A Russian opera opens La Scala's season as the theater defends art over politics

Milan’s storied Teatro alla Scala celebrates its gala season premiere Sunday with a Russian opera for the second time since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. La Scala’s music director Riccardo Chailly will conduct Dmitry Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” for the gala season opener that draws luminaries from culture, business and politics for one of the most anticipated events of the European cultural calendar. Shostakovich's 1934 opera highlights the condition of women in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and was blacklisted just days after the communist leader saw a performance in 1936, the threshold year of his campaign of political repression known as the Great Purge.