World premiere: 22 January 1934, State Academic Maly Opera Theatre, Leningrad
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre and premiere of this production:
20 May 1995 – Katerina Izmailova, revised version of opera
21 June 1996 – Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, original version
Performance running time: 4 hours
The performance has two intevals
“In our parts such characters sometimes turn up that, however many years ago you met them, you can never recall them without an inner trembling. Such characters include the merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who was once embroiled in a fearsome drama, following which our nobles, at someone’s easy word, began to call her Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” Leskov’s tale of the murderous merchant’s wife Izmailova, whose crimes are commensurate with the atrocities of Shakespeare’s heroine, was published in 1865 and clearly entered into polemics with Ostrovsky’s The Storm (1859). With Leskov, Katerina is certainly no “sunbeam in a dark kingdom”, the author telling of a bored and indulgent woman ironically, describing her unseemly actions with the keen observation of a prosecutor. The twenty-five-year-old Shostakovich took a completely different approach to his own heroine, and in his opera she is a proud and powerful young woman, reckless in her passion and fearless in her rebelliousness. In undertaking to be her protector, the composer unmasks her entourage: the cruel and lustful father-in-law, her miserable excuse for a husband, the rude servant, the drunken priest, the bribe-taking police officers and, most importantly, the chosen one himself, a haberdashery gigolo and a coward.
Shostakovich, for many years a pianist accompanying silent films, had a perfect awareness of the nerve and tempo of drama. In his thriller the tension is pumped up gradually then it explodes with heart-rending climaxes: a composer using “close-ups”, with physiological details, in the music he reproduces scenes of violence and murder, tenderness and cruelty, the chaos of despair and insensibility on the verge of death. The audience is left afraid, ashamed and bitter. And at times it is amusing – because, spurred on by Leskov’s subtle irony, the librettist-composer eagerly mixes satire into the tragedy, generously drawing on expressions from the texts of Chekhov, Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin.
In 1995 the Mariinsky Theatre entrusted a production of the opera to an old-style stage director and a designer from a totally different generation. Irina Molostova had staged Katerina Izmailova back in 1965 in Kiev when, after a long period of disgrace, Shostakovich’s opera, a victim of the Communist Party’s editorial Muddle Instead of Music (1936), returned to the stage. At the Mariinsky Theatre Molostova’s production remains true to the psychological theatre of various experiences and true-to-life mise en scènes. American designer George Tsypin appeared as an architect, proposing a mobile construction rather than the typical picturesque sets. Before the very eyes of the audience, the “boardwalk” house of the Izmailovs cunningly transforms into a courtyard or a police station or a prison camp as required. When, after the first murder, the sets burst open as huge gates leading to endless darkness, from the orchestra pit amid the threatening sounds of a passacaglia the orchestra suddenly flares up – as the embodiment of fate and as the inevitability of punishment. Anna Petrova
Co-production with the New Israeli Opera
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