Word: macbeths
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Neither were as good or as popular as his First; so next he turned to satiric ballet and opera. His Lady Macbeth of Mzensk is a kind of musical Sunday supplement about small-town life in Tsarist Russia...
Condemned to years of living death in Mzensk, the heroine commits three murders to relieve her boredom. The first Soviet opera, Lady Macbeth became a Red fad, was given more than 200 performances in Leningrad and Moscow. In the U.S., where it arrived in 1935, the opera was called flippant, noisy, vulgar and a hodgepodge of musical styles. Nevertheless, Lady Macbeth of Mzensk fascinated many musicians by its vitality, shrewd musical characterization, brilliant orchestration...
...also nearly ruined Composer Shostakovich. At the height of the Purge, when Russian nerves were badly frayed and people were plopping into prison like turtles into a pond, Stalin decided to hear Lady Macbeth. He did not like it, walked out before it was over. Murder from boredom struck him as a bourgeois idea. Besides, Stalin's musical taste runs to simple, more tuneful things, zigzags between Beethoven's Eroica and Verdi's Rigoletto. Also, he had a seat directly above the brasses...
...season did best with musicals (Let's Face It!, Banjo Eyes, Best Foot Forward, Sons o' Fun) and with revivals (Macbeth, Porgy and Bess, Candida). Thoroughly revived also, after a long, troubled sleep, was vaudeville...
Interest in Shakespeare's dark & bloody tale flowed over into the intermission with comments like: "They'll get that louse Macbeth. Watch. I know the plot." Highbrows might smile at such remarks, but Shakespeare would have understood them. Last week's groundlings were capable of a more direct response to the play than most theaterfuls on Broadway...