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Published: Tuesday, 21 January 2025 at 09:30 AM
‘Coarse, primitive, vulgar and perverted…’ How Stalin’s displeasure left Shostakovich fearing for his life
Read on to discover why the early departure of Joseph Stalin from a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had Shostakovich trembling in terror…
Joseph Stalin: self-styled opera lover
For Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, the evening of 26 January 1936 should have been a routine date in his diary. A self-styled opera lover, Stalin was attending the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to catch up belatedly on a work that had premiered to great acclaim two years previously in Leningrad, and been performed around 200 times in the Soviet Union since. In fact, no fewer than three productions of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk were running in Moscow at the time, and successful stagings in both Europe and the US had catapulted the 29-year-old composer into the global arena.
Explicit sex and violence… at odds with Soviet moral values
Unfortunately, Stalin did not like what he saw. Three acts into Shostakovich’s four-act opera he left the theatre, apparently unable to stomach more. What particularly riled him? The sensationally in-your-face plot – a woman in Tsarist Russia, oppressed and exploited by a succession of men, becomes a triple-murderer – was one problem. Violent and sexually explicit, it offered a chaotically unstable view of human relationships, dramatically at odds with the state-ordered, morally conservative equilibrium the Communist authorities sought to propagate.
Shostakovich’s music was correspondingly in-your-face, especially in the convulsive sex scenes, ‘complete with ejaculatory trombone slides’, as one commentator has put it. Throw in a dash of anti-police satire in Act Three, and the recipe for thoroughly antagonising the Soviet Union’s most powerful citizen was complete.
When Shostakovich saw Stalin leave before the end, he knew the signs were ominous…
Shostakovich was in the Bolshoi Theatre that evening, and knew that Stalin was too. When he saw the general secretary leave before the end, the composer realised the signs were ominous. ‘I was called out by the audience and took a bow,’ he wrote to a friend later. ‘My only regret is that I did not do so after the third act. Feeling sick at heart, I collected my briefcase and went to the station.’
Just two days later, a review of Lady Macbeth appeared in Pravda (‘Truth’), the Communist Party newspaper. Headlined ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, the unsigned article castigated the opera in the most brutally dismissive fashion. ‘Singing is replaced by shrieking,’ it raged. ‘The music quacks, hoots, pants and gasps for breath in order to present the love scenes as naturalistically as possible.’ The work as a whole was ‘coarse, primitive and vulgar’, and designed to ‘tickle the perverted taste of the bourgeoisie’. Such an approach, the reviewer warned, ‘could only end badly’.
This scarcely veiled threat certainly unsettled Shostakovich, and rumours that Stalin himself had written the article began to circulate. He had not, but Pravda was a state-sanctioned publication, and the views expressed therein were automatically assumed to have the leader’s imprimatur. Erstwhile friends began to abandon Shostakovich, and the composers’ union dutifully condemned his opera. Performances sputtered to a halt, and it would not appear again on the Soviet stage until 1963, in a partially sanitised version entitled Katerina Izmailova.
Despite the furore, Stalin did not stop Shostakovich from composing
The furore over Lady Macbeth did not stop Shostakovich composing, despite the heightened level of scrutiny he was now subjected to by the Communist leadership. The Fourth Symphony followed soon after – though, for fear of causing similar displeasure, was soon hidden away without a performance – as did the first of his 15 string quartets.
In 1978, Shostakovich’s friend Mstislav Rostropovich recorded Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in its full original form in London, confirming it as one of the searing operatic achievements of the 20th century. Stagings of the opera are now relatively common, and it always had a special place in Shostakovich’s heart – when evacuating the Nazi-threatened Leningrad in 1941, it was the only score he took with him.