Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Opera Review

How to Cure the Housewife Blues

Slide 1 of 7

The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek stars as a poignant yet earthy restless housewife in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Shostakovich’s 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”

Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
  • Slide 1 of 7

    The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek stars as a poignant yet earthy restless housewife in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Shostakovich’s 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”

    Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The libretto of Shostakovich’s bitterly satirical 1934 opera, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” sets the first scene in the bedroom of Katerina, the restless wife of a dull merchant who has taken over the prosperous family business from his oafish father. Katerina’s husband has left for work, and she has gone back to bed. But she is too bored and depressed to sleep.

In the director Graham Vick’s audacious, inventive 1994 production for the Metropolitan Opera, which returned to the house on Monday night for the first time in 14 years, the setting is updated and altered in a way that better exposes the entrapment and numbing routine of Katerina’s life. In this staging, with sets and costumes by Paul Brown, Katerina (the bright-voiced soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek in a vulnerable and wrenching performance) is a bored housewife in a vaguely 1950s setting. Wearing a print dress, bright yellow with roses, she sits slumped in a beige chair, trying to watch television. A dingy refrigerator rattles nearby. Off to the side is the couple’s midsize maroon car. A rear wall is a row of doors against images of distant blue skies. Sitting at a table is Katerina’s crude, bossy father-in-law, Boris, the bass Anatoli Kotscherga in a bellowing, nasal-toned performance that captures this boorish character.

As the opera progresses, Katerina is driven not just to adultery with a husky laborer, Sergei, but also to killing her father-in-law by feeding him sautéed mushrooms sprinkled with rat poison, and, later, to strangling her husband, Zinovy, when he discovers her in bed with Sergei.

But Shostakovich aims to win your sympathy for Katerina. Already, in that opening scene, her vocal lines alternate bursts of chatter with melting lyricism accompanied by subdued, yet nervous orchestra music, a tangle of strings and sighing woodwinds, lines at once wayward and trapped in a musical maze. All of this and more came through in the inspired, incisive and colorful performance that the conductor James Conlon drew from the great Met Orchestra.

This production was a high point in Joseph Volpe’s tenure as general manager of the Met. It was good to see him in the house on Monday, basking in some much-deserved credit.

The fate of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” at the hands of Stalin and the obsequious officials in his circle is well known. Two years after its momentous 1934 premiere in Leningrad, Stalin attended a performance with some cultural dignitaries and walked out before the final act. Two days later, the work was condemned in a stinging editorial in Pravda. Interestingly, the attack focused less on the content of the opera, including its brazen sexuality, than on the music, the “deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds,” the “grinding, the squealing.” What the Soviet masses really needed was wholesome art, the thinking went.

As music critics, Stalin and his henchmen got it half right. Yes, during lurid scenes, especially the aggressive seduction of Katerina by Sergei, the music “quacks, hoots, pants and gasps.” That’s actually a good description.

But Shostakovich cuts through the grotesquerie to get at Katerina’s desperation. After that sex scene, she and Sergei, here the muscular tenor Brandon Jovanovich, have a bittersweet exchange in bed the morning after. As they kiss, the music swells with Mahlerian tenderness.

The impressive Met choristers, under their director, Donald Palumbo, have been working extra hard this fall, and the demands continue with “Lady Macbeth,” which they meet triumphantly. After we encounter Katerina, the laborers at her husband’s business intrude upon the scene, some leering from atop the walls that frame the house, others trudging through the row of doors, a grungy lot. A few urinate against the walls, while others strip down to take showers, casually exposing an array of both fit and flabby bodies. The doors become shower cubicles with real water.

There are orchestral sequences of surreal, grotesque comedy in this opera, and Mr. Vick, working with the choreographer Ron Howell, milks them for zaniness. In one, with music of snarling brass and fractured rhythms, a town drunk chances upon the body of Katerina’s husband, stashed in the trunk of the car, now crushed. The poor man imagines a horde of murderous brides in bloodstained wedding gowns, dancing wildly, knives in hand, some of them played by men in drag.

Mr. Jovanovich is ideal as Sergei. His singing is bright and virile, and he is dramatically fearless. One moment, he wrestles Katerina into his arms with unabashed lust; the next, he wanders from the bed in his underwear, looking lost, heading to the refrigerator for a beer.

The tenor Raymond Very brings a sturdy voice to the role of Zinovy, the husband, and conveys the character’s impotence: He cannot make his wife pregnant. Among many standouts in smaller roles are Allan Glassman as a shabby, drunken peasant, and Mikhail Kolelishvili as a cartoonish priest.

But Ms. Westbroek dominates, as Katerina must. Though best known for creating the title role in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole” in London, she is a dramatic soprano who made a notable Met debut as Wagner’s Sieglinde in “Die Walküre” and is well suited to the vocal demands of Katerina. Her voice was sometimes slightly strident. But this seems right for the character. Ms. Westbroek also brings aching vulnerability and delicate singing to her overwhelming performance.

The final scene is bleakly tragic. Katerina and Sergei, arrested for the murder of Zinovy, are prisoners en route to Siberia. Sergei, now bored with Katerina, finds diversion with an alluring convict, Sonyetka (Oksana Volkova). At the end, in despair, Katerina drowns herself in a lake, dragging her rival with her.

At least that is what the libretto indicates. In this version, pulling Sonyetka along, she jumps into a pit filled with what seems to be the contents of slop buckets from outhouses. It’s one of Mr. Vick’s more heavy-handed touches, but certainly effective.

“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” runs through Nov. 29 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Beat the Housewife Blues. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT