 Composers were writing for a proletarian audience; Dzerzhinsky’s "Tikhii Don" met this expectation.On the other hand, Shostakovich’s opera, "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", first performed in 1934, resulted in disaster for the prodigious composer.Although Shostakovich’s work was initially critically well received, Stalin and the Communist Party found the opera’s themes of a “pre-socialist, petty-bourgeois, Russian mentality” entirely inappropriate.