Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Joan of the Stockyards: heroines for the humankind

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Bertolt Brecht’s Joan of the Stockyards are a truly modern heroines, honest to themselves and the world, with her defiance of oppressive social surroundings, conventional morality and the law.

Both characters fall in love with someone of a lower social class, Sergei, Lady Macbeth’s husband assistant and Joan with the Chicago unemployed. In addition, both characters share the oppression of a capitalist class character: Mauler, the meat producer that impoverishes his competitor and as a result the workers find themselves in the street; and Lady Macbeth’s merchant husband that imprisoned her in a life of barren stultification.

Both characters share a similar end: Joan dispenses free soups to the workers in the name of God, but when she finds out that her charity organisation also tries to gain profit out of misery, she protests and starts acting on her own. Sharing the destiny of the unemployed Johanna dies from pneumonia and is proclaimed a saint. On her side, Lady Macbeth shares the consequences of killing her husband and father-in-law and, like many people in the Soviet Union, is sent to a Siberian camp with Sergei. Sergei has now found another lover, whom Lady Macbeth drags into a frozen lake, drowning both women. Being given the Stalin’s Shotakovich opera's boorish verdict in Pravda: the delivery of a life sentence for purgatory. 

Joan ends up in heaven as a saint and Lady Macbeth in Stalin's purgatory. 

         In the same sense, both characters, although they share very similar circumstances, respond to the same situation in a particularly different way. Joan is focused on leaving a better world and is a soul which is doomed to death in a world where the cold calculus rules. In Lady Macbeth though, like Dostoievski’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Shostakovich created the seemingly paradoxical figure of the innocent murderess, a criminal of romantic purity.

         While Joan of the Stockyards realizes too late that the capitalists are only pretending to be kind, that the religious ones are only pretending to be godly, in order to receive the money from the capitalists. And only the workers are not pretending. They are just starving. And they will follow anyone who gives them the opportunity to eat - the capitalists, or the church, or the communists. Lady Macbeth realizes, from the very beginning, that the only way out from her oppressed live is only by murder that she will obtain her right. In this sense, she follows Sergei, the working class-like character that at the end betrays her love.

Joan of the Stockyards

And the good intentions? They prove to lead directly to hell. And the murder? It prove to lead straight to Siberia.

         Same similar situation in which the characters are living in (oppression by the capitalist class), different answers and methods to end with that injustice (love to God and serving the poor by Joan; and murder by Lady Macbeth), but a similar end: death.

Both characters are a bitterly tragic description of truth during any dictatorship, either the market or the party-bureaucracy dictatorship, and manifesto for the absurd, sung in a ditty, and saying everything and nothing at once.  Shostakovich as well as Bertolt Brecht, were writing neither a Soviet nor a German soundtrack, but music and stories for the humankind.