Word: mzensk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
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...