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

Abstract

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.