Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

On 7 November last year (2014), I attended the dress rehearsal of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera by Dmitrii Shostakovich, at Metropolitan Opera.  Eva-Maria Westbroek, a Dutch soprano, who performed Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole earlier, sang the title Katerina role dramatically.  At the end of the first scene, following her lament on her neglectful husband Zinovy, he leaves to attend the repairs at the dam site he was overseeing.  In this production by Graham Vick, a car is parked in the garage, stage right, and he gets in the driving seat but it didn’t start.  So, helped by his father Boris, he pushed it off stage.  I thought the car out of commission was a perfect metaphor for the ineffectual husband, though I was not sure if it was a detail in the direction or a snag in the staging.  When I returned to the Met on 17 December for the real performance, alas, the car started right away and he slowly drove out off stage.  Sometimes, a slip can trigger a creative decision as in Balanchine’s Serenade a ballerina who arrived late for rehearsal and another who fell on exit with the corps were incorporated in his finished choreography. 

In Act III (shown above), a large sign in Cyrillic alphabet — adorns the scene overhead.  It reads поздравляем; I was curious about it and figured it out that it said “We congratulate,” rather than Поздравление/Поздравления (Congratulation/Congratulations).   

The opera, composed in 1934, was based on the 1864 story of the same title by Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), a contemporary of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Tchaikovsky, much celebrated there but less known here until recently.  I read the story in two translations, one by David McDuff and a newer one by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volonkhonsky.  The latter was particularly impressive for the fluid and expressive narrative, notable in the way the rhythm of the prose replicated that of the action portrayed in the manner of ekphrasis — leisurely and relaxed in the scene of romance and terse and brisk in depicting quickly executed murders.  It was instructive to compare the story with the opera’s libretto, which obviously selected and highlighted certain more sensational events. I was confirmed anew that the opera, in contrast to the prose which flows like a river, is a loosely joined sequence of firework as it should be to succeed.  Shostakovich and Alexander Preis, who wrote the libretto understood this well. 

A month later, at BAM, I saw the opera The Enchanted Wanderer, another adaptation of a Leskov story, composed by Rodion Shchedrin; he also was the librettist.  Here, curiously, Leskov’s story was drained of the adventures that would have served the opera well, and was developed as a staged oratorio — so strikingly unoperatic though exciting enough musically.