Shostakovich’s mysterious opera about the hybrid of a man and a monkey returned to St. Petersburg after 83 years

ST. PETERSBURG. The premiere of Shostakovich’s unfinished opera Orango about the monkey man took place.

The next anniversary of the October Revolution needed a grandiose work glorifying it. The Directorate of the Bolshoi Theater approved in 1932 the candidacy of Shostakovich, ignoring the difficult history of productions that lasted negligible in the repertoire of Leningrad opera houses. “Bolt” passed once, “Nose” - 16 times, “Golden Age” was removed a year later. The creation of the libretto was entrusted to Alexei Tolstoy (author of Peter I, the Golden Key, Hyperboloid Engineer Garin) and Alexander Starchakov (writer and literary critic, repressed and executed in 1937), since Demyan Bedny was not originally invited to this role managed to meet the deadlines.

The resulting work was supposed to demonstrate the advantages of socialism, which has a beneficial effect on a person living under such a system). The politically correct topic proposed by the librettists, “Son of the Partisan,” was rejected by Shostakovich. He was replaced by a hybrid of a monkey and a man from Starchakov’s short story “The Victory of Albert Duran”. The intelligence of Orango, born of the fertilization of a monkey by a man, allowed him to build a phenomenal career in the newspaper business. In his actions, he is guided by a hatred of communism, which after visiting the Country of Soviets becomes even stronger. In the finale - the inevitable degradation of the hero. The clavier, which included only the Prologue of 11 numbers, was lost.

An invaluable musical autograph accidentally caught the eye of a researcher at the Museum of Archives named after Glinka Olga Digonskaya. Among the 300 pages she discovered, filled by Shostakovich’s hand, was the clavier “Orango”, designed for about 40 minutes of sound. The opera was first performed in Los Angeles on December 2, 2011. The orchestra was done by Gerard McBurney. The real breakthrough occurred in 2015. At the May Diaghilev Festival, the theatrical production of the Perm Opera was presented with great success. In late August, at the 120th BBC Proms, a concert version performed by the soloists of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers, accompanied by Esa Pekka Salonen. In October, a similar event occurred in St. Petersburg (also performed by the young soloists of the Mariinsky). For the first time since the creation of the opera.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru