In 1936, critiques were targeted towards Shostakovich’s successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932), which led to his first downfall. Cause the plot of Lady Macbeth is, well, very wild:
TL;DR for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk:
Katerina Izmailova, a bored and lonely merchant’s wife in a provincial Russian town, begins an affair with a worker named Sergei. To escape her stifling life, she helps him murder her father-in-law, then her husband.
The couple marries, but at the wedding, their crimes are exposed. Sentenced to a labor camp in Siberia, Katerina discovers Sergei has taken up with another woman. In a jealous rage, she drags her rival into an icy river — and they both drown.
And no wonders (at least some) people are unhappy:
Lady Macbeth of Mzensk is a bed-chamber opera. We see much of the coarse embrace of the two sinners, mumbling and fumbling in bed with the side of the house removed so we shall miss nothing. For their first embraces the composer has written music which for realism and brutal animalism surpasses anything else in the world.
Here indeed we can indulge in superlatives. Shostakovich is without doubt the foremost composers of pornographic music in the history of art. He has accomplished the feat of penning passages which, in their faithful portrayal of what is going on, become obscene… And to crown this achievement he has given to the trombone a jazz slur to express satiety, and this vulgar phrase when the tenfold more offensive by its unmistakable purpose, is brought back in the last scene to help us to understand how tired the lover is of his mistress. The whole thing is a little better than the glorification of the sort of stuff that filthy pencils write on laboratory walls.
W.J. Henderson, New York Sun, Feb. 8th 1935