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Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

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State Opera (Státní opera)Wilsonova 4, Praga, Central Bohemian Region, 110 00, República Checa
Fechas/horas en zona horaria de Prague
Intérpretes
Prague State Opera
Hermann BäumerDirección
Richard HeinDirección
Martin ČičvákDirección de escena
Hans HofferDiseño de escena
Georges VafiasDiseño de vestuario
Jan DörnerDiseño de iluminación
Prague State Opera Orchestra
Prague State Opera Chorus
Beno BlachutDramaturgia
Prague National Theatre Opera Ballet
Alžběta PoláčkováSopranoKaterina Lvovna Izmailova
František ZahradníčekBajoBoris Timofeyevich Izmailov
Denys PivnitskyiTenorSergey
Josef MoravecTenorZinoviy Borisovich Izmailov
Kateřina JalovcováMezzosopranoSonyetka
Jan HnykBajoPolice inspector
Tamara MorozováSopranoAksinya
Ivo HrachovecBajoPriest
Csaba KotlárBarítonoPoliceman
Peter MikulásBajoOld Convict
Jan Maria HájekTenorSchoolmaster
Jaroslav BřezinaTenorTattered peasant

The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich set Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to a libretto he wrote together with Alexander Preis after the eponymous novella by Nikolai Leskov. He himself referred to the opera as a satirical tragedy. The main character, Katerina, is a murderess haunted by qualms of conscience. Yet, with a touch of bitter humour, Shostakovich also focuses on the moral decay of the inhabitants of a Russian village, revealing the omnipresent torpidity and recklessness. Life without hope and love is the very reason for the heroine’s downfall.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk premiered to great acclaim in 1934 at the Small Opera Theatre in Leningrad (today St Petersburg). Yet it would only enjoy general popularity in Russia until January 1936, when Joseph Stalin attended a performance at the Bolshoi in Moscow, following which the official Communist Party newspaper Pravda condemned the piece in the infamous article titled “Muddle instead of music”. Subsequently, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had to be withdrawn from the repertoire of theatres throughout the Soviet Union. (By the way, it was also banned in Nazi Germany.) On the very day when Stalin saw the production in Moscow, the opera received its premiere, for the very first time in German translation, at the Neues deutsches Theater (now the State Opera) in Prague, conducted by Georg Széll and staged by Renato Mordo. Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was prohibited in Russia until 1963, when its revised version, Katerina Izmailova, was first performed in Moscow.

After the composer’s death, the majority of opera houses worldwide returned to the original version, which is also the case of the new production to be presented at the State Opera.