9 - Operetta in Russia and the USSR

Summary

This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of operetta in Russia, starting with performances and reception of German and French operettas from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and exploring home-grown, Soviet operetta. It will show that operetta was big business in tsarist Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, and demonstrate that it was a valuable resource, a laughter therapy, for the Soviet authorities with which to anaesthetize the masses to the realities of life. The works by German and French composers dominated Russian operetta stages, with the most popular composers being Suppé, Offenbach, Planquette, Hervé and Lecocq, until Soviet composers began to create operettas according to the new, official socialist realism style. This chapter will briefly introduce significant operetta composers – Dunayevsky, Strelnikov, Aleksandrov and Milyutin – and discuss contributions to the genre from such well-known composers as Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. It also gives a brief account of how operetta was instrumental to boosting the morale of the population ravaged by World War II, especially in blockaded Leningrad, and shows that operetta (both European and Soviet) is still popular in today’s Russia.