"Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" floods the Liceu in Barcelona for the Season Opening

"In the forest, deep in the forest, there is a lake, round and deep. The water in the lake is completely black. Black as my conscience. And when the wind howls through the forest, the lake makes waves, large waves that are frightening", – as Katerina Ismailova (performed by mesmerizing Sara Jakubiak) sang these words, the lighting dimmed, the water took center stage, and beds slowly ascended towards the skies above the stage. The reflection of the water illuminated the proscenium and ceiling, creating an ethereal atmosphere.

The entire production revolves around a vast swamp, echoing these final words of Katerina Ismailova. In the last opera of Dmitri Shostakovich, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk", director Àlex Ollé flooded the stage with thousands of liters of water, pumped up from the theater’s groundwater system. The water was warmed up every day (fortunately, as the idea of artists at the opera splashing around in freezing water for the entire show was shocking). 

A playful gesture from the director had him appear during the final ovation wearing rain boots , though the cast had spent nearly three and a half hours barefoot. The singers and chorus had to navigate the flooded stage, making their movements even more extraordinary given the length of the opera (not to mention the demands of rehearsals and multiple performances).

The water’s effect was astonishing. The set portrayed a suffocating world; the lake's water sometimes transformed into a place of filth, almost like a sewer, with the darkened, oppressive lighting amplifying the sensation.

The baton of Josep Pons was equally extraordinary, he conducted an orchestra that maintained the opera’s frenetic pace. The musicians delivered an impressive performance, featuring carefully nuanced basses and percussion that felt almost tangible, drawing the audience deeper into the work’s intimacy. Simply spectacular.

In addition to the impressive Sara Jakubiak as Katerina — visceral and overflowing with passion as she communicated the tension of her repressed anger — Katerina’s father-in-law, Boris, whom she poisons, was brilliantly portrayed by Alexei Botnarciuc. Despite his secondary role, Botnarciuc received great applause. Both he and Zinovi, Katerina’s husband, played by Ilya Selivanov, were depicted as somewhat ridiculous characters, offering a clear critique of male authority. Pavel Ćernoch’s Sergey, however, Katerina’s lover and later husband, stood in stark contrast to them.

Erotic Rebellion and Submission

Katerina is the central figure: the wife of a merchant, psychologically crushed, bored of her husband, and dominated by her tyrannical father-in-law, she is seduced by Sergei, a depraved worker at the family factory. Katerina ends up murdering first her father-in-law and then her husband. The new couple lives together until a peasant accidentally discovers the crime and reports it to the corrupt police. The story culminates in tragedy with the couple’s deportation to Siberia, Sergei’s infidelity, and the eventual double murder when Katerina kills her husband’s lover before taking her own life.

Carnal passion is confused with love, love with submission, and submission with sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering. This is the tale of a woman trapped within the traditional patriarchal system and a family structure from which there is no escape. "We are witnessing an erotic rebellion as the first gesture in the search for a dream: individual freedom in the face of familial tyranny," says the Liceu’s press department.

A Masterpiece of 20th-Century Russian Literature

Shostakovich dedicated this work to his first wife, physicist Nina Varzar. The score was an immediate critical and popular success in the Soviet Union but fell from grace after a performance in Moscow attended by Stalin in 1936. Pravda, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, published an editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music" denouncing the opera and leaving Shostakovich in fear for his life. "From the very first moment, the listener is bombarded with a flood of deliberately disjointed and muddled sounds. Snippets of melody, embryos of musical phrases, drown, disappear, and then re-emerge amidst crashes, grinding noises, and shrieks. Following this "music" is difficult; remembering it is impossible." It is speculated that the editorial may have echoed Stalin’s own words.

The opera was harshly rejected by the Soviet regime, which disapproved of humor and satire in opera. Such themes were unwelcome in a modern context, as they hinted that the gloomy aspects of Russian life had not entirely disappeared. Scenes of forced labor, police corruption, drunken confessions, and infighting among family members offered an unfavorable picture of Russia at the time.

Shostakovich intended Lady Macbeth to be the first of a tetralogy about the situation of women in different periods of Russia. However, after this opera was banned, he never composed another. With some modifications to soften the more vivid elements of the story, the opera was revived in 1963 to great acclaim at the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow. Although Shostakovich was in favor of this revised version, it is the original that is most often performed today.

Àlex Ollé and the Poetics of Brutality

The Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona opened its 2024-2025 season with this second and final opera by Shostakovich. A 20th-century masterpiece, it is a dark and existential drama based on an 1865 novel by Nikolai Leskov, written during a period when Russian literature flourished with authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The opera has a certain cinematographic touch musically and narratively. Politically, it constitutes a strange aesthetic anomaly in the Stalinist era. Beyond the glorification of the proletariat, which suits the ideological tastes of the time, it is a great thriller set in 19th-century rural Russia in Mtsensk, some 300 km from Moscow. A place of criminal exile.

After the bravos and a long ovation, words like profound, intense, and explicit echoed through the theater. For those unfamiliar with the work, some of the more graphic sexual scenes and violence were undoubtedly shocking.

Allowing a director to choose the opera they wish to stage is a rare privilege in opera and one that Àlex Ollé, the current resident artist at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, enjoyed. It was a wise choice to place such trust in him. His staging is even more brutal, raw, and explicit than the libretto of this Russian tragedy.

Ollé’s production surprises in its ability to fuse the strange with the familiar, creating a deep connection with the audience. This adaptation emphasizes the timelessness of the story and the performances, transporting us to a world that, although rooted in the past, resonates powerfully in the present. It is an extraordinary achievement, where the brutality of the narrative waves with a dark and poetic aesthetic, leaving spectators contemplating the work long after the curtain has fallen.

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Text by Nerea Menor

Photography by Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona