - MSN Encarta
		The opera is full of delightful melodies and ensembles, such as the sextet when the newly married Lucia falls in love, but her climactic mad scene is one of the great vehicles and tests for the coloratura soprano.
		Puccini was from a family of opera composers, and this, his third attempt, won acclaim, particularly for its freshness of sound and fine choral writing.
		Written when Strauss was 78, his last opera may not have repeated the triumphs of his hey-day, but the conversation-piece on the value of words and music in opera is a worthy coda.
	uk.encarta.msn.com /media_461542336_761570299_-1_1/Opera_Chronology.html (2998 words)

	11lady macbeth (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Like Lady Macbeth, the first crime leads to all the rest and Katerina Izmailova, feeling herself sullied by the blood she has shed so many times, could ask, like Shakespeare’s character: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”.
		In the opera this tone –that of a true-to-life, horrifying, moralizing chronicle– is replaced by a viewpoint closer to that of the main character.
		This opera was born, blossomed and died, theatrically speaking, around the birth, satisfaction and eclipse of Shostakovich’s love for Nina Vasar, to whom, indeed, he gave the manuscript.
	www.amicsliceu.com /temp0203/ang/a11ladymacbeth.html (4074 words)

	OperaWorld.com's Opera Insights: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
		The opera was the catalyst which set into motion the subjugation of all Soviet artists to the creative control of the Communist Party.
		Two years after its premiere, the opera had been performed close to 200 times---and in many countries throughout the world---and was hailed as the first major Soviet opera.
		Lady Macbeth disappeared from the repertory as a work not worthy of the Soviet people, and Shostakovich's opera became the quintessential example of "formalism," a type of art that all artists were to reject if they wanted to avoid the suppression of their works, a trip to the Gulag, or a sudden disappearance.
	www.operaworld.com /special/mtensk.shtml (1174 words)

	Lady MacBeth of Metsensk
		Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is the story of a house wife who yearns for happiness and love but ends up rejected and utterly alone.
		Irina Molostova,currently director of the Kiev Opera and Ballet, knew Shostakovich in the early days of Lady Macbeth and claims that either view, be it Shostakovich as a kind of court composer to the communist party or as a carefully rebellious closet dissident is wrong.
		Lady Macbeth is one of the all time masterpieces of the Twentieth Century repertoire, and not just in the world of opera but as a stand-alone symphonic work of tremendous emotional depth.
	www.benisrael.com /htm/macbeth.htm (4389 words)

	Verdi's Classic Vital Again
		In February, the company introduced an exciting new production of "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District." It was the first staging by a Moscow company of Shostakovich's opera in its original version since 1936, when Stalin's famous attack on the opera signaled a crackdown on all the arts.
		In a country where only a handful of the best-known Verdi operas are performed, "Macbeth" is a true rarity, just as it was in the West until singers like Maria Callas, Leonie Rysanek and Leonard Warren turned their attentions to it in the 1950s.
		The role of Lady Macbeth is notoriously demanding, and it must be said that, at times during the performance, one feared for the vocal well-being of the young soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva.
	www.themoscowtimes.com /stories/2000/05/12/109-print.html (781 words)

	Bulgarian Operas
		The history of native opera in Bulgaria is in practice the history of its composers.
		The dramatic nature of this opera (comparable in style to Janacek's Jenufa and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District) is consistent with that of its subject matter, the Turkish invasion of Bulgaria, and reveals expressionist and symbolist qualities.
		The development of Bulgarian opera after the 1944 socialist revolution reflected a new social and cultural environment, in that the customary freedom of treatment of the two most frequently encountered genres associated with the Romantic aesthetic - the heroic-historical opera and the comic opera based on everyday life - was now strictly proscribed.
	www.ucis.pitt.edu /opera/BULGOP/comp/history.htm (763 words)

	Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich
		But the culminating achievement of these quick-witted, nervy years was his second opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, where high emotion and acid parody are brought together in a score of immense brilliance.
		However, in that same year Lady Macbeth was fiercely attacked in Pravda, and he set aside his completed Symphony no.4 (it was not performed until 1961), no doubt fearing that its Mahlerian intensity and complexity would spur further criticism.
		There were to be no more operas or ballets, excepting a comedy and a revision of Lady Macbeth; instead he devoted himself to symphonies, concertos, quartets and songs (as well as heroic, exhortatory cantatas during the war years).
	uhaweb.hartford.edu /KARPYUK/shostakovich.htm (449 words)

	Friends of the Salzburg Festival
		In the same year Dmitry Shostakovich took as the source of his opera a short story called Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, written in 1864 by Nikolai Leskov, which in turn was based on a capital offence that had actually been committed.
		It is the opera that introduces the idea of her being subjected to the sexual harassments of her despotic father-in-law, a fact that makes the neglect of her impotent husband Sinovi all the more gross and blatant.
		Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District: Thriller and Psychodrama
	www.festspielfreunde.at /english/frames/200105/ef_200105_04.htm (668 words)

	'LADY MACBETH'- AN OPERATIC CHALLENGE - New York Times
		Ciulei's ''Lady Macbeth'' was first staged at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in July, 1980; the production has now crossed the Atlantic to South Carolina with the same sets, costumes, cast and conductor (another Rumanian, Christian Badea), and was scheduled to open last night.
		In 1956 Shostakovich revised ''Lady Macbeth,'' his only full-lenght opera, and renamed it ''Katerina Izmailova'' - after its lustful and murderous heroine - in which smoother, more polished form the opera returned to the Soviet stage in 1962.
		Ciulei insists that it was for dramatic and musical reasons, not personal or political ones, that he was drawn to ''Lady Macbeth,'' one cannot help notice similarities in the careers of these two Eastern European artists, both of them familiar with the vagaries of governmental artistic oppression.
	query.nytimes.com /gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE1DB1238F930A15756C0A964948260 (642 words)

	OPERA REVIEW; Provincial Angst and Sex, Soviet Style - New York Times
		Updating an opera from its historical setting to the approximate present can often represent lazy thinking on the part of a director, a gimmicky way to make an older work seem relevant.
		This is the opera New York concertgoers have been reading about in program notes for the many events that have constituted the city's virtual, though unplanned, Shostakovich festival in recent weeks.
		The opera is drawn from an 1864 short story by Nikolai Leskov, a horrid tale of Katerina Ismailova, the frustrated, childless, murderous wife of a successful provincial merchant in mid-19th-century Russia.
	query.nytimes.com /gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EFD7173BF932A25750C0A9669C8B63 (698 words)

	"Title" Los Angeles Opera Review by Paul Berenson
		At The L. Opera, Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" is a thrilling production performed by The Kirov Opera of St. Petersburg.
		The Macbeth theme is not terribly obvious, but it's certainly there and brought down to the level of Russian peasants.
		Shostakovich wrote "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" when he was twenty-four years old, and he captures all of the emotion, energy, sexual passion, and pathos of a young man contemplating these and the social sensibilities and revolutionary aspects of the Soviet Union of the early 1930's.
	www.paulb.com /mtsenskprnt.htm (945 words)

	Hrvatsko narodno kazalište u Zagrebu - Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb
		Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, created after a novel by Nikolay Ljeskov and the libretto by Aleksandar Preis and the composer himself, had its successful world premiere in St. Petersburg in January 1934, whilst the famous Sergey Eisenstein directed the second production in Moscow.
		Shostakovich revised the opera in 1958, and the altered version titled Katarina Izmailova was first performed in January 1963 in Moscow.
		The Opera of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb performed this opera in January 1964, in the presence of the author himself, with Milan Horvat as conductor, Kosta Spaic as director and Zlatko Bourek as set designer.
	www.hnk.hr /en/novosti.php?m=1&y=2004 (1487 words)

	Canadian Opera Company (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		The libretto is written by Dmitri Shostakovich and Alexander Preis, after the novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov (1831 – 1895).
		The murder by Katerina of her nephew (who stands to inherit the family fortune) is left out of the opera, and Zinovy is portrayed as a weak character, under his father’s thumb.
		In 1988, a gathering of scholars in Toronto entitled “The Ordeal of Lady Macbeth: Modern Opera and Cultural Politics in the 1930s” was jointly sponsored by York University, the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at University of Toronto, and the Canadian Opera Company.
	www.coc.ca /performances/lady_historical.html (427 words)

	News
		Moreover, due to time restrictions, such works as Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (first version) or "Anti-Formalist Rayok" could not be published.
		Polka) for string quartet, Moderato for cello and piano, marches for wind orchestra of the 1940s-1960s, adaptation of Russian folk songs "The Cudgel" and "Hey, Let's Bang!", survived fragments of the youth opera The Gypsies on the poem by Alexander Pushkin, and children's compositions for the piano.
		Five Interludes from the Opera Katerina Izmailova, Suite for Variety Symphony Orchestra in Eight Parts, and the author's version of Six Romances on Verses by British Poets for bass soloist and big symphony orchestra, Op.
	www.sikorski.de /articles/article142.html (672 words)

	The War Symphonies: Shostakovich Against Stalin. A video review for the Journal for MultiMedia History, Volume 2 (1999).
		Lady Macbeth premiered in early 1934; it met with overwhelmingly favorable response and was staged over 180 times.
		Two days afterward, a Pravda editorial blasted Lady Macbeth, calling it "chaos in place of music" and accusing Shostakovich of that most anti-Soviet of cultural crimes, "formalism." With the Stalinist terror of the 1930s about to go into high gear, such criticism was more than career-damaging.
		Like Lady Macbeth, this tragic and tumultuous work reflected a growing sense of fear and anxiety; consequently, it went unheard for a quarter-century.
	www.albany.edu /jmmh/vol2no1/warsymphonies.html (1608 words)

	SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975) The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District [RBr]: Classical Reviews- August 2001 MusicWeb(UK) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		In 1936 the opera was withdrawn from public performance, but twenty-five years later Shostakovich extensively revised it, omitting "controversial" scenes.
		In the two years prior to its withdrawal by the composer (with a cringing public "apology to the Soviet people") The Lady Macbeth received two hundred performances before enthusiastic audiences in Leningrad and Moscow, and was frequently presented outside the Soviet Union.
		Shostakovich explained that he wished it to describe "the fate of a woman who endures terrible life conditions in the age she is living through", adding "I want to explain all her crimes in this light, not through an inclination to be blood-thirsty".
	www.musicweb-international.com /classrev/2001/Aug01/ShostakovichLadyMacbeth.htm (876 words)

	Friends of the Salzburg Festival
		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.
		That the rage should have been engendered precisely by Lady Macbeth can hardly be seen as a coincidence.
		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.
	www.festspielfreunde.at /english/frames/200012/ef_200012_05.htm (692 words)

	BSO Online Conservatory - Dmitri Shostakovich - Biography
		Influenced by the "animal eroticism" found in Berg's opera Wozzeck, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth was hailed as a major achievement of socialist construction.
		It is tragic to contemplate that Lady Macbeth was condemned to oblivion for the next 25 years.
		After suffering in silence from the public attacks on his music in 1936, Shostakovich responded with his Fifth Symphony, which came to be known as "the creative reply of a Soviet artist to justified criticism." This reinstated Shostakovich as the foremost Soviet composer of the young generation.
	extranet.bso.org /conservatory/textVersion/shost_bio.asp?module=shostakovich (536 words)

	Shostakovich - Symphony No. 5 Cello Concerto No. 1
		It ran in part: 'The listener is flabbergasted from the first moment of the opera by an intentionally ungainly, muddled flood of sounds.
		Following this "music" is difficult, remembering it is impossible.' The subject was Shostakovich's internationally successful opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and the author, it now appears, was none other than Stalin himself.
		The moment in the opera from which the figure comes is the opening of the monastery scene, where the curtain rises to reveal the chronicler-monk Pimen writing at his desk.
	www.benjaminzander.com /news/detail.asp?id=161 (3597 words)

	Walt Disney Concert Hall - Piece Detail
		He had achieved international fame at age 20 with his First Symphony, and his 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District — with its explicit sexual content and sordid events — had reinforced that reputation in performances as far away as Cleveland, London, Zurich, Stockholm, and Buenos Aires.
		Not until the successful premiere of his Fifth Symphony in November 1937 was Shostakovich back, however tentatively, in official favor, and it was in the quiet aftermath of that success that — almost by accident — he composed his String Quartet No. 1.
		Curiously, the new quartet shows none of the raciness of the opera that got him into trouble and none of the heroism of the symphony that got him out of it.
	wdch.laphil.com /about/piece_detail.cfm?id=773&back=/tix/performance_detail.cfm?id=828;; (616 words)

	Opera Today : Lady Macbeth at the Bolshoi
		Dangerous Music When Stalin pulled Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth” from the Soviet stage, the composer had good reason to fear for his life.
		When Stalin pulled Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth” from the Soviet stage, the composer had good reason to fear for his life.
		Widely considered the greatest Russian opera — and perhaps even the greatest of all operas — of the 20th century, Dmitry Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” has led a troubled life over most of the 70 years since its dual premiere in Leningrad and Moscow.
	www.operatoday.com /content/2004/11/lady_macbeth_at.php (240 words)

	Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk / Anissimov, Secude, Ventris, Et Al \| ArkivMusic
		Dmitry Shostakovitch’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is unquestionably one of the greatest operas of the twentieth century.
		Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk received its premiere at the Maly Theatre in Leningrad in 1934.
		The story behind Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk offers an insight into Shostakovitch’s tormented life and the political, cultural and ideological persecution that took place in the Soviet communist world, notably under Stalin’s ruthless dictatorship that imposed the aesthetic of so-called ‘socialist realism.’
	www.arkivmusic.com /classical/album.jsp?album_id=91239 (280 words)

	CLASSICAL MUSIC ARCHIVES: Biography of Dmitry Shostakovich
		His opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and ballet Bright Stream had both been successfully prod.
		It is apparent now that Shostakovich soon became disillusioned with the Soviet system and that the intensifying darkness and bitterness of his work reflect a spiritual misery connected with external events (his attributed memoirs, published in the West in 1979, give convincing proof of his attitude).
		OPERAS: The Nose (Nos), Op.15 (1927-8); Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Ledi Makbet Mtsenskovo uyezda), Op.29 (1930-2) rev. 1955-63 as Katerina Izmaylova, Op.29/114; Moskva, Cheryomushki, musical comedy (ov.
	www.classicalarchives.com /bios/codm/shostakovich.html (1882 words)

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