ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT BY THE CAST OF LENINGRAD OPERA AND BALLET THEATER NAMED AFTER S.M. KIROV IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1941

Andrey V. Mankov

DOI: 10.47026/2712-9454-2021-2-2-21-29

Key words

the Great Patriotic War, Leningrad, the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater named after S. M. Kirov (GATOB), performance, performing artists, the newspaper “For the Soviet Art”, the magazine “Soviet Music”

Annotation

The relevance of the research topic is due to the fact that 80 years ago – on June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people began. In the second half of 1941, millions of Soviet people unexpectedly became defenders of the Fatherland: commanders and political workers of the Red Army, ordinary Red Army soldiers and Red Navy men, partisans and members of the underground, some of them were captured and turned into prisoners of nazi concentration camps. The author focuses on the most interesting episodes from the creative and social life of the world-famous Leningrad State AcademicOpera and Ballet Theater named after S.M. Kirov (GATOB) and its artists. How did they meet the beginning of the war? What happened in the theater in the pre-war months of 1941, as well as in the first hours and days of the war? What was the theater’s repertoire in 1941? In his work, the author primarily uses the materials of a number of issues of the theater newspaper “For the Soviet Art”, published in January – September 1941 in Leningrad and stored in our time in the funds of St. Petersburg State Theater Library, for the first time introducing them into scientific circulation. He tells about the details of the theater’s creative activity, which today are of undoubted interest to all amateurs of the Russian culture. It is concluded that the outbreak of the war made significant adjustments to the repertoire of the on-stage performance group, radically changed the entire life of Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater. It is particularly emphasized that the last pre-war opera premiere of the great theater on the stage in Leningrad was the performance to the music of the German composer R. Wagner “Lohengrin”. In those years, Wagner was considered in Germany one of the symbols of the “Aryan culture” of the Third Reich. Today, the author believes, it can be supposed that staging of the German “Lohengrin” in Soviet Leningrad in June 1941 had a political nature, and the decision to work on the performance was made at the highest state level.

References

1. Sovetskaya muzyka, 1941, no. 1,
2. Sovetskaya muzyka, 1941, no. 2.
3. Sovetskaya muzyka, 1941, no. 3.
4. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 1(157), Jan. 14.
5. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 2(158), Jan. 21.
6. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 3–4(159–160), Feb. 4.
7. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 8 (164), March 15.
8. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 21(177), July 14.
9. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 22(178), July 22.
10. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 23(179), July 28.
11. Za sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1941, no. 24(170), Sept. 13.

Information about the author

Andrey V. Mankov – Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Lecturer, Department of Humanities and Social and Economic Disciplines, Military Academy of Communications named after The Marshal of the Soviet Union S.M. Budenny, Russia, St. Petersburg (63donetsk@mail.ru).

For citations

Mankov A.V. 1941 IN THE LENINGRAD STATE ACADEMIC THEATRE OPERA AND BALLET TO THEM S.M. KIROVA. Historical Search, 2021,  vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 21–29. DOI: 10.47026/2712-9454-2021-2-2-21-29 (in Russian).

Download the full article