The “Song Opera” of the 1930s: In Search for New Poetics of the Genre

Contemporary researchers of opera of the Stalin period primarily touch upon the Soviet “opera project” (Ekaterina Vlasova, Marina Frolova-Walker): conceived on a high level of ambitiousness, it became virtually a failure. An immense number of operas created during the course of the 1930s and the 1940s, with a small number of exceptions, slipped into obscurity: a significant part of them has never seen the stage and has been preserved only as archival materials. One of the main reasons is mentioned as the low artistic level of the overwhelming part of the opera material. In them, along with rather fair criticism of many opera works, there were attempts to understand the reasons why Soviet opera, which received a level of government support unprecedented in its scale, adapted itself to the new sociocultural conditions with such great difficulty. In the present article the attempt is made to comprehend the phenomenon of the so-called song opera: with this aim the examination of one of the most illustrative periods of its development is proposed. It spans the period of five years — from 1936 (the year the article Muddle Instead of Music came out and the Committee for the Affairs of Art was created affiliated with the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR) until 1940 (the All-Union Opera Conference was held). During this period the greatest number of operas was composed (including 30 song operas), presentations of newly created compositions and the subsequent discussion of them in the Committee for the Affairs of Art was brought into practice. A considerable number of publications from these years was devoted to the issues of opera. The discussions of the art of opera received unprecedented caliber and were conducive to the formation of complex perceptions of the aesthetic etalon of Soviet opera. However, the etalon operatic composition was never written. The article is based on analysis of archival materials and documents, part of which is being brought into scholarly use for the first time.