Word: mtsensk
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...Metropolitan Opera's new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is so bright, so impish and in its energy so reflective of the dazzling score it dramatizes that it's a shame to say that it represents a waste of talent. But it does...
...working-class lover boosted Shostakovich's art to a new level of technical assurance and emotional maturity, and at age 25 he appeared well on his way to becoming the most important operatic composer of the century. Then, in 1936, the Soviet authorities denounced the popular Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as "muddle instead of music." Afraid not only for his livelihood but for his life, Shostakovich withdrew the earthy score, replaced it with a pallid adaptation called Katerina Ismailova, and never wrote another opera. It was not until 1979 that the original work surfaced; gradually, it has been replacing...
...point is debatable. Cowed by the official castigation of his 1930-32 masterpiece, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich never completed another opera, to the world's inestimable loss. Who knows what other great works went unwritten while Shostakovich was living a double life? "Tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears," he said. Moreover, at 157 minutes the film is itself guilty of some of Shostakovich's own sins, including bombast and repetitiveness...
...most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming of a bedroom scene...
Although the 15 symphonies are his best-known works, it is likely that a truer portrait of the composer is to be found in the quartets. After Shostakovich's daring opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in the pages of Pravda as "muddle instead of music," he apologized with the Fifth Symphony (1937), a "creative reply to just criticism." Censured by a Communist Party resolution of 1948 for "formalistic distortions and antidemocratic tendencies," Shostakovich wrote two of his next three symphonies about the Russian Revolution. But these works were for official consumption; spiritually, Shostakovich went underground to express...