Word: mzensk
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...Dmitry Shostakovich has been up and down the ladder of official Soviet approval. In 1936 his opera-Lady Macbeth of Mzensk was considered "neurotic" (its heroine committed murder out of boredom rather than in the interests of social progress) and was banished from Moscow. During the war his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were, in effect, official Soviet masterpieces, although non-Soviet ears found them pretty thin stuff. But the Ninth got him into hot water with the party's Central Committee in 1948 (it "smelled strongly of the spirit of modern bourgeois music...
Venice's International Festival of Contemporary Music, which used to play host to such startling modern operas as Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Dmitry Shostakovich's The Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, last week unveiled a collaboration between two chilly and notably elegant talents: Britain's Composer Benjamin Britten and America's late, great Author Henry James. The work: Britten's opera version of The Turn of the Screw...
...International Congress of Composers, but anyone who expected to hear new theories or techniques was disappointed. Blinking myopically under the klieg lights, he read a dull account of the bureaucratic organization of Soviet music, not once mentioning himself. At the end, someone asked: "Is your opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk banned in Russia?" Said Shostakovich quietly: "It is not banned-it is simply not played." There was an embarrassed silence; considering the blast directed at Lady Macbeth by Soviet ideologists eleven years ago ("Screaming, neurotic music"), it was hardly a nice question. Shostakovich made an abrupt bow and walked from...
...Lady of Mzensk. One mystery Biographer Seroff's book goes a long way toward solving is the maze of Slavic ideological brainwork that lay behind the sensational blacklisting of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the District of Mzensk in 1936. The close connection in the Soviet mind between musical and political technique will probably never be completely fathomed by non-Russians. But looked at by Russians, the downfall of Lady Macbeth had a certain logic about...
...inherently contrary to the soothing national strains of Russian folk music. In 1936 Joseph Stalin, already preparing for his celebrated purge of the old bolsheviks, was carving Russia a new nationalistic policy. In the eyes of Moscow's word-raddled musical theorists, Lady Macbeth of the District of Mzensk was an old-bolshevik opera...