Shostakovich's opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was first performed in Leningrad in 1934, and for two years was highly prized as a major work by the Soviet Union's outstanding young composer. Then Stalin saw it. The piece was denounced and withdrawn, and though Shostakovich was able to put out a modified version in 1963, the original version was not seen again until after his death.

English National Opera 1987

The official banning of Shostakovich's second opera has often been seen as evidence that Stalin had no ear for music; but perhaps the father of his people saw and heard right enough what was going on, and detected in Lady Macbeth a four-act shriek of outrage, an explosion of total cynicism. Such is the shocking effect of the new English National Opera production, which brings the original version of the work to the British stage for the first time.

This delayed arrival, though it has had different causes, is just one of many parallels between Shostakovich's opera and the exactly contemporary Lulu of Alban Berg. Both works take their heroines from empty marriage to amoral ecstasy to degradation and death; both have a host of subsidiary characters presented in caricature; both suggest that the only dependable relationship between people is one of unmediated lust, and that the only proof of lust is the willingness to murder. Then again, Stalin ended the career of Lady Macbeth the month after death ended that of Berg, and so prevented the completion of Lulu.