7 - From Lady Macbeth to Katerina Shostakovich's versions and revisions

Summary

It is well known that Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth exists in two different versions. The first, designated Op. 29 in the composer's catalogue, was completed late in 1932 and staged almost simultaneously in Leningrad and Moscow, both rival productions having their premiéres in January 1934. Despite the initial popular success of these productions, the opera effectively disappeared from view soon after it and its composer came under official attack in 1936. Almost thirty years later, when it was finally revived in Moscow in January 1963, the libretto had been thoroughly reworked, the music somewhat less so. To underscore the differences, the composer gave this new version the opera's alternative title, Katerina Izmaylova, and assigned it a new opus number, Op. 114. It was in this revised form that the work quickly regained its place in the repertory both at home and abroad.

It is often assumed that Shostakovich's new version resulted solely as a response to the public censure of the opera in 1936. Previous comparisons of the two versions of Lady Macbeth have frequently been used to demonstrate how effectively the Soviet regime's aesthetic criteria were applied: the opera ‘before’ and ‘after’ socialist realism; the opera as a showcase for the benefits (or abuses) of political intervention; and so forth.

In fact, interest in the alternative versions all but evaporated after 1979, when the 1932 score of Lady Macbeth surfaced again in the West, inaugurating a spate of new productions based on this rediscovered ‘original’ version.