Antonina Klokova

An Unrealized Staging of Weinberg’s Opera “The Passenger” in 1968: Whose Fault?

This article is written in Russian. You can read it here.

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DOI 10.34690/71

Author Antonina Klokova

Affiliation Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany

Email klokova@mailbox.org

ORCID

0000-0003-4592-5923

Abstract

Opera “The Passenger” by Mieczysław Weinberg is regarded as the composer’s central work, an outstanding work due to its theme and the incredible relevance. Both his fellow composers and the leading national musicologists came to these conclusions, when the opera was first submitted to the USSR Union of Composers for consideration. However, the opera’s staging became uncertain right after its composition, and “The Passenger” did not premiere, neither at the Bolshoi Theatre that commissioned its composition, nor at any other theatre, until 2006.

Whose fault was that? New archive materials that are to be presented in this paper can help to shed the light on the possible reasons for Soviet theatres to neglect the opera. They refer to the history of the opera’s composition and unveil the initial plans of the Bolshoi Theatre to stage it. Besides the archive data, the paper will examine changes in the (cultural) politics of the USSR at the end of 1960s as well as its contemporary historical narrative referring to the Second World War events.

Keywords Mieczysław (Moisey) Weinberg, opera “The Passenger”, Bolshoi Theatre, censorship in the Soviet culture and Soviet histor

For citation

Klokova, A. “An unrealized staging of Weinberg’s opera ‘The Passenger’ in 1968: Whose fault?” Muzykal’naya akademiya [Music Academy], no. 2, 2020. pp. 116–131, doi:10.34690/71. (In Russ.)

Acknowledgments

to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which has funded my research work in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts in 2015.