Word: macbeth
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...died in wriggling agony. A merchant was smothered with a bed pillow and his corpse dragged into a cellar. A prostitute let out a blood-chilling scream as she was pushed to her death in an icy black lake. Yet as the heroine of Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (pronounced Muhzjensk), the woman responsible for these three atrocious murders was really a gentle soul whom only the sternest moralist would blame for her crimes...
...operatic rage of Soviet Russia was having its U. S. premiere by the Cleveland Orchestra, Conductor Artur Rodzinski and the troupe of White Russian singers which calls itself the Art of Musical Russia, Inc. Five days later the same performers gave Lady Macbeth in Manhattan. Audiences in both cities were equally impressed with the naivete of Comrade Shostakovich. The 28-year-old composer, who looks like a schoolboy with thatched hair and horn-rimmed glasses, had borrowed his story from Nikolai Leskov, a long-dead author who made his murderess a fiend incarnate. Shostakovich read of her crimes and promptly...
Whether Lady Macbeth will find a place in the world's operatic repertoire is a matter for doubtful conjecture. It was difficult to think of it last week without an all-Russian cast in which every member has a real feeling for an earthy Russian village. But what Shostakovich has accomplished with his orchestra will long be remembered by all who listened to it seriously. His vulgar homespun libretto prepared people for something madly modern. Such a heroine as Katerina seemed ludicrously impossible. Yet when the curtain went up there were no fierce shriekings. Katerina was quietly, miserably restless...
Conductor Artur Rodzinski, who obtained the first U. S. rights to Lady Macbeth, heard it six times in Russia last summer. Last week he called it "one of the most important contributions to music brought out in the past 25 years." The ardor of his performance proved that he meant what he had said...
...Here the producers were faced with one of many moral problems. According to Shostakovich's directions, the cook should be plopped into the barrel rump up. Clevelanders decided it would be wiser to exhibit her head. The Philadelphia Orchestra, which will give Lady Macbeth in March, considered an English translation but finally despaired of finding any that would pass even the most liberal censorship...