Bolshoi Theater and USSR

The grand interior of the Bolshoi Theater. It was recently renovated and currently still holds performances including the “Stone Guest” and “La Bayadere.”

Shostakovich’s tormet under Stalin, reimagined in Julian Barne’s ‘The Noise of Time,’ a novel about how the “Muddle Instead of Music” article utterly changed Shostakovich’s life.

The Bolshoi Theater (translated as “large” or “grand" theater) was imperial property when it was built and is connected with the Maly Theater (translated as “small” or little.” While the Bolshoi Theater was meant for operas and ballets,  the Maly Theater was meant for plays (tragedies and comedies). The Bolshoi was built in 1776 by Prince Pyotr Ouroussoff and Englishman Michael Maddox. However, the original theater was destroyed in the French invasion of Moscow in 1812 and was destroyed by fire and the current theater was built on Theater square form 1821-1824 [1]

Though the Bolshoi has the reputation of being a grand theater pioneering and staging the most famous operas for many centuries, it has not escaped censorship during the Soviet era. Notably, the formal proclamation that the Soviet Union had been established happened at the stage of the Bolshoi. Two notable connections to cultural oppression that bookend the last century were the denunciation of Dmitiri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (1925) and more recently, an accomplished dancer at the Bolshoi in 1974, who applied for political asylum. The famous and first article that denounced Shostakovich’s opera is allegedly written by Stalin called “Muddle Instead of Music” was published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. This editorial called the opera “bourgeois” and “vulgar” – “Petit bourgeois ‘innovation is leading to a gap away from true art, science…literature.” This statement both affected Shostakovich’s later work and was a sign to other artists to be more careful. Another artist under attack from the communist government a few decades was a Russian-Jewish dancer Valery Panov, who left the USSR for the US seeking political asylum after fighting for the right to emigrate to Israel in 1974. The Soviet authorities considered anyone who tried to leave as good as a public enemy and Panov was banned from performing [3].

[1] The Bolshoi Theater. Moscow.Info

[2] Volkov, Solomon. When opera was a matter of life or death. March 2004. Telegraph.

[3] Dancing their way to freedom: 4 great Soviet ballet defectors