Lady Macbeth von Mzensk

Katerina Ismailova is wealthily married and lonely, her husband impotent and her father-in-law a tyrant. She is trapped in a world where merciless brutality, despotism and cruelty reign. The woman with a lust for life and love gives way to her raw longing for freedom when Sergei starts working for the Ismailov family. She throws herself into a passionate affair with him and poisons her father-in-law's food. But the increasing radicalism of her desire for self-determination will claim further victims ...

How far may a person go to free themselves from unworthy circumstances? Here, a woman becomes a vile murderer, and yet the 26-year-old composer Shostakovich sympathises with her. His grand, expressive score is a masterpiece of the 20th century, a mixture of tragic force and satire, full-blooded grotesque and harrowing realism that sugarcoats nothing and yet makes everything palpable. After Peter I. Tchaikovsky's "The Maid of Orleans", director Elisabeth Stöppler and her team tell the story of another radically contradictory female character.