The Development of an Opera Canon and the Search for the Iconic Soviet Opera in the 1930s

This paper is a part of a bigger text, to become a book in the future, which is dedicated to the processes which took place at the Soviet opera stage in the 1930s. My desire was to look at the development of the Soviet operatic culture against the background of the social, political and cultural processes, which influenced the USSR in this period. My perspective is broad, but the Bolshoi Theater remains the ´main character´ of this article, not only because this stage had utmost political importance for the regime. It witnessed also all the processes unfolding on the operatic map of the USSR. My desire was to highlight these processes and to show the context and the final purpose that the cultural politics concerning opera had. The model of the romantic 19th century Russian national opera served as an example for all composers who created operas in the national opera houses. Soviet leaders saw the establishment of the classical opera enterprises as the best way to equate previously culturally ‘underdeveloped’ republics with the most culturally ‘advanced’ ones by establishing the socialist‑realist canon in music and transmitting it to the whole territory of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself had some ideas of how the model contemporary opera should look like, to which he desired to listen in the Bolshoi Theater and all over the country. Once he said that “we need [to create] Soviet classic [operas which would be], like the nineteenth century classics, but better”. Stalin listed their desirable basic characters – librettos with Socialist plots, a realistic musical language with the stress on national idioms, and positive protagonists embodying the new Socialist era. These criteria were submitted to a group of opera specialists at the meeting of 17 January 1936. But already on 26 January 1936, Stalin’s highly cherished dream of a Soviet classical opera with a positive, contemporary hero was destroyed by “Lady Macbeth” by Dmitry Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s first composer. An article entitled ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ in Pravda and the resolution of the Party accused the composer of formalism after Stalin had visited this opera performed in the Bolshoi Theater. The last hope remained that in the republics, on the ‘virgin musical soil’ of Buriat‑Mongolia or Kyrgyzstan, the Soviet canon of ‘classic’ opera could be developed. Basically, all the ‘Dekady’ served the purpose of establishing this classical operatic canon, which Bolshoi Theater failed to do, and to transmit it to the territory of the whole Soviet Union. Not only was the Stalinist government unafraid of the manifestation of ‘national character’ in music, it supported it as long as it served the higher purpose of creating an opera art ‘socialist in content’. Here lays the chief paradox of Stalinist cultural politics.