It will soon be a year since the first production of my opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. That production was a great lesson for me. / I feel that as far as my works for the stage are concerned, Lady Macbeth represents a step forward. Recalling my failures in this area (the ballets The Golden Age and Bolt), I began to look for the reasons for these failures and for the success of Lady Macbeth, and established that the essential element in the opera is the attempt to penetrate as deeply as possible into the content of the given material.