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Read on to discover why the early departure of Joseph Stalin from a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk<\/em> had Shostakovich trembling in terror…<\/strong><\/p> 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<\/a><\/strong> 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<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk<\/em> 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.<\/p> Unfortunately, Stalin did not like what he saw. Three acts into Shostakovich\u2019s four-act opera he left the theatre, apparently unable to stomach more. What particularly riled him? The sensationally in-your-face plot \u2013 a woman in Tsarist Russia, oppressed and exploited by a succession of men, becomes a triple-murderer \u2013 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.<\/p> Shostakovich\u2019s music was correspondingly in-your-face, especially in the convulsive sex scenes, \u2018complete with ejaculatory trombone<\/a><\/strong> slides\u2019, 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\u2019s most powerful citizen was complete.<\/p> Joseph Stalin: self-styled opera lover<\/h3>
Explicit sex and violence… at odds with Soviet moral values<\/h3>