Riccardo Chailly won his bet, bringing an opera by Dmitrij Shostakovich to the premiere of a season at La Scala for the first time. ‘A Lady Macbeth of the Moscow District’ received loud and long applause for over 11 minutes. For the maestro, on his last 7 December as musical director, it was in particular a personal success, “the embrace of the public” said the superintendent Fortunato Ortombina. Applause also went to the director Vasili Barkhatov, and to the female protagonist Sara Jakubiak who defined her Katerina as “a tiger”. But all the voices were appreciated, starting from Najmiddin Mmavlyanov (Sergej), Alexander Roslavets (Boris), the La Scala choir directed by Alberto Malazzi and all the others. The announced scenes of violence and explicit sex, desired in the opera’s libretto, were accepted by the public, also because they never crossed the threshold of bad taste.
Overall it was an evening faithful, even in the demonstrations in Piazza della Scala (Propal and CGIL), to the tradition of December 7th, even if the presence of the Head of State Sergio Mattarella was missing. In the central box Liliana Segre next to the president of the Constitutional Court Giovanni Amoroso and the mayor Giuseppe Sala; behind the US Undersecretary of State Sara Rogers, the Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli, the vice presidents of the Senate and Chamber Gian Marco Centinaio and Anna Ascani. In the room the undersecretaries Gianmarco Mazzi, Lucia Albano and Federico Freni. Then Mario Monti, Barbara Berlusconi, Diana Bracco, Giacomo Campora, Claudio Descalzi, Marcello Foa and Melania Rizzoli. But also names from the world of entertainment such as Mahmood, Achille Lauro, Pierfrancesco Favino.
The great protagonist of the show is this music by Shostakovich, unknown to a large part of the public (Stalin’s censorship since 1936 contributed to the fact that we had to wait until 1992 to see the original work at La Scala). Music that under Chailly’s baton manages to emotionally involve the audience, making them experience every sigh of the protagonist in search of her fulfillment as a woman, every moment of unhappiness, boredom, desperation. But also, and with impetuous, pressing, sometimes dizzying sounds, every dramatic moment, be it sexual betrayal or a brutal crime.
If Shakespeare and Verdi’s Lady Macbeth induces her husband to regicide out of pure thirst for power, Shostakovich’s lady kills out of thirst for freedom, love and sex. And behind this bloody affair, Shostakovich introduces a fierce social criticism, with the desire to open the discussion on the condition of women in the petty-bourgeois society of the time.
ANSA AgencyThe arguments are in the story itself told by the director also with something ironic and grotesque: the forced marriage with an impotent man, the harassment of the master father-in-law, the boredom of a dead-end life and above all the sexual dissatisfaction (“no one will caress my white breasts…”) lead the protagonist to fall in love with a servant, betray her husband, poison her father-in-law, kill her husband and in the end, arrested and condemned, commit suicide after seeing every dream collapse of love, bringing with her the new conquest of the man she loved.
Video Mahmood makes his debut at La Scala: ‘I can’t wait’
Director Barkhatov moves the story from a Russian village in 1860 to a restaurant in the capital in the 1950s, setting the story as a flashback, as if the story developed through the protagonists’ depositions before a police officer. In the scenography (by Zinovy Margolin), the fixed central scene of the restaurant with the set tables is occupied several times by a large technical volume which, entering from the backstage on the left, fills the entire proscenium and represents two overlapping environments: on the ground floor the study of the violent master (Boris), which also becomes the love room between Katerina and the assistant chef Sergej. Upstairs are the kitchens, where in the first act Sergej and his colleagues bully and grope an unfortunate servant girl. In the restaurant Boris forces his daughter-in-law to swear loyalty on her knees to her husband who is leaving for work. Also in the restaurant is Sergei’s attempted sexual assault on Katerina, who however offers herself easily to him. In the study Boris whips Sergei bloody. In the restaurant, immediately afterwards, the woman serves her father-in-law a mushroom soup laced with rat poison. When her husband, Zinovij (Yevgeny Akimov), returns and surprises them, the two lovers kill him too and hide his body.
But the most obvious departure from the libretto is in the last scene, after the arrest: a military truck with soldiers armed with rifles breaks into the restaurant, breaking the large glass door. In the booklet the setting is an open countryside where the train of convicts stops waiting to resume their journey to the penal colony in Siberia. But on stage there is only one military vehicle inside a restaurant. And the death of Katerina, who should throw herself into the black waters of a lake dragging Sergei’s new ‘flame’ with her, becomes a double death in the (real) flames triggered by the woman after having doused herself and her rival with petrol. The music stops, the curtain closes and intense applause begins.
Segre: ‘The applause? It’s me who loves La Scala’
“I am the one who loves La Scala”: senator for life Liliana Segre commented in this way on the applause she received today as she entered the central box at the premiere of ‘A Lady Macbeth of the Mcensk district.
A “rather scandalous” play, he admitted and, giving a comment to Lady Macbeth he gave a “three-step” response. “First, I had read beforehand what I would come to see, to hear. Second, I am so old and I have been coming to La Scala since I was five years old. So I am prepared” for everything, “for ballet, for children’s opera, for the one here which is quite scandalous. But I’m always interested, I’m always interested in what I see at La Scala, what I hear. I’m interested, then I can judge according to my taste, but basically I’m interested.”
Video Liliana Segre: ‘Always interested in what I see and hear here’
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