It is once again from the great Russian repertoire that Riccardo Chailly has drawn for his twelfth season opening at La Scala, the eleventh in a row. After Boris Godunov by Petrovic Mussorgskij in 2022, already chosen by Claudio Abbado for a December 7 performance, the musical director tries his hand at one of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century musical theatre, A Lady Macbeth of the Mcensk District by Dmitrij Shostakovich, performed for the first time at the opening of the season at La Scala.
As on other occasions in the past, Chailly exploits the national and international resonance of the Premiere – a magic formula for the, alas, few remaining pages of culture and entertainment – to make a less known opera title known to the general public.
And what a title, one might say. A fundamental work for various reasons, historical, literary and obviously musical, Lady Macbeth is first and foremost a work that fascinates for its distance from operatic conventions. Let’s forget about melodrama, with its “effects without causes” and its heartbreaking and heartbreaking consumptive heroines waiting for their lover for a last duet before dying: emotions squared, or rather cubed, that no sane human being could ever truly experience. This is to simplify, obviously: the work is also much more, from eighteenth-century love skirmishes, to the sublime virtuosity of the Baroque, to the disturbing and Freudian fin de siècle collisions… the catalogue, “madamina”, is endless.
But what makes Lady Macbeth unique is the unprecedented, ruthless violence she stages, the brutality of a protagonist outside of any canon and, perhaps also for this reason, truer than truth.
Katerina L’vovna, unhappy wife of a mediocre and repressed merchant, is a young woman who – without beating around the bush – needs to be loved, even and above all physically. «My God, how boring!» she exclaims in her opening monologue as Emma Bovary would. And you can’t blame her: the district of McEnsk, in provincial Russia in the 1860s, couldn’t have been exactly fun. Furthermore, Katerina lives in a sort of prison, whose jailer is the terrible father-in-law Boris Timofeevic Izmailov, father-master who, so as not to make us miss anything, also undermines her.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Katerina seeks escape routes, especially after falling in love with the handsome boy Sergei, with whom she enters into a relationship destined to end in tragedy. In order: she poisons her father-in-law with a mushroom soup, then, with the complicity of her lover, she kills her husband so she can freely live her dream of love in the same house where she was a prisoner. Inevitably the two are discovered and sent to forced labor on the banks of the Volga, where it doesn’t take Sergei long to find another woman. In the end, humiliated and offended, Katerina throws herself into the river, dragging her rival with her.
If this chain of crimes would already make Ryan Murphy’s series pale, the novella by Nikolai Leskov from which Shostakovich, together with Aleksandr Prejs, took the libretto was even bloodier: in their homicidal fury, the two lovers went so far as to eliminate even a child. It is worth remembering the Russian proverb chosen as the epigraph of the story: “The little song only makes you blush the first time you sing it”, a far from elliptical way of saying that evil only causes scruples the first time, then less and less, until it becomes habit. This is what happens to Katerina. The “discount” of a victim that Shostakovich grants her betrays, if not sympathy, at least a profound understanding for her: “An intelligent and passionate being who suffocates in the grayness of life and the environment in which she is forced.”
For a comparison with the original Katerina, it is worth seeing William Oldroyd’s beautiful film with an icy Florence Pugh in her early days.
It is not surprising that, upon her debut in 1934, first in Leningrad, and soon after in Moscow, Lady Macbeth aroused enormous curiosity. The success was immediate, in Russia and abroad, including the United States, until two years later Stalin attended a performance and left the theater before the end. A few days later, the infamous article Chaos instead of music appeared in Pravda which, more than a (also anonymous) criticism, sounded like a direct threat to the composer. These were the years of the directives of Zhdanov, recently responsible for the culture of the Communist Party, and the accusations made were two: the subject did not respect the necessary class distinctions and, above all, the “modernist” musical language, considered intricate and elitist, did not take into account the needs of the people.
The accusation of “formalism” appears laughable today, belied by the success of the work itself which, if it had really been so difficult, would not have been so widespread. In reality, what annoyed Stalin was his own bigotry: he did not tolerate a representation of sex that was so explicit, brutal and far from any operatic idealization.
The political attack marked the end of Shostakovich’s operatic career, after just two titles – the first was The Nose, based on the famous story by Nikolai Gogol. The damage was incalculable: the composer was only 28 years old and with Lady Macbeth he imagined inaugurating a triptych dedicated to the Russian woman. Without Stalin’s censorial intervention, today we would perhaps have a sort of Soviet Ring (Der Ring des Nibelungen, The Ring of the Nibelung, ed.)
So what should we expect from this new production? In truth, it is difficult for Lady Macbeth to be bad: its explosive force, the compelling plot, the stylistic variety that ranges from the poetic to the most extreme grotesque, make it one of those works that “go by themselves”. But it is equally true that the risk of pushing too hard is always lurking: it doesn’t take much to slip into vulgarity or kitsch, and sex in the theater must be handled with art, otherwise ridicule is just around the corner.
The Russian director Vasily Barkhatov, in his early forties and making his debut at La Scala, seems the right name to maintain the balance between the many excesses of the opera, and to recognize in Katerina’s gesture of rebellion both its criminal nature and its liberating power.
After all, the “chaos” of which Stalinist censorship spoke is not a completely arbitrary term. But it is precisely the chaotic force of this score, which Chailly and Barkhatov are called upon to tame, that makes it one of the most powerful ever.
