Word: mtsensk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...This opera cost its composer considerable grief: shortly after he wrote it he was denounced by the Soviets for bourgeois intentions and vulgar execution. It is a brash work; at times openly satirical, at others tragically serious. The plot, based on Nikolai Leskov's story, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, tells of a frustrated wife who eventually destroys the men around her. All the characters are thoroughly unsympathetic. The recording, part of Capitol's new import of Russian phonography, is disappointing. As the wife, Niconora Andreyeva has spirited dramatic presence, but vocally she is insecure. Tenor Vyascheslav Radzievsky...
...suggest much beyond a battle over a nightgown. The gown was worn by Eurydice (Dancer Cora Cahan) over flesh-colored tights and, as New York Daily News Critic Douglas Watt observed, it seemed Orpheus wanted it. (P.S.: He got it.) Excerpts from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Ravel's Piano Concerto in G were deformed by the Philharmonic's raucous and jarring performance...
Whenever Joseph Stalin saw an opera that wasn't Eugene Onegin he went home mad, but rarely as mad as he was the night he saw Dmitry Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. "Gnashing and screeching, crude, primitive, vulgar," Pravda roared, having prudently reconsidered a published opinion that called the opera "a triumph" after its 1934 debut two years before. Shostakovich withdrew the opera, and off and on over the years, he set to work at revision...
...loveless, thankless life among crude and cruel merchants. A love affair blossoms with one of her husband's workmen, and, bewitched by the promise of a new life, she kills both husband and father-in-law. Just as she and her lover take happy possession of the Mtsensk manor house, the crimes are discovered; on her way to Siberia in a column of convicts, she is taunted by her lover's new woman, and she pushes the interloper into an icy lake and jumps in after her. The convicts pause to stare, then trudge aboard a ferry...
...wonderful creations, though they do not evoke religious feeling. Religious music contains great compositions, such as the requiems of Mozart and Verdi, but I do not take it as religious music-I take it as secular music." Asked how he now feels about his opera, A Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was denounced by Pravda in 1936 (reportedly because Stalin did not like it), Shostakovich revealed that he was rewriting it: "I did not like the old version; in vocal parts I abused high and low registers. This has been corrected...