Lady Macbeth de Mzensk

Dmitri Chostakovitch Opéra Bastille Duration: 3h25 with 1 interval Language: Russian Surtitles: French / English Like a Russian Madame Bovary, Katerina is bored in the company of her husband. The arrival of a new employee, Sergueï, pushes her into adultery and then into crime, which brings her closer to Lady Macbeth. But unlike Shakespeare's character, Katerina acts not out of a taste for power but to satisfy urges stifled by a squalid environment. Created in 1934 in Leningrad, when Dmitri Chostakovitch was only 28, Lady Macbeth de Mzensk enjoyed a triumph that marked the composer's downfall. Stalin, finding this scandalous opera at odds with "socialist realism", had the composer threatened with deportation, and the work was banned for more than 25 years before reappearing in a watered-down version. Performed in its original version, Chostakovitch's powerful, taut score is heightened by Krzysztof Warlikowski's staging. By placing the characters in a slaughterhouse, he restores to this 20th-century masterpiece its relentless crudity.

Ingo Metzmacher Musical direction Krzysztof Warlikowski, Staging Aušrinė Stundytė Katerina Lvovna Ismaïlova Pavel Černoch Sergueï Dmitry Ulyanov Boris Timofeevitch Ismaïlov Oleksiy Palchykov Zinovy Borisovitch Ismaïlov Ekaterina Sannikova Aksinia Marcel Beekman The Wretched Oaf Victoria Karkacheva Sonietka Michael Colvin The Schoolmaster Margarita Polonskaya The Convict Woman Dmitry Belosselskiy The Police Chief, the Old Convict Vartan Gabrielian An Officer Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris