Documentary Gesamtkunstwerk, or Can Lenin Sing? Opera Ten Days that Shook the World in the Prague National Theatre
Abstract
The study discusses the 1972 Czech production of an opera by the Ukrainian composer Mark Karminsky based on John Reed's account of the October Revolution. The analysis primarily focuses on the question of what ideas about the political potential of contemporary opera informed the work and its production and by what means it was fulfilled.
The study looks at the official period reception of the Prague production, which accentuated the "documentary" character of the representation and promoted the opera as "modern" or even "experimental". It concludes that the opera works with a totalizing artistic conception that draws on the holistic visions of Bertold Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein as well as the legacy of the Soviet opera project of the 1930s and 1940s with all its Wagnerian ambitions.
As a significant act of propaganda in the first years of "normalization", the Prague production of Ten Days contributes to the understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics guided by a strong totalizing impulse.