Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

In the first detailed study of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Pauline Fairclough offers a radically new interpretation of one of the twentieth century's most popular operas. Banned by Joseph Stalin after he went to see it in early 1936, Lady Macbeth was never heard again in Shostakovich's lifetime. In her examination of original sources from the very first productions of the opera in 1934, Fairclough shows how Lady Macbeth was understood by contemporary Soviet audiences and how its shocking portrayal of sexual violence against women was rooted in the culture and everyday reality of early Soviet society.

Pauline Fairclough is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, and a specialist in Soviet musical culture, particularly the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Her biography of Shostakovich was published in 2019 and her study of Western classical music's appropriation in the Soviet Union, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (2016) was co-winner of the Women's Forum history prize of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (2017).