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- Title
THE GOLDEN COCKEREL IN WEIMAR BERLIN: EXILE, PERFORMANCE, AND FABULOUS DISSENT.
- Authors
Utkin, Roman
- Abstract
This article offers an archival reconstruction and analysis of Pavel Tchelitchew’s production of Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel at the Berlin State Opera in 1923. In this study in the relation between the literary and visual arts, I read Tchelitchew’s visual world by contextualizing the iconography of his surviving scenic and costume designs with cultural-historical analysis. In the early 1920s, Berlin became a transit zone for travelers between Russia and the West. The political and cultural environment of this so-called Russian Berlin facilitated deliberation for many Russian exiles about whether to emigrate permanently or to return to the Soviet Union. In staging The Golden Cockerel in Berlin, Tchelitchew tapped into the opera’s capacious interpretative possibilities and attempted to communicate a distinct message about the predicament of Russian exiles to his audiences while bridging the Silver Age aesthetic with a more radical avant-garde idiom. Tchelitchew approached The Golden Cockerel in an aesthetic I will describe as “fabulous dissent”; my aim is to decipher his staging as one driven by a distinctly exilic sensibility. I show how Tchelitchew’s staging of this opera links art and ideology and reflects a broader discourse beyond the stage about political and social anxieties concerning the interconnection of power and gender. I conclude by considering transpositions of The Golden Cockerel at the Bolshoi Theater in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
- Subjects
GOLDEN Cockerel, The (Theatrical production); TCHELITCHEW, Pavel, 1898-1957; DEUTSCHE Staatsoper Berlin; RECONSTRUCTION of works of art; RUSSIAN art
- Publication
Slavic & East European Journal, 2021, Vol 65, Issue 1, p119
- ISSN
0037-6752
- Publication type
Article