Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of the title role in his second opera, premiered in 1934: “Even if Katerina Lvovna is a murderer, she is not a scumbag. Her conscience torments her. (…) I can empathise with her…”. Unlike Lady Macbeth, Katerina does not kill out of ambition, but for love and passion. Married to a rich merchant’s son who has no interest in her, brutalized by her father-in-law, her life is empty and boring. She has a love affair with Sergey, a womanizer from the staff. Katerina first kills her father-in-law, then, with Sergey’s help, her husband. The murder is discovered, and the lovers are sent to a labour camp in Siberia. On their way to exile, Sergey becomes involved with a fellow prisoner. Katerina, at her wits’ end, drags her rival with her to a watery death. In addition to murder, the opera features brutal sex, sadistic harassment and sexual assault. Buoyed by its steamy subject matter, the opera had some initial success, but Stalin could hardly put it on display abroad to represent new Soviet art. So the regime ruthlessly condemned it in 1938, stifling the composer’s nascent operatic career before he turned 30. The opera’s dizzying musical and dramatic narrative also includes fragments of operetta, music hall, cabaret and jazz with the orchestra leading the party – one senses Shostakovich’s vast experience as a silent film accompanist. Calixto Bieito, for one, is in a film noir mood as he returns to Geneva to continue the cycle of Russian operas after his masterful War and Peace, another opera whose fate was strongly influenced by Stalin. His production for the Flanders Opera in 2014 takes place in a rotten industrial labyrinth, where one can only work in hazmat suits, and which recalls the polluted and dilapidated metropolises of Russia and China… or Detroit. According to Bieito: “It’s not Romeo and Juliet, it’s the apocalyptic thriller of a love in a post-capitalist system.” The Argentine Alejo Pérez, also a partner in War and Peace, returns to conduct the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and to introduce Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė (a staggering Elektra in Salzburg in 2020 and already Lady Macbeth in this production in Antwerp and later in Warlikowski’s staging in Paris) in the title role who will have her passionate roll in the hay (and the mud) with the expressive Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr as Sergey. Around them is a cast of great Slavic voices, who have already impressed us at the Grand Théâtre in War and Peace, notably the Russian basses Dmitry Ulyanov, as the evil father-in-law Boris, and Aleksey Tikhomirov, as the Pope and the Old Convict.