Katerina’s Version
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth is at once simple and extremely difficult, requiring the Russian director to strike a delicate balance between violence and clarity, where any superfluous gesture can seem vulgar.
Vasily Barkhatov, who was born in Moscow in 1983, will make his Teatro alla Scala debut for the Season Opening with a new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Dmitri Shostakovich’s operatic masterpiece based on Nikolai Leskov’s novella of the same name, which centres on the loves and crimes of Katerina Izmailova, the wife of a provincial merchant. The opera is one of the most significant of the 20th century, yet after an initial period of success it was banned by the Soviet regime for its daring musical language and for subject matter considered too provocative—and far too explicit—for Stalinist censors. Today, even at the height of its popularity, Lady Macbeth continues to pose formidable challenges for the directors who take it on.
AT Where do you start when putting on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth?
VB It is both a complex and simple task. On the one hand, whatever you do, the work will always be hugely successful; on the other hand, it is easy to fall into certain clichés that are best avoided.
AT Such as?
VB Many kitsch moments, or those of extreme animal carnality, become ridiculous if you stage them literally. My goal is not to illustrate this music. Shostakovich's score is already overflowing with information; it is like a strong perfume that you can't spray everywhere because it would be too vulgar.
AT Aren't you afraid of softening its edges?
VB I don't think there's really any risk of that. A wild force runs through the whole piece, and you can't avoid it, it hits you like a punch to the gut. However, it's important to avoid covering those passages in which the music and the words of the text already say everything – such as Katerina's rape scene – with a veil of clumsy pretence.
AT Isn't it necessary to illustrate the piece in order to narrate it to an audience that is unfamiliar with Shostakovich's language and references?
VB No, I don't think so. Because this is not a story about Russia or the Soviet Union, it is the story of a woman, the story of a human being, whom Shostakovich himself places at the centre of the story with much more empathy than the rather misogynistic view of Leskov's novella, as if it were Katerina's “version of events”.
AT What role does the literary source play in your production?
VB Almost none, as is often the case. If you think of almost all the works based on great literature, for example Tchaikovsky's Onegin, you almost have to forget Pushkin's original. The characters in the opera are completely transformed by the music and libretto, and the same is true of Lady Macbeth.
AT How does Shostakovich differ from Leskov?
VB A clear example is the omission of the last murder in the novella, the most brutal one, that of the child who would have been the legitimate heir of the Izmailov family. This omission is not for the sake of brevity; Shostakovich chooses to focus his work on the loneliness of a woman in search of happiness, who commits heinous crimes, but does so for her own good, for her love, with an almost childlike inability to understand what she is doing.
AT Does the composer's empathy extend to other characters in the opera?
VB Not like with Katerina, but in a way, yes. Sergei, the lover, is also portrayed not as a demon, but as a man. He too is looking for his place in the world, his corner of happiness. In every house he has been to, he repeats the same pattern, the rules of which are clear to everyone: he finds a job and starts a relationship with his boss's wife, until the boss finds out and fires him. Sergei does not even think about lying; they have always been just sexual encounters, and that has always been enough for him. It is when faced with the intensity of Katerina's feelings, who throws herself into this love as if her life depended on it, that he finds himself taken aback.
AT So how can we convey this intensity and even violence without being authoritative?
VB The narrative approach we have chosen helps us here. In our production, Katerina is a narrator who analyses what is happening, step by step, as in a police report. This framework allows us to avoid overly explicit scenes, such as seeing two opera singers awkwardly pretending to have sex on stage at La Scala, something we wanted to avoid not out of modesty, but because any solution we came up with would have been laughable compared to the music.
AT What role does humour play in this depiction?
VB It is one of the central themes, and Shostakovich distributes it masterfully throughout the piece. With perfect dramaturgical sense, Shostakovich constructs a parable that combines cheap, vulgar humour with a sense of spiritual tragedy of an almost Wagnerian nature. It is a combination in which violence and sarcasm merge to a point in which it is impossible to tell precisely where one ends and the other begins.
AT This coexistence is typical of Shostakovich as a composer, we might say.
VB Exactly. If we were to translate this concept into an image, it would be as if we were talking in one house while in the flat next door a couple were having wild sex, upstairs a priest was reading the Holy Scriptures, and downstairs two people were wondering how to get rid of a dead body.
AT The piece's misfortune under Soviet censorship is well known. Many years after its premiere, Lady Macbeth was banned, described as “chaos rather than music”. But how much of the Soviet world is actually present in the opera?
VB The Soviet Union is more of a background condition that informs the characters' mentality than a real presence in the opera. Everything lives and breathes that cultural climate, without referring to it too directly, which is one of the reasons why we chose to move the story to the early 1950s, the final years under Stalin, and to a snobbish city environment, where everyone behaves like the merchants and peasants of Leskov's village.
AT Three years ago, La Scala opened its season with Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, which Shostakovich knew very well. How does Lady Macbeth relate to the great Russian opera theatre?
VB There is a direct link between Godunov and Lady Macbeth, as evidenced by the references throughout the opera that have an almost postmodern parodic effect. One example is the choruses accompanying the departure of Katerina's husband, Zinoviy in the first act, which come directly from Godunov, as does the reference to merchants as “boyars”, a term that was completely archaic at that time. And the references continue: Musorgsky's legacy is very much alive in Shostakovich, whom we can consider the next step in the history of Russian musical theatre.
AT You are also a product of this Russian theatre. How did you become interested in directing?
VB I have always loved theatre, and it was clear to me that I wanted to work with opera. I graduated with a degree in musical theatre directing, but when I was a student, the Bolshoi in Moscow and other major Russian theatres were still very conservative, unlike spoken theatre. You could say that Russian theatre was truly avant-garde in the 1990s, while opera remained somewhat stuck in Stalin's era.
AT Did you have the chance to learn about European directors?
VB Of course, although it wasn't easy. YouTube didn't exist yet, so you had to somehow get hold of VHS tapes of the most important productions, which I devoured as soon as I could get my hands on them. Then, during my studies, we had the opportunity to go to Berlin for practical training, and during those months I immersed myself in the city's theatre life, rushing from one theatre to another day and night. European Regietheater and authors such as Patrice Chéreau, Hans Wernicke, and Harry Kupfer became my points of reference in my early productions.
AT And how has your style developed today?
VB That's always a difficult question because looking back at my early work, I don't know if it's me and my style that have changed or time and the world around us. Ultimately, I think my approach is still the same, partly because anything I tried to do that didn't reflect who I am would come across as pathetic and artificial. I'm interested in the lives of characters, their simple reality as human beings. I have certainly acquired technical skills over the years, thanks in part to my avid observation of other productions: whenever I have a free evening, wherever I am, I try to spend it at the theatre. But in the end, the analysis of characters in their humanity and the way musical dramaturgy brings them to the surface have remained at the heart of what theatre means to me.
Alessandro Tommasi
A journalist and organiser, Tommasi studied cultural management and piano, writes for Amadeus, Quinte Parallele, Le Salon Musical and is a member of the Association of Music Critics.