Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (composed 1930 - 1932 and premiered in 1934) was the turning point of his career. Conceived as a tragic grand opera and executed in a style which fused Shostakovich's modernist orchestral music of the late '20s with a more expressive and even Romantic type of vocal writing, Lady Macbeth was inarguably the height of Shostakovich's achievement until that time. And its condemnation of the front page of Pravda in January 1936 completely changed Shostakovich as a composer. His modernist style of orchestral writing was utterly abandoned and the expressive Romanticism of the opera's vocal writing came to suffuse all his music. Needless to say, in the harsh cultural climate of the late '30s Lady Macbeth was removed from the stage and withdrawn from production for more than a quarter century.

But after the death of Stalin and the thaw under Khrushchev, it became possible to consider reviving Lady Macbeth. As early as 1955, the Leningrad Maly Opera asked Shostakovich to bring the opera back to the stage. However, Shostakovich was no longer satisfied with the work as it had been performed in 1936 and undertook extensive revisions to it. These revisions did not effect the fundamental dramatic structure of the opera nor most of its music. They were concerned, rather, with three specific areas: altering some of the vocal lines to make the work more "singable;" reducing the lurid and erotic aspects of the music to make the work less sexually provocative; and altering the music and the character of the central character to make her more sympathetic to the audience. These revisions took the composer eight years to accomplish and when the opera was eventually restaged in Moscow, its title had been changed to the name of the central character, Katerina Izmaylova.

Since that time, although the revised version has held the stage in the East, the original version of the opera has been widely staged in the West. Sometimes, a combination of both versions of the music are staged, a hybrid of both Lady Macbeth and Katerina Izmaylova.

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