Традиции Петербургской композиторской школы в оперном творчестве для детей уральского композитора Л. Б. Никольской

Abstract

Lyubov Borisovna Nikolskaya (1909–1984) was a composer, music researcher and music teacher, who graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory, where she majored in composition (having studied with Maximilian Steinberg) and musicology (as a student of Semyon Ginzburg). The main period of her creative activity was during the years 1947–1984, when she worked at the Urals State M. P. Mussorgsky Conservatory, having traversed the path from a teacher to a professor at the music theory and composition departments. Lyubov Nikolskaya became the founder of the tradition of composition of children's operas in the Ural Mountains region. She composed about ten children's operas based on literary works by writers from the Ural Mountains region of the previous century (“The Silver Hoof” by Pavel Bazhov, “The Devushka-Semidelushka” by Elena Khorinskaya, etc.). A weighty position in them is held by the domain of fairytale-fantastic imagery. In the realization of her fantastic imagery Nikolskaya relies on the traditions of the St. Petersburg Compositional School of the 19th and early 20th centuries, presented by such significant composers as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Anatoly Lyadov, Nikolai Tcherepnin and others. The aforementioned refers to the features of the dramaturgy of the libretto, interpretation of stage images, the specificity of the use of the means of harmony, counterpoint, texture, and orchestral-timbre color, which is perceived in the musical vocabulary of her opera compositions examined in this article. Keywords: Lyubov Nikolskaya, children's operas, the traditions of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Urals Composer School, Pavel Bazhov.