Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Oxford Keynotes)

Shostakovich's lurid opera of sex, violence, and murder, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is famous for being banned by personal decree of Joseph Stalin in 1936.Dramatically revived by Shostakovich's close friend, the cellist and Soviet émigré Mstislav Rostropovich in 1979, Lady Macbeth is now an international hit.In the first-ever study of this beloved but still-controversial opera, Pauline Fairclough asks whether we have become so distracted by its traumatic reception history that we overlook what is truly shocking about it: namely, Lady Macbeth's frank portrayal of sexual violence against women.Arguing that Shostakovich himself vacillated over how consensual its central sex scene should be, she grounds the opera's presentation of women, sexuality, and sexual violence in both real-life events and culture of early Soviet Russia.In a challenge to the still-potent Cold War Western assumption that only the banned original was faithful to Shostakovich's true creative impulse, Fairclough asks that