Authors

Discussion

It was during Stalinism that opera became recognized as a particularly fertile genre for spreading ideology, leading to its dramatic reshaping in a process now referred to by musicologists as the Stalinist or Soviet operatic project. This process began in the late 1930s, with composers like Tikhon Khrennikov (1913-2007) and Ivan Dzerzhinsky (1909-1978) setting the tone for operatic production in the years to come. The newly shaped operatic style, rooted in the aesthetics of socialist realism and reflecting the ideology of the current government, perpetuated the imagery of significant Soviet historical events, primarily the Civil War and World War II. The focus on martial masculinity left little room for the construction and development of complex female characters, relegating them to the margins of the grand myth-building on the Soviet operatic stages. However, Stalin's death in 1953 and the subsequent arrival of the Thaw instigated a significant change in Soviet operatic production and indirectly sparked a process of feminization within Russian-Soviet opera. This paper, based on my doctoral research, aims to analyze selected operas with Soviet themes written during the long Soviet sixties and shed light on the circumstances that led to the construction of the new type of the operatic protagonist, but also the dominance of female-centric operatic universes. The operas of particular interest include Tikhon Khrennikov's Mat' (Mother, 1957), Rodion Shchedrin's Ne tol'ko lyubov' (Not Love Alone, 1961), Sergei Slonimsky's Virineya (1967), and Kirill Molchanov's Zori zdes' tikhie (The Dawns Here Are Quiet, 1973). Aside from illuminating the intricate network of political, social, and cultural trajectories that influenced the shift of focus from the martial and active hero to the pensive and reflective heroine, the main question this paper poses is: Why did the female operatic perspective turn out to be particularly fruitful in the artistic exploration and dissection of the post-Stalinist subject and landscape?