Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
| Work data | |
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| Title: | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk |
| Original title: |
Леди Макбет Мценского уезда ( Ledi Makbet Mzenskowo ujesda ) |
Svetlana Sozdateleva as Katerina Ismailowa at the Teatro Comunale Bologna , 2014 |
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| Original language: | Russian |
| Music: | Dmitri Shostakovich |
| Libretto : | Alexander Prize based on the novel of the same name by Nikolai Leskow |
| Premiere: | January 22, 1934 |
| Place of premiere: | Maly Theater , Leningrad |
| Playing time: | approx. 2 ½ hours |
| Place and time of the action: | The district town of Mtsensk in the Russian Empire in 1865 |
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Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is an opera in 4 acts (9 images) by Dmitri Shostakovich and Alexander Preis based on Nikolai Leskov 's story of the same name . The second version of the opera, revised by Shostakovich, is titled Katerina Ismailowa ( Russian Катерина Измайлова ).
action
first act
The young and beautiful Katerina is married to the boring businessman Zinovi Borisovich Izmailov. She is bored by the uneventfulness of her life and suffers from her husband's inability to love and the tyrannical behavior of her father-in-law Boris Timofeevich. While her husband is on a business trip, Katerina steps in in the courtyard of the merchant's house when the manager and some workers, including the philanderer Sergei, are playing their merciless game with the fat old cook. Sergei challenges Katerina to a test of strength, who lets herself into it because she finds the daring worker attractive. Her father-in-law interrupts the wrestling match with loud ranting and refers Katerina into the house. Sergei comes into Katerina's room under the pretext of wanting to borrow a book and seduces her.
Second act
When Sergei leaves the room through the window, Katerina's father-in-law catches him, who grabs him and beats him almost to death. Katerina still has to bring her father-in-law something to eat, which she uses to mix rat poison into the food. Boris Timofeevich dies. Now Katerina regularly spends her nights with Sergei, but her conscience plagues her. When her husband unexpectedly returns in the middle of the night, Sergei can barely hide, but Sinowi is suspicious and discovers a strange belt with which he hits Katerina. Sergei comes out of hiding and, with Katerina's help, kills Sinowi.
Third act
Katerina can now marry Sergei, but while the line-up is ordered, a drunk man discovers Sinovi's body in the cellar and informs the police. The police burst into the wedding party and arrest Katerina and Sergei, whereupon they are sentenced to life-long forced labor .
Fourth act
During the transport to the forced labor camp, Katerina tries to get to Sergei and bribes a guard. But Sergei is now interested in young Sonjetka, who only wants to sleep with him if he can get her warm socks. Sergei ensnares Katerina and gets the stockings from her. When the latter sees through Sergei's plans, she kills Sonjetka by falling from a bridge and jumping into the raging river herself.
The template
The librettist Alexander Preis based the opera on the novella Lady Macbeth from the Mtsensk district by Nikolai Leskov , published in 1865. The great Russian writer was seen by the Soviet cultural bureaucracy as an annoying bourgeois author. Only this story was allowed to appear. In 1930 it came - albeit with interference by the censorship authority - as a “crude, erotic and criminal show piece” in Soviet theaters. The title character was supposed to be a chilling example of feminine sensuality.
Shostakovich therefore had to legitimize his choice of material in connection with the premiere. He wrote an essay for the premiere in which he claimed that "while retaining the full force of Leskow's narrative", he nevertheless interpreted the material critically and from a contemporary point of view. Above all, this meant a change in the "Lady": "Ekaterina Lvovna should leave the impression of a positive personality." In this way, he tried to excuse the strong eroticism she exudes in his opera.
But the librettist and composer also made other changes in order to achieve a sharper social statement: In the third act, for example, they gave the prisoners more space and made their suffering more clearly. They also added a critical entrance scene at the police station (7th picture) and removed a third murder (of Katerina Ismailova's nephew).
How to deal with eroticism
In research, Shostakovich's newly awakened interest in making eroticism a theme in his music is often explained with his personal experiences. So he had just met his great love and future wife Nina Warsar while playing tennis. She embodied the new type of "self-confident woman".
“I dedicate Lady Macbeth to my bride. It goes without saying that opera is also about love, but not only. "
His interest in the way the sexes interacted with one another was awakened. He began to observe the erotic behavior of his time and classify it historically. To Tsarist times had Domostroi been considered a Code , which regulated the domestic, social, political and religious life of the upper class. As a result, women were subject to the power of the householder and female sexuality was reduced to procreation. The revolution of 1917 had sprouted the idea of sexual freedom, which was still discussed in art and literature in the late 1920s. But a short time later, love and sexuality were again subject to the state power system.
“It [the opera] is also about how love could be if there was not wickedness all around. Love perishes because of these wickednesses all around. In the laws, in possessiveness, in greed, in the police machinery. If the circumstances were different, love would also be different. "
The musical design of Katerina
Shostakovich endowed his title character with three great musical moments. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, for example, is an opera that, contrary to conventions, does not open with an overture . Instead, she begins with an Arioso by Katerina, which describes her feelings and her situation as a merchant woman in the 18th century. (The model for this monologue is Modest Mussorgski's song cycle Without Sun from 1874.) An important term for this monologue is “skuka”, boredom, which in the course of the song increasingly stands for grief, gloom and melancholy. Katerina has lost her meaning in life, she lives without love, without joy. A topos of Russian art (such as in Chekhov's Three Sisters ). This lawsuit becomes the reason for her further action and thus her fate.
The second monologue (“Everything couples”) stands for the satisfaction of this pain of her life, which she seeks in sexuality. In a first version of the text, she compared herself to a "fervent mare". In the second version, Shostakovich changed this to a "turtling dove", but did not vary the music, which exudes a high level of eroticism. The paintings by the painter Boris Kustodijew , who liked to depict voluptuous, seductive women, contributed to this. Shostakovich had occupied himself with them at the time the aria was written and was inspired by them.
In the last act, the 9th picture, Katerina looks inward in a last big monologue and sums up her life. Here we come full circle: Satisfied sexuality brought only short-term joy and no inner stability, just an agonizing new dependence on its object of desire. The rhyming word for “skuka”, boredom, now forms “muka”, the agony.
history
Success and failure
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was the second (and at the same time last completed) opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, with which he caused a lot of uproar. He completed it in December 1932 and dedicated it to his bride Nina Warsar. Since two opera houses were interested in the work, there were two world premieres in quick succession. The first on January 22, 1934 in the Maly Theater in Leningrad , directed by Nikolay Smolich and the musical direction of Samuil Samossud, was a huge success. Two days later the second took place at the Nemirovich Danchenko Music Theater in Moscow . This production, directed by Vladimir Nemirowitsch-Danchenko, used a slightly shortened and modified version. For two years, the plant celebrated one success after another. It was performed in Cleveland as early as January 1935. Performances followed in New York, Philadelphia, Stockholm, Prague and Zurich.
Then came the evening of January 26, 1936. Stalin , Molotov , Mikoyan and Zhdanov honored the performance of the opera in the Bolshoi Theater in their government box, right above the orchestra pit, directly above the brass and drums. The box was secured with steel plates in order to prevent possible attacks, which additionally "tightened" the acoustics. Stalin was protected from the public by a curtain. After the performance, Stalin disappeared without having received the composer in his box, but is said to have amused himself with his companions, in particular at the drastically staged sleeping scene. On leaving the house, the correspondent for the government newspaper Izvestia Stalin who was present asked whether he had liked the performance. According to eyewitness Sergei Radamsky, he is said to have said: "This is a mess and not music!" On January 28, Pravda published an unsigned (that is, Party-approved) article, "Chaos Instead of Music", on Lady Macbeth . The slipping was catastrophic. The artistic director Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirowitsch-Danchenko , who initially let the opera continue to play in his theater despite the Pravda commentary, was asked shortly afterwards in an Izvestia article: "Does Nemirovich-Danchenko seriously believe that his theater is outside the Soviet Union?" Although he pointed out to the authorities that all performances were sold out for months, he had to discontinue the play. One after another, critics apologized and stumbled upon their previous opinions. The strongly dogmatized Soviet cultural policy, as propagated by Zhdanov, played a role in this. There was also the general public opinion that an opera had to follow the “principle of decency” and “create sublime objects”. This collided with Shostakovich's opera, in which a murderess is portrayed as a heroine.
While opera was banned in the Soviet Union, it continued to be successfully performed in the United States and in other European countries with the exception of Nazi Germany. After Shostakovich had protested in 1950 against a production of Lady Macbeth von Mzensk planned in Kassel , in 1959 he allowed the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf to have a "last world performance" with the declaration that he was working on a new version of the opera. This production, directed by Bohumil Herlischka , called Lady Macbeth in the Country, in a German translation by Reinhold Schubert, was also the German premiere of the opera. Alberto Erede was the musical director . Erika Wien sang the role of Katerina .
Katerina Ismailova
The new version, which Shostakovich had been working on since 1956, was finally given the title Katerina Ismailowa and was premiered on January 8, 1963, during the thaw under Nikita Khrushchev , at the Stanislavski-Nemirowitsch-Danschenko Music Theater in Moscow. Shostakovich severely defused some of the most disreputable text passages, especially those with an erotic theme. He also softened the most extreme instrumental effects and vocals. Overall, there was a more moralizing representation of the plot. However, some of these defuses had already taken place before the print edition was banned in 1935.
Reintroduction of the original version
In 1979, four years after Shostakovich's death, Mstislaw Rostropovich brought a copy of the score of the original version from 1932 to the West, which he recorded on phonograms in Paris. The score was published in the same year with a German translation by Jörg Morgener and Siegfried Schoenbohm under the title Lady Macbeth von Mzensk bei Sikorski . This version was first staged in German in 1980 in Wuppertal and then prevailed over the revised version in the western world. Only in the successor states of the Soviet Union was the new version still relevant. It was not until 1996 that Valery Gergiev performed both versions side by side at the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg. The first Moscow performance of the original version took place in 2000 at the local Helikon Opera .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Laurel Fay: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
- ↑ a b c Sigrid Neef : Music from a time of hatred. Contribution to the program of the performance in the Aalto-Theater Essen, 1995/1996
- ↑ Sergei Radamsky: The persecuted tenor - my singing life between Moscow and Hollywood , Munich 1972
- ↑ Sergei Radamsky: The persecuted tenor - my singing life between Moscow and Hollywood , Munich 1972
- ↑ German translation of the Pravda article "Chaos instead of music". (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on July 9, 2015 ; Retrieved July 9, 2015 .
- ^ Sigrid Neef : Handbook of Russian and Soviet Opera. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Bärenreiter 1989. ISBN 3-7618-0925-5 , p. 540.
- ^ Sigrid Neef : Handbook of Russian and Soviet Opera. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Bärenreiter 1989. ISBN 3-7618-0925-5 , p. 537 f.
- ↑ a b Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , p. 825
- ↑ a b c Ulrich Schreiber : Opera guide for advanced learners. The 20th century III. Eastern and Northern Europe, branch lines on the main route, intercontinental distribution. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2006, ISBN 3-7618-1859-9 , p. 82 ff.
- ↑ Russian Lady Macbeth. In: Der Spiegel 48/1959. November 25, 1959, pp. 71-72 , accessed July 9, 2015 .
literature
- Article Ledi Makbet Mcenskogo uezda . In: Kindler's new literary dictionary. Edited by Walter Jens. Munich 1988–1992. (Study edition) Vol. 10, pp. 279f.
- Martina Fuchs: 'Ledi Makbet Mcenskogo uezda': comparative analysis of NS Leskov's story and the opera of the same name by DD Šostakovič. Heidelberg: Groos 1992. (= Groos Collection; 45; Mannheimer contributions to Slavonic philology; 4) ISBN 3-87276-661-9
- Sigrid Neef : To Shostakovich's opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” . In: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk . Program booklet. Ed. Komische Oper Berlin. 2000.