The RUSSIAN OPERA Theatre

The Askold’s Grave Stage Opera

The RUSSIAN OPERA Theatre is busy with a new project of restoring the Askold’s Grave romantic opera by Alexey Verstovsky, that is to be opened at the stage of the Maly National Academic Theatre in April 2012.

The idea to stage the Askold’s Grave opera was not an accidental one. The world music community is well familiar with the Russian musical theatre’s sublime vertices, the operas composed by Petr Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mikhail Glinka, et al. The baroque music experts are knowledgeable of opuses by Bortnyansky, Berezovsky, Fomin, et al. The performances are being done, recordings are being issued. But, both the common public and experts know practically nothing about the Russian musical theatre of the “pre-Glinka times” epoch of Romanticism, which the contemporaries called “the Verstovsky epoch”. 176 years passed since the Askold’s Grave first night in the Bolshoi, Alexey Verstovsky’s opera was a colossal success, it had opened a new page in the history of the Russian musical theatre. By many a contemporary, the Askold’s Grave, first staged in 1835 in Moscow, was thought to be the vertex of the Russian opera.

The desire to give back a life to Verstovsky’s masterpiece relates to its tragic stage destiny. The opera’s Christian subject matter that ran counter to the Soviet official ideology made it impossible the further existence of an going to a cut with official Soviet ideology, have made impossible the Askold’s Grave to be further performed on the stages of the domestic theatres. Today, just a close circle of experts are aware of this musical composition. With the desire to eliminate this historical injustice, the RUSSIAN MAECENAS Theatrical and Cultural Centre (the RUSSIAN OPERA Theatre) is going to return the opera back to the public.

For further information please visit the Theatre’s website (Russian)