Panorama of 20th Century Opera: from the History of One Cycle of the Main Editorial Board of Music Broadcasting of the All-Union Radio

Abstract

The article examines a cycle of programs of the Main Editorial Board of Musical Broadcasting of the All-Union Radio, Panorama of 20^thCentury Opera. Due to a happy accident, the author came into the possession of seven volumes of typescript texts of 96 radio programs, which were subject to depreciation and destruction, due to the expired time-limit of storage. The first was dated January 8, 1968 года, whereas the last went on the air on October 1, 1971. Over a hundred works by composers from Russia and other countries were broadcast during the four seasons of the cycle. These composers included Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Gheorghe Enescu, Leos Janacek, Zoltan Kodaly, Paul Dessau, Eugen Suchon, Sandor Szokolay and others. The operas were broadcast in their entirety, their synopses were expounded before each act, as the result of which the time duration relayed for the broadcast ranged up to four hours over the airwaves. Of special attention were the introductory words devoted to the composer’s personality and music, the history of the opera’s creation and the performances, which could range up to 50 minutes. All the significant researchers of musical theater of that time were engaged into the project. A great role was played by Boris Yarustovsky: his introduction to the cycle of radio programs about the paths of development of the opera genre is directly connected with the monograph Ocherki po dramaturgii opery ХХ veka [Essays on Dramatic Concept of Twentieth-Century Opera], the first part of which was published later, in 1971. Besides that, the programs involved the participation of Leo Mazel, Boris Levik, Lev Danilevich, Gigoriy Schneerson, Israil Nestyev, Marina Sabinina, Larisa Danko, Oksana Leontyeva, Ludmila Polyakova and others. Special attention is merited by the original lectures of Gennady Rozhdestvensky devoted to one-act operas by composers outside of Russia and Igor Stravinsky, as well as an overview of Soviet opera, with accentuation of its most important features undertaken in one of the programs by Innokenty Popov, the assistant editor of the newspaper Sovetskaya kul’tura [Soviet Culture]. The author of the article arrives at the conclusion that in the cycle Panorama of 20th Century Opera at the All-Union Radio for the first time in Russian musicology a detailed, academically equipped retrospective review of opera of the first six decades of the 20th century, while the preserved texts merit being published in a separate edition.

Keywords: 20th century opera, All-Union Radio, cycle of radio broadcasts, Boris Yarustovsky, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Innokenty Popov

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to express her gratitude to Valery V. Berezin for the transfer of archival materials from the cycle Panorama of 20^th Century Opera.

For citation: Gavrilova, L. V. (2024). Panorama of 20th Century Opera: from the History of One Cycle of the Main Editorial Board of Music Broadcasting of the All-Union Radio. Contemporary Musicology, 8(4), 135–153. https://doi.org/10.56620/2587-9731-2024-4-135-153