Dmitri Kabalevsky - Colas Breugnon: Overture
DMITRI KABALEVSKY
Born St. Petersburg, 30 December 1904.
Died Moscow, 18 February 1987
OVERTURE TO COLAS BREUGNON
Composed 1936-38 and first performed in 1938 at the Leningrad State Opera. The score calls for solo violin, piccolo, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, snare drum, xylophone, gong, harp, and strings. The work lasts approximately 5 minutes.
When Dmitri Kabalevsky became professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1939, his accessible energetic style had earned him the approval of the communist authorities. The year before Kabalevsky premiered his opera, Colas Breugnon. Officials at the Ministry of Culture, guardians of the healthy political instincts of the working class, were pleased. They assumed the task of purging Soviet culture from the "decadent formalism" that could be heard in much of the west by this time. In Berlin, for example, Alban Berg had premiered his jarringly atonal opera, Wozzeck, back in 1925. The guardians of working class sensibilities were mollified by the conviction that Kabalevsky, at least, avoided such anti-proletarian methods.
The overture of the opera is a brilliant romp in the conservative tradition. It is a rousing opening to the opera, beginning with driving passages, rhythmic intensity, and good humor, with a slower, lyrical middle section, and finishing with an exciting flourish. Kabalevsky creates a compelling overture within the constraints of the conservative style.
If Soviet authorities were reassured by the overture of the opera, they were equally enamored with its plot, for the story pits a noble worker against an evil aristocrat, a favorite theme of the community party. Based on a novel by the French author, Roman Rolland, entitled The Master of Clamecy, the opera tells of the master sculptor, Colas Breugnon, who loves a maiden named Selina. The duke of the province beguiles Selina, tricking her into rejecting Colas. Years later, a plague kills much of the village, including Colas' wife and family. In the confusion, Colas and Selina find each other again and fall in love. The enraged duke destroys all of Colas' artworks. Colas exacts revenge when he is commissioned to carve a monument of the duke, and in the final scene Colas unveils a sculpture of him riding backwards on a donkey.
The communist authorities, in their self-righteous indignation against the aristocracy, seem to have missed the double entendre of a political regime that imposes its will on the artists of its realm. The irony could hardly have been lost on the composer. Still, Kabalevsky managed to keep a low enough political profile, so that in 1948, when the communist party condemned so many of his fellow composers, including Prokofiev and Shostakovich, for musical decadence, Kabalevsky was spared. He managed to continue working within the system, and created music that found universal appeal, even if it did not extend the boundaries of musical expression.
