The exhibition „War. Siege. MALEGOT“
With the 70th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad just around the corner, an exhibition dedicated to the theatre in wartime is due to open. Photographs and documents from that time, which have been carefully preserved in the theatre’s archive, will be on display in the stalls circle. At a time when we all feel a strong personal connection to one of the great heroic milestones in our nation’s history, documentary evidence of the era acquires special relevance.
A wealth of documentary evidence — covering concerts in the blockaded city and on the frontline, work carried out at arms manufacturing plants and in anti-aircraft teams, the daily life of frontline squadrons, and accounts of the evacuated theatre — promises to recreate this chapter in the Maly Opera Theatre’s history. Among the original documents on display at the exhibition will be letters to the frontline, reviews and thank you letters addressed to the theatre from Red Army commanders, and the transcripts of meetings that decreed to extend material assistance to soldiers on the frontline and their families back home.
One section of the exhibition contains a direct link to the life of the theatre today. Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tsar’s Bride, which is currently returning to the stage in a rendition by Andrey Moguchy, was the first opera to be performed in Leningrad after the siege of the city was lifted. The opera, which in 1936 had appeared on stage at the Leningrad Academic Maly Opera Theatre (known as MALEGOT) in a production by Viktor Rappaport with sets based on drawings by Boris Kustodiev, was performed again as soon as the opera company returned to the city following their evacuation. The theatre troupe returned from Chkalov (present-day Orenburg) on 8 September 1944. Shortly after, on 3 November 1944, the theatre season in Leningrad opened with a performance of The Tsar’s Bride. An original poster with frayed edges, painstakingly reinforced by our archivists, will be temporarily retrieved from the folder where it has been stored for almost 70 years to be featured in the exhibition, a wartime relic attesting to the continuity of the theatre’s creative process.
„We have been performing daily, so far to a packed house. Once a week we put on symphonies, and so far these have also been very popular, but we are going to run out of music soon (by which I mean orchestral scores), and that will be bad. We are revisiting our old repertoire while at the same time working on new productions.“
From Boris Khaikin’s letter to Ivan Sollertinsky, sent from the town of Chkalov, where the theatre troupe was evacuated.
