Opera by DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH, 1934, first performed in Leningrad. The story depicts adultery and murder in Russia in the middle of the 19th century. The protagonist conspires with her lover to murder her husband. The cuiprits are convicted and sent to Siberia. When her lover takes another mistress there, she kills her rival and then commits suicide.

Unexpectedly, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, attacked the opera as a product of bourgeois decadence and damned it for its modern style of HARMONY. Shostakovich apologized for his musical sins and stopped writing operas for a number of years. The opera was eventually revived in a sanitized version under the title Katerina Izmailova, 1963, the name of the heroine.