Milan’s Teatro alla Scala opened its new season on December 7 with a bold and symbolically charged choice: Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, presented in the year marking the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. It was also the final December 7 premiere for music director Riccardo Chailly, with American soprano Sara Jakubiak leading the cast under the direction of Vasily Barkhatov.

La Scala revived the opera in its uncut original version, preserving the violent and sensual scenes that triggered the Soviet regime’s furious 1936 condemnation. Barkhatov relocates the action to late-20th-century Moscow, while retaining the story’s raw social tension. The production has already won over younger audiences, earning ten minutes of applause at the Under-30 preview. Financially, it set a new record: €2.8 million in ticket sales, the highest ever for the theater’s famed December 7 opening.

Outside, the atmosphere was far from celebratory. As is tradition on opening night, Piazza Scala filled with protests, from pro-Palestinian groups to unions representing culture-sector workers. Activists staged a political performance lampooning Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and denouncing soaring living costs and precarious cultural labor.

Inside the theater, attention focused on the Royal Box, where Holocaust survivor and senator-for-life Liliana Segre represented Italy’s institutions in the absence of both the president and prime minister. Celebrities including Mahmood, Achille Lauro, Pierfrancesco Favino, and fashion figures filled the rest of the house. Notably missing was Giorgio Armani, a longtime fixture of La Scala, present only symbolically through his designs.