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Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is not your usual opera of grace and virtue. As snappily summarised by Andrejs Žagars, general director of the Latvian National Opera, and the man behind their upcoming performance complete with a 200-strong orchestra and chorus, the “extreme emotional situations” covered by the story range from “lovemaking, rape, death, murder, escape, captivity, [to] suicide.” Upbeat stuff.

First performed in 1934 in Leningrad, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera was officially condemned in 1936 by Pravda (the government newspaper) as “a bedlam of noise”, two days after Stalin and his entourage went to see the opera – and walked out before the finale. With the opera withdrawn from circulation and Shostakovich reprimanded, Lady Macbeth was to be Shostakovich’s second, and last, opera, even though the composer was rehabilitated following the Soviet dictator’s death.

Shostakovich’s excoriated story was adapted from Nikolai Leskov’s novel of the same name – coming from a tradition of nineteenth-century Russian literature that reiterated the tragic pathos of Shakespeare’s household characters, while departing from that tradition of universal settings with a distinctly provincial – and far more ominous – outlook in the old, pre-Revolutionary Russia. Although a predominant air of bleakness permeates both Leskov’s and Shostakovich’s take on the story – in which Katerina, the ‘Lady Macbeth’, murders her rapist father-in-law, kills her husband with the help of her lover Sergei, before being sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, only to be cheated on by the faithless Sergei and resort to suicide at the end – the stances taken up by the two versions towards their title character are decidedly different.

“For me, [Shostakovich’s Katerina] is no Lady Macbeth, a cold-blooded murderess who arranges her life across the corpses of her fellow human beings,” says Žagars. While Leskov’s character is a born criminal propelled to murder by her bestial desires, under Shostakovich’s sympathetic depiction, she becomes a victim of patriarchal and puritanical tyranny. In fact, Shostakovich has once remarked of his work that “the musical language given to [Katerina] has been designed for the one purpose of justifying this ‘criminal’.”

Shostakovich’s music, while retaining folkloristic Russian motifs and intonation, sounds completely contemporary. “The composer’s understanding of women, men, relationships, crime, God, and fate in the music, is fascinating,” explains Žagars. “During rehearsals with the soloists, we searched long and hard for ways to correctly guess the protagonists’ psycho-physical condition, emotional capacity, and – this is very important – their motives for action, so that, in the music, these characters could have a true, concrete, and cinematically real life, instead of abstract, conditional suffering.”

While it may not be the first to deal with such complicated morality issues as – in Žagars’s words – “the life of modern man with all its paradoxes, [and] the diversity in meanings of good and evil”, the opera distinguishes itself with its contemporary costumes and explicit portrayals of sex and violence. Indeed, it is a world apart from the company’s traditional Baroque opera Alcina, also being staged at the festival. “There aren’t many musical works where the composer has precisely depicted erotic scenes or real sexual passion in the score,” admits the director. “In Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, these scenes fit very organically into the dramaturgy of the story and the music.”

Reflecting on the controversial themes of sex and crime in the tragic satire, Žagars says, “Audiences need to be able to surrender to the story, and to experience it emotionally. That’s all [they have to do].” Here’s your chance to witness Katerina’s dramatic end in the mournful Siberian night – something that Stalin never managed to do.

Edmund Lee