A good attitude towards monkeys
In 2004, the archives of the Museum of Glinka was discovered opera by Dmitry Shostakovich Orango. For a long time Opera was considered lost, and its discovery has become a minor sensation: the manuscript has lain in his desk for more than 70 years. The first statement "Orango" going to implement in Russia, but whether there was no money, or simply forgotten. As a result, an unknown Shostakovich premiere will be held in Los Angeles.
Paper, which found the manuscript Orango, hit the museum in 1960 by a close friend and Secretary of Shostakovich Levon Avtomyanu. Opera was the most valuable material of the sketches, drafts and fragments, which were 250-page file, and most importantly, that she kept in solid form: it was found and the libretto, and the registered version of the clavier scores, as well as the party of the choir and soloists.
On the conception of the opera has long been known, but before the discovery of manuscripts, no one knew Shostakovich wrote it or not. "Orango" composer commissioned in 1932, while he was completing "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" and engaged in work on the opera "Big Zipper". The customer made the Bolshoi Theatre and the opera was to be confined to the 15 th anniversary of the Great October Revolution, so it was meant to be a tough satire on capitalist society and in particular - to the bourgeois press. Nevertheless, the composer and librettists - Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Starchakov - have invested in it and share of criticism of the Soviet regime.
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Perhaps this is why the opera was never completed. According to another opinion, Shostakovich had left his work on "Orango" because it simply did not have time to finish it in time. Whatever it was, all that was found in the archive - a prologue for about 40 minutes. It consists of an orchestra party, a choir and 11 votes. In the prologue, exposition is given of the plot, which was to develop a three-act opera, left unwritten.
The plot of the opera is based on one of the stories Starchakova in which a doctor makes crossing experiments of man and monkey. While the topic of biological tests has been quite popular in literature and in science. In 1896 saw the release of HG Wells' novel about a mad vivisectionist "The Island of Dr. Moreau," and in 1925 wrote to Bulgakov "Heart of a Dog", a model of sharp political satire.
With regard to science, then in 1920 a biologist Ilia Ivanov on the instructions of the Soviet government spent in Africa, crossing experiments of man and monkey. His experiments were not successful, but he continued to work and after returning to the Soviet Union, for this, a special research station in Sukhumi. Dmitri Shostakovich was no stranger familiar with these experiences: in 1929 he visited the station Ivanov and later told me that he liked what he saw.
Los Angeles Philharmonic. Photo from laphil.com
The combination vpechtaleny Shostakovich with text Starchakova output gave the protagonist of the opera - a metaphorical enemy of communism, the ape-man, whose name became the title of the opera - Orango. Orango life begins in the laboratory of the French scientist who successfully crossed the monkey to man. As an adult, Orango a career journalist, after the First World War, is sent to the Soviet Union as a spy, but his expose and expelled. France Orango marries, becomes richer and the owner of the newspaper, which started to work.
With age, hatred Orango the communist regime is growing, and he falls in love with the daughter of the scientist who created it, sympathetic to the Communists. Because of this contradiction, and burn his hatred Orango rapidly become blunt and begins to decompose, losing a human face, and at some point, his wife sells it as a gimmick German circus, which brings Orango in Soviet Russia. At this prologue ends.
Opening "Orango - merit senior researcher of the Museum of Glinka Olga Digonskaya, which examined the archives at the request of the composer's widow, Irina Shostakovich. In an interview in 2006 Digonskaya said that "Orango" thinks to put in "Helikon-opera" Dmitri Bertman, but since then about these plans did not hear it. And in general in Russia, the news of the discovery did not cause much excitement, in fact - went virtually unnoticed.
Perhaps, therefore, Irina Shostakovich in late 2008 asked the British composer Gerard McBurney with a request to do the orchestration of piano version of the score. McBurney - a renowned expert on Russian music, including Shostakovich. He had previously engaged in an arrangement of his works - the suite "The Bedbug" pop-circus "Conditionally killed," the operetta "Moscow, Beacon Hill" and others.
Once the existence of the score, thanks to McBurney, learned in the West, she became interested in Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. He got in touch with Debra Borda, director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and said that he wanted to perform "Orango. As a result Philharmonic acquired the rights to work and start preparing for the premiere, scheduled for December 2011.
It is difficult to explain this in its way astounding disregard for the heritage of one of the prominent Russian composers of the XX century in his homeland.
Alex Kadanerhttp://www.lenta.ru/articles/2010/11/20/orango/
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Mitya Shostakovich.
1919 Artist BM
Kustodiyev.
From family archives, DD
Shostakovich.
In the portrait the inscription: "To my little friend Mitya Shostakovich from the author. B. Kustodiev. 1919. September"