jan 4, 1934 - 1934, Soviet Union.

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In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack. Much of this period was spent writing his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was first performed in 1934. It was immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. It was described as "the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party", and as an opera that "could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture".






Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Russian: Леди Макбет Мценского уезда, or Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda) is an opera in four acts and nine scenes. It incorporates elements of expressionism and verismo, telling the story of a lonely woman in 19th-century Russia who falls in love with one of her husband's workers and is driven to murder.

Despite early success on popular and official levels, Lady Macbeth became the vehicle for a general denunciation of Shostakovich's music by the Communist Party in early 1936: after being condemned in an anonymous article (sometimes attributed to Joseph Stalin) in Pravda, it was famously banned in the Soviet Union for almost thirty years, until 1961.[1] Many people in fact know about the opera due to its place in the history of censorship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldRJQfES8hA

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