MILAN — La Scala opened its 2025-26 season with Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” drawing around 2,000 guests to the storied theater for a sold-out gala that generated a record €2.8 million in box-office revenue, Dec. 7, 2025.
Presented as a tribute to Shostakovich on the 50th anniversary of his death, the La Scala Lady Macbeth premiere doubled as a declaration that artistic freedom should trump geopolitics, even as the house staged a Russian opera amid the ongoing fallout from Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, according to a detailed Reuters report.
La Scala Lady Macbeth turns a banned score into box-office history
The La Scala Lady Macbeth staging revives a work once denounced in the Soviet press as “muddle instead of music” and banned under Joseph Stalin. Composed in the 1930s and based on a novella by Nikolai Leskov, the opera follows Katerina Izmajilova, an unhappy merchant’s wife who turns to adultery and murder before being exiled to Siberia and driven to suicide, a story La Scala is presenting through Dec. 30.
Russian director Vasily Barkhatov shifts the action to a grim mid-20th century setting, while music director Riccardo Chailly leads what is likely his final Dec. 7 season opener as La Scala’s music chief. U.S. soprano Sara Jakubiak, in her house debut, anchors the La Scala Lady Macbeth cast with an intense, physically demanding performance that drew a 12-minute ovation from the gala crowd, according to an Associated Press account.
Fortunato Ortombina, in his first December premiere as artistic director, backed Barkhatov’s choice of a once-censored Russian title as a “test case” for keeping Shostakovich in the repertoire without endorsing the Kremlin. Outside the theater, small groups of protesters gathered, but inside, the La Scala Lady Macbeth production played to a house packed with political leaders, fashion figures and international arts patrons.
La Scala Lady Macbeth in a tradition of political opening nights
The decision to launch the season with La Scala Lady Macbeth continues a pattern of overtly political December 7 openings. Last year, the house turned to Verdi’s “La forza del destino,” updating the 19th century drama into a meditation on contemporary conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East, as reported by Reuters last season.
An earlier OperaWire preview of that 2024 opener highlighted how La Scala has increasingly used its gala night to comment on war, fate and national identity rather than leaning solely on safer crowd-pleasers.
The theater’s double role as cultural temple and political stage has been widely noted, including in a February profile in Le Monde, which described the opening as a ritual where government ministers, activists and Milan’s elite converge under the same gilded ceiling. In that context, choosing La Scala Lady Macbeth — a story of a woman crushed by patriarchal and police power — reads as both an artistic homage to Shostakovich and a pointed comment on authoritarianism.
From scandal to staple: what’s next for La Scala Lady Macbeth
Once a symbol of artistic dissent that nearly cost its composer his career, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is now being positioned as a global calling card for La Scala. The theater’s own official synopsis underscores the opera’s focus on female agency and moral ambiguity, themes likely to resonate with international viewers following the new production via broadcasts and streams.
If the record takings and roaring applause continue through the run, the La Scala Lady Macbeth gamble may be remembered less for the protests outside than for proving that a once-banned Soviet shocker can anchor one of Europe’s most tradition-bound opening nights — and still send Milan home arguing about music, money and morality long after the curtain falls.
