Maturing in Moscow

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.

It was generally assumed that the changes he was making would be pitifully political. But on both sides of the Iron Curtain, all doubts have been dispelled. Last January the new opera got an enthusiastic reception in Moscow. Last week, with the new title of Katerina Ismailova, it had its Western debut at London's Covent Garden. To the delight of an audience that would not stop cheering until the shy Shostakovich had come onstage to accept a laurel wreath, every change turned out to be strictly the work of a matured and masterly composer.

Absurdity & Despair. The bleak, mocking portrayal of 19th century Russian life that Shostakovich chose for his libretto survives from the original version. A gay and clever girl marries into a 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 to glide away.

Shostakovich explores every twist in the tale with a lively assortment of musical styles, and the music sustains the entire drama. The heroine, who despite her crimes is meant to be "a ray of light in the kingdom of darkness," is described in lyrical and eloquent themes, while an array of jarring, brassy polkas, gallops and mazurkas evoke the absurdity that surrounds her. In the revision, Shostakovich has tightened and refined both music and libretto, producing a work more polished and subdued --and considerably more singable.

Drabness & Squalor. Shostakovich pronounced himself pleased with the London production, which had an English libretto written last summer by Conductor Edward Downes. He sat by Downes's side through days of rehearsal, apparently bent on tempering every hint of crudity. "He has a puritanical obsession about showing sexualism onstage," said Downes. "Anything that was the least bit suggestive he jumped on immediately."

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