Orango (Shostakovich)

1932 commission#

The Bolshoi Theatre commissioned the opera in 1932 intending it as a celebration of the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Starchakov were engaged as librettists to work with Shostakovich and given the broad theme “‘human growth during revolution and socialist construction.’ Ultimately, the collaborators conceived their opera as ‘a political lampoon against the bourgeois press,’ adapting the plot from one of Starchakov’s stories concerning a human-ape hybrid conceived in a medical experiment.” When the librettists failed to deliver on schedule, Shostakovich, who was busy in the midst of composing Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, deferred and then abandoned the project, discarding his draft. Starchakov was arrested in 1936 and shot in 1937 during the Great Purge.

2004 discovery#

Russian musicologist Olga Digonskaya was working with Irina Shostakovich, the composer’s third wife and widow, on Shostakovich’s catalogue. In December 2004, at the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture, Moscow, Digonskaya discovered a cardboard file containing some “300 pages of musical sketches, pieces and scores” by the hand of Shostakovich. “A composer friend bribed Shostakovich’s housemaid to regularly deliver the contents of Shostakovich’s office waste bin to him, instead of taking it to the garbage. Some of those cast-offs eventually found their way into the Glinka. … The Glinka archive ‘contained a huge number of pieces and compositions which were completely unknown or could be traced quite indirectly,’ Digonskaya said.” The piano score was published in Moscow in 2010 with a scholarly introduction by Digonskaya.

McBurney orchestration#

Irina Shostakovich asked British composer Gerard McBurney to orchestrate a score from the piano sketches.

Further reading#

• Digonskaya, Olga, “Interrupted Masterpiece: Shostakovich’s Unfinished Opera Orango. History and Interpretation,” Shostakovich Studies 2, Pauline Fairclough (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 7–33.
• Digonskaya, Olga, “D.D. Shostakovich’s Unfinished Opera Orango”, (introductory essay in piano score) (Moscow: DSCH Publishers, 2010), pp. 31–58 (ISMN 979-0-706364-17-9).