Lady Macbeth von Mzensk

What a life! Katerina, a freedom-loving woman full of longing, is trapped in a patriarchal hell: to her husband, she is merely a potential mother; her father-in-law stalks and tyrannizes her. Violence against women is the order of the day at the court of the old Russian merchant family. The young worker Sergei is also a perfidious macho – and yet, at first, he appears to Katerina as the harbinger of a new, happier life. She throws herself into an affair with him and from now on makes no more compromises: To ensure she never has to let go of her supposed happiness with Sergei, she first kills her father-in-law, then her husband, and finally marries her lover. But the newlyweds’ honeymoon ends on the march to a Siberian labor camp. When Sergei starts an affair with a younger woman there, Katerina’s world collapses: “In the forest, deep in the thicket, lies a lake, almost round and very deep. And the water in it is black, black as my conscience,“ she sings – and throws herself into the icy Volga together with her rival.
First performed in 1934, the opera depicts women’s struggle for liberation within a system that knows only violence as a means of self-assertion and grants women no space of their own. Dmitri Shostakovich has set this story to overwhelming music that transcends all boundaries: between garish grotesque and profound emotion, it reveals the longings and abysses of human existence. This exceptional work is conducted by the new General Music Director of the Stuttgart State Opera, Nicholas Carter. Director Ulrike Schwab brings the story to life from the perspective of the female protagonist – as a dark journey through memory in which reality, fantasy, and dreams blur into one another.