Opera in three acts and an epilogue by Dmitri Shostakovich (1927/1928)
Composer Dmitri Schostakowitsch.
Libretto by Dmitri Shostakovich, Yewgeni Ivanowich Samyatin and Alexander Preis, based on the eponymous short story by Nikolai Gogol.
In russian · With english surtitels. New Production.
Premiere at 24. October 2021
[Translate to English:]
Einführungen zu Die Nase finden am 17. und 20.7.22 jeweils 1 Stunde vor Vorstellungsbeginn im 1. Rang im Vorraum zur Königsloge statt.
Zu beachten: Sitzplätze nur begrenzt vorhanden, Dauer ca. 20 Min, Mindestabstand in Eigenverantwortung der Besucher:innen
A nose goes independent. It leaves an embarrassing empty space on its owner’s face, arrogates a social position for itself and struts in its State Councillor uniform along Nevsky Avenue in Saint Petersburg. Its tattered owner, Kovalyov, loses himself in a ludicrous search for his status symbol.
The 21-year-old Shostakovich’s first opera is a searing critique of post-Tsarist Russia, shaken by world war, bloody civil war and rising state terror. The image of a brutal society filled with physically and spiritually distorted moral cowards and perpetrators of violence is musically captured in the grotesque interchange of the most diverse style levels – circus music and Russian-orthodox church music, gallops, polkas, marches and fugues are intercut in filmic radicalism. Behind the caustic wit lurk fear and violence.
