“The Nose”. Opera

The Nose

Opera in Three Acts and Ten Scenes

Op. 15

Libretto by Yevgeni Zamyatin, Georgy Ionin, Alexander Preys and Dmitri Shostakovich after Nikolai Gogol’s like-named story.

Duration: 110'

In April 1926, Shostakovich was a post-graduate student at the Leningrad Conservatory in Maximilian Steinberg’s composition class, and wrote his opera The Nose based on Gogol’s “St. Petersburg Tale” of the same name as his post-graduate work.

Shostakovich began writing the opera in the summer of 1927, even before he finished his one-movement Second Symphony, Op. 14 (it was written under contract with the State Publishers music Sector for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution; the score was completed before 10 August).

The composer first mentioned the idea of writing The Nose in a letter to Boleslav Yavorsky on 12 June: “As soon as I finish the symphonic poem (future Second Symphony), I will start on the opera. It will be based on Gogol’s The Nose. I will write the libretto myself. If there are any difficulties, I will ask Radlov. I have almost finished the overture already.”

Later, Shostakovich presented the chronology of the composition of The Nose as follows: “The first act was written in a month, the second, after a short break, in two weeks, and the third, again after a break, in three weeks.” It cannot be established on the basis of this description whether or not Shostakovich took breaks while writing the separate acts or whether each act was written at one sitting. Nor is it clear whether this chronology also included the orchestration.

Shostakovich originally asked veteran Yevgeni Zamyatin to write the libretto. His adaptation of Leskov’s The Lefty (under the title The Flea) with stage decorations by Boris Kustodiyev and music by Yuri Shaporin was an important event in Leningrad’s theatrical life in the mid-1920s. Later, young writers Georgy Ionin and Alexander Preys, the future librettist for the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, were involved in writing the script for The Nose. There is reason to believe that Ivan Sollertinsky, Shostakovich’s close friend since the middle of 1927, participated in elaborating the concept of the opera, but there are no documents confirming this. However, there can be no doubt that Shostakovich himself was the main librettist of The Nose.

The composer explained his choice of literary base post factum in an article published immediately after the premiere of the opera at the beginning of 1930. Shostakovich said that he turned to the classics because there was no suitable material in modern Soviet literature, and contemporary writers did not want to work with him in “developing Soviet opera art”. Convinced that “in our day and age, opera on a classical subject ... is more suitable, given the satirical nature of the theme”, Shostakovich “began looking for a subject in the three giants of Russian satire—Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Chekhov” and “finally decided on Gogol’s The Nose”.

Even before the score of The Nose was finished, in February 1928, a contract for the opera was reviewed by the artistic council that served both Leningrad opera theatres—the Maly (Malegot) and Academic (Gatob); in May, the council listened to the two acts that were ready by that time. Soon after that, Shostakovich joined the seven fragments of the opera into a suite for concert performance (Op. 15a).

At first it was presumed that The Nose would be performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Meyerhold’s production. In the end, the opera was staged at Leningrad’s Malegot and conducted by Samuil Samosud, a convicted propagandist of new music, primarily Soviet, and supporter of Shostakovich’s oeuvre (later, in 1934, he staged Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at Malegot, in 1942 performed the Leningrad Symphony for the first time, and in 1956 returned the Eighth Symphony, which had been under unofficial ban since the time of the Zhdanovshchina, to concert life). The concert premiere of The Nose on Malegot’s stage under the baton of Samosud took place on 16 June 1929. On 14 January 1930, four days before the stage premiere, three scenes from the opera were shown in Leningrad’s Moscow-Narva House of Culture with explanations by Shostakovich himself and musicologists Sollertinsky and Yulian Vainkop. Finally, on 18 January 1930, the premiere of the opera was staged at Malegot, produced by Nikolai Smolich, stage design by Vladimir Dmitriyev.

The opera was removed from the repertoire a year later after being performed 16 times. The critics of the Stalin era insistently posed Shostakovich’s first opera as an embodiment of the most pernicious extremes of petty bourgeois modernism in the still weak Soviet music culture of the 1920s.33 The first serious analytical study about The Nose appeared only in 1965.

The sensational renewal of the opera in the Soviet Union (Moscow, Chamber Music Theatre, 1974, conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, director Boris Pokrovsky) was preceded by performances in Italy, West Germany, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Great Britain.

The fair manuscript of the score of the opera The Nose was the property of Universal Edition, a Viennese music publishing house, which had been regularly printing music from the Soviet Union since 1925. The score was evidently submitted to the publishing house at the beginning of the 1930s, but it was not published until 1970. At present, the score is kept in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Archive.

Recordings:

- Moscow Chamber Music Theatre, Vladimir Agronsky (chorus-master), Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (conductor).
Eduard Akimov (Kovalyov), Valeri Belykh (Ivan Yakovlevich), Boris Tarkhov (District Inspector), Boris Druzhinin (Ivan), Aleksandr Lomonosov (Nose), Lyudmila Sapegina (Pelageya Podtochina), Lyudmila Ukolova (Podtochina’s daughter), Nina Zazulova (Barber’s wife);
Melodiya C10 07007-10 (recorded in 1974; issued in 1977).
- Le Chant du Monde LDX 78609/10.