Music: The Murders of Mzensk

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In the respectable quiet of East Side Cleveland one night last week an old man ate poisoned mushrooms, died in wriggling agony. A merchant was smothered with a bed pillow and his corpse dragged into a cellar. A prostitute let out a blood-chilling scream as she was pushed to her death in an icy black lake. Yet as the heroine of Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (pronounced Muhzjensk), the woman responsible for these three atrocious murders was really a gentle soul whom only the sternest moralist would blame for her crimes.

The operatic rage of Soviet Russia was having its U. S. premiere by the Cleveland Orchestra, Conductor Artur Rodzinski and the troupe of White Russian singers which calls itself the Art of Musical Russia, Inc. Five days later the same performers gave Lady Macbeth in Manhattan. Audiences in both cities were equally impressed with the naivete of Comrade Shostakovich. The 28-year-old composer, who looks like a schoolboy with thatched hair and horn-rimmed glasses, had borrowed his story from Nikolai Leskov, a long-dead author who made his murderess a fiend incarnate. Shostakovich read of her crimes and promptly forgave her. Poor Katerina Izmailova! He would continue to call her Lady Macbeth but audiences were to understand that she was an innocent victim of her sordid bourgeois surroundings.

As seen on the stage last week, the home of Katerina Izmailova is sordid indeed. It resembles a crude two-story dolls' house with one side missing. Upstairs in a dreary bedroom Zinovi, the merchant, sleeps sluggishly with his boots on while downstairs Katerina, his wife, broods on a couch, paces the floor. She cannot sleep. She has never been taught to read. Her lecherous, spying old father-in-law comes in to charge her with being as cold as a cold fish to her spouse. Because of her there is no heir to the Izmailov name. The puling Zinovi is called hurriedly to repair a break in a far-away milldam. Before he leaves Katerina has to bow low before him, swear to be faithful in his absence.

A swaggering unprincipled clerk named Sergei starts the trouble. He squeezes the cook playfully, rolls her in a barrel while the peasants laugh uproariously.* Just for fun, Katerina accepts Sergei's challenge to wrestle with him in the courtyard. Because she has been lonely and restrained, she lets him into her bed after a minor struggle. There the father-in-law catches them, flogs the clerk until his bare back bleeds. For that Katerina feeds the old man mushrooms, seasoned with rat poison. His vitals burn and gnaw. A priest is summoned. "I die like a rat," gurgles the father-in-law. "He ate mushrooms at night," mourns Katerina Izmailova. "He dies like a rat?" bumbles the bibulous old priest. "That could not be so. A rat just dies. A man appears before God."