Which opera by Dmitri Shostakovich was withdrawn after criticism in a 1936 Pravda editorial?

Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera withdrawn after criticism in a 1936 Pravda editorial was Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

The opera premiered in Leningrad on 22 January 1934 and later reached Moscow. It adapts Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella about Katerina Izmailova, a merchant’s wife whose affair and crimes lead to catastrophe. Shostakovich’s score combines sharp satire, powerful orchestral effects, and intense dramatic contrasts.

After Joseph Stalin attended a performance in Moscow, the Pravda newspaper published the unsigned editorial “Muddle Instead of Music” on 28 January 1936. The article condemned the opera’s music and subject matter. Performances were subsequently curtailed, and the work was not openly revived in the Soviet Union until 1962, in a revised version called Katerina Izmailova.

The opera’s title can be confused with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but Shostakovich’s plot is set in nineteenth-century Russia and uses Leskov’s novella as its source.