Muddle Instead of Music

"Muddle Instead of Music: On the Opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" (Russian: Сумбур вместо музыки – Об опере «Леди Макбет Мценского уезда») is an editorial that appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda on 28 January 1936.

The unsigned article condemned Dmitri Shostakovich's popular opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as, among other labels, "formalist", "bourgeois", "coarse" and "vulgar".

[6] Almost exactly two years after the opera's premiere, Shostakovich was invited to a Bolshoi Theatre performance on 26 January 1936, where he found Stalin in attendance with several associates, among them Andrei Zhdanov and Vyacheslav Molotov.

[7] Nine days prior Stalin had attended another opera, Ivan Dzerzhinsky's The Quiet Don, and had praised it as a model of socialist realism for its lyrical clarity and emotional directness.

Shostakovich later wrote to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky that he witnessed Stalin cringing at loud parts of the score and laughing at sexual moments.

Perhaps the editorial's most dangerous pronouncement is that Shostakovich was not a class-conscious composer, rather an introspective artist who "ignored the demands of Soviet culture" and cared little for his audiences.

Leaving no room for doubt about the depth of its deprecation, the editorial regrets that: "The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to create originality through cheap clowning.

Many of his colleagues in the arts community sought to dissociate themselves from him, although some, such as Isaac Babel, Abram Lezhnev and Vsevolod Meyerhold spoke out in support of Shostakovich (all three would be shot in the purges).

Named "Ballet Falsehood", the piece unleashed more castigation, calling the composer a musical charlatan and a peddler of "aesthetic formalism".

[15] Late in the year Shostakovich was summoned for a meeting with a representative of the Union of Soviet Composers, who advised him to withdraw the symphony on threat of "administrative measures" for noncompliance.