News
07.11.2017
MALEGOT: Thoughts on the Revolution
The Mikhailovsky Theatre will be marking the 100th anniversary of the revolutionary events of November 1917 with an exhibition in the Fireplace Hall on the dress circle level. The exhibition can be visited upon presentation of a valid ticket to any Mikhailovsky Theatre production.The theatre, being „born of the revolution“ or, more accurately, reborn as an opera house in 1918, has often addressed the theme of civil unrest. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the productions of the Maly Opera Theatre (or MALEGOT), as it was then known, often glorified the events of the October Revolution, reflected on its causes and background, and portrayed the reality of everyday Soviet life and the motif of revolution in other countries and ages.
In the early years of Soviet censorship the Directorate of Academic Theatres came up with a way of „modernizing outdated masterpieces“ of pre-revolutionary opera, giving them a revolutionary meaning. Puccini’s Tosca was an early victim of this adaptation process in 1924, when it was rewritten in a new way and staged under the new title In the Struggle for the Commune. Instead of the painter Cavaradossi and the singer Floria Tosca, the new production featured the communards Arlen and Zhanna Dmitriyeva, and the portrait of the penitent Mary Magdalene was replaced by a painting entitled The Triumph of Communism.
The first attempts to create real Soviet opera date from the 1920s, when strict rules were introduced for new productions: Soviet operas had to be „for the masses... covering all values and events from the perspective of the proletariat... and include new sound combinations reflecting the unique sounds of modern times (iron, sirens, clatter, factories, and cannons.“ Arseny Gladkovsky and Evgeny Prussak created the musical drama For Red Petrograd under these laws in 1925. The production featured „a huge crowd of workers, soldiers, and sailors with banners and weapons.“ In 1927, to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the theatre staged the première of The Twenty-Fifth, a composite production based on Mayakovsky’s poem Good! Through opera, ballet, and dramatic declamation the four-part production told the story of the lead-up to October, the period of the Provisional Government, the October coup d’état and an ‘apotheosis’.
The 1930s were the heyday of Soviet opera. During this period the Maly Opera House staged performances of Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s Quiet Flows the Don (1935), Levon Khoja-Eynatov’s Rebellion (1938), which returned audiences to the events of the Civil War and post-revolutionary revolts against the Soviet authorities, Valery Zhelobinsky’s Mother (1939), portraying the background to the revolution and the first workers’ unrest, and Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s Virgin Soil Upturned (1937), which extolled the idea of collectivization. Other operas staged at this time were Valery Zhelobinsky’s The Peasant of Komarino (1933) depicting Ivan Bolotnikov’s revolt and Dmitry Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon (1938), in which the characters rise up in rebellion against their ruler.
The highlight of the post-war years at the MALEGOT was Vladimir Enke’s opera Spring Love (1947), a tragic love story set during the Civil War. The same year also saw the première of Vano Muradeli’s The Great Friendship, dedicated to the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus. This particular opera was soon banned as a „vicious anti-artistic work“. The 1940s at the Maly Opera Theatre closed with the première of the ballet Youth to music by Mikhail Chulaki. The audience first saw the characters as teenagers and followed them as they were exposed to „a world of fierce class struggle“ and ultimately transformed into „soldiers of the revolution“.
Revolutionary events were again portrayed in operas at MALEGOT in the 1950s: Daniil Frenkel’s Gloomy River (1951) and Alexander Chernov’s Kirill Izvekov (1956). The 1950s also saw productions of Oles Chishko’s opera Battleship Potemkin (1955) and Gavroche (1958), a ballet by Boris Bitov and Evgeny Kornblit, in which the theme of popular discontent is portrayed through revolutionary events in other eras.
The theme of revolution at the Maly Opera Theatre continued into the 1960s as choreographers began to experiment. Alemdar Karamanov’s ballet More Powerful than Love, based on Boris Lavrenyov’s story The Forty-First, premiered in 1961. In 1966, the theatre returned to its revolutionary roots once more when it staged a ballet set to the music of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 (1905). The ballet The Gadfly, set to the music of Alexander Chernov and based on the popular revolutionary romantic novel, was staged in 1967. The same year also saw the première of Yakov Vaysburd’s The Viper, a ballet about a woman whose life has been ravaged by the Civil War and her inability to find her place in the new world order.
The theatre’s interest in the revolution gradually abated in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time the Maly Opera Theatre staged productions of Shirvani Chalaev’s The Highlanders (1971) on the establishment of Soviet power in Dagestan, Igor Rogalyov’s At the Beginning of Your Fate (1981), based on the works of Isaac Babel, and Vladimir Kobekin’s musical tragedy Pugachev (1983), retracing parallels between popular uprisings in different ages. In 1987 the theatre marked the anniversary of the October Revolution for the last time with a performance of the ballet Quiet Flows the Don to the music of Leonid Klinichev.
None of these productions have endured to the present day, but we still have the actors’ recollections, musical scores, photographs and, of course, theatre designers’ sketches. Some of these sketches are on display at the ‘MALEGOT: Thoughts on the Revolution’ exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition can also listen to excerpts from audio recordings of the operas Spring Love, Mother, Virgin Soil Upturned, Battleship Potemkin, and Quiet Flows the Don.