Shostakovich Contra Stalin

On January 26, 1936, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, Shostakovich vs. Stalin, Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was performed for the umpteenth time. It wasn't just any function. That night, hidden behind the curtains of one of the boxes, Comrade Secretary General, Joseph Stalin, kept watch. The next day, everyone in Moscow knew that the dictator had not liked the opera and had left the theater before it ended. The newspaper Pravda - the official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - on January 28 published an editorial on the third page whose headline was: "Chaos instead of music", written, it was said, by Stalin himself. It could be the death knell for the composer of Lady Macbeth. Thus begins a time of deep anguish for Shostakovich; a titanic struggle between him and Stalin, between creative freedom and totalitarian power.