Lolita is an opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 in two acts by composer Rodion Shchedrin

Rodion Shchedrin

Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin is a Russian composer. He was one оf the leading Soviet composers, and was the chairman of the Union of Russian Composers from 1973 until 1990.-Life and Works:...

. The opera was composed in 1992 and uses a Russian language libretto

Libretto

A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...

 by the composer which is based on Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

's 1955 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 of the same name

Lolita

Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...

, written in English. The opera premiered in 1994 in Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

 using a Swedish language translation of the original libretto.

Composition history

Lolita is Shchedrin's fourth opera based on literary works by Russian writers. He had already been his own librettist in composing operas based on Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

's Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...

 (1972), Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

's Dead Souls

Dead Souls

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol...

 (1976) and Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

's The Seagull

The Seagull

The Seagull is the first of what are generally considered to be the four major plays by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. The Seagull was written in 1895 and first produced in 1896...

 (1979). It was followed by Enchanted Wanderer (1873) in 2002, based on the Nikolai Leskov

Nikolai Leskov

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was a Russian journalist, novelist and short story writer, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is...

's novella

Novella

A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

 The Enchanted Wanderer, and Boyarinya Morozova in 2006, based on texts from The Life of Protopope Avvakum and The Life of Boyarina Morozova

Feodosia Morozova

Feodosia Prokopiyevna Morozova was one of the best-known partisans of the Old Believer movement.She was born on May 21, 1632 into a family of the okolnichi Prokopy Feodorovich Sokovnin. At the age of 17, she was married to the boyar Gleb Morozov, brother to the tsar's tutor Boris Morozov...

.

In 2001 Shchedrin extracted "symphonic fragments" for orchestra from the opera score, which were published as Lolita-Serenade, dedicated to Mariss Jansons

Mariss Jansons

Mariss Ivars Georgs Jansons is a Latvian conductor, the son of conductor Arvīds Jansons. His mother, the singer Iraida Jansons, who was Jewish, gave birth to him in hiding in Riga, Latvia, after her father and brother were killed in the Riga Ghetto...

.

Performance history

The opera Lolita was commissioned by Mstislav Rostropovich

Mstislav Rostropovich

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, KBE , known to close friends as Slava, was a Soviet and Russian cellist and conductor. He was married to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. He is widely considered to have been the greatest cellist of the second half of the 20th century, and one of the greatest of...

. It was first intended for the Opéra Bastille

Opéra Bastille

L'Opéra Bastille ' is a modern opera house in Paris, France. It is the home base of the Opéra national de Paris and was designed to replace the Palais Garnier, which is nowadays mainly used for ballet performances....

, the new opera house in Paris, inaugurated in 1989. Instead, it was premiered on 14 December 1994 at the Royal Swedish Opera

Royal Swedish Opera

Kungliga Operan is Sweden's national stage for opera and ballet.-Location and Environment:...

, staged by Ann-Margret Petterson and conducted by Rostropovich. The performance ran four hours, and was considered well-staged but musically monotonous. Lasse Zilliacus had translated the work into Swedish. The first performance in Russian was on 12 May 2003 at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre

Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre

The Perm Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre is an opera and ballet theatre in the city of Perm in Russia. It is one of the oldest theatres in the country, and it has remained a major musical centre during its history, in which many significant art events have taken place...

, conducted by Valery Platonov. It was also given in 2004 in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

 at the Novaya Opera. The opera was nominated for Russia's Golden Mask

Golden Mask

The Golden Mask is a Russian theatre festival and the National Theatre Award established in 1994 by the Theatre Union of Russia. The award is given to productions in all genres of theatre art: drama, opera, ballet, operetta and musical, and puppet theatre. It presents the most significant...

 award. In 2008 the second act of the opera was performed in concert at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre

Mariinsky Theatre

The Mariinsky Theatre is a historic theatre of opera and ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Opened in 1860, it became the preeminent music theatre of late 19th century Russia, where many of the stage masterpieces of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov received their premieres. The...

, conducted by Valery Gergiev

Valery Gergiev

Valery Abisalovich Gergiev is a Russian conductor and opera company director. He is general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and artistic director of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg.- Early life :Gergiev,...

, together with Messiaen's L'ascension

L'Ascension

L'ascension is a piece for orchestra, composed by Olivier Messiaen in 1932-33. Messiaen described it as "4 meditations for orchestra".The orchestral piece is in four brief sections:...

 and Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...

's Four Notations, as part of the Second New Horizons festival.

The premiere of a German version in a translation of Ariane Csonka Comstock was given on 30 April 2011 at the opening night of the Internationale Maifestspiele Wiesbaden in a production of the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden

Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden

The Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden is the State Theatre of the German state Hesse in the capital Wiesbaden, producing operas, plays, ballets, musicals and concerts on four stages. It is also known as Staatstheater Wiesbaden or Theater Wiesbaden...

, in the presence of the composer and his wife, Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Mikhailovna Plisetskaya , born is a Russian ballet dancer, frequently cited as one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century. Maya danced during the Soviet era at the same time as the great Galina Ulanova, and took over from her as prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi in 1960...

. It was staged by Konstanze Lauterbach, conducted by Wolfgang Ott, with Emma Pearson in the title role and Sébastien Soulès as Humbert. By agreement with the composer, the opera was shortened by a third. A workshop before the premiere, called Opernforum (Opera Forum), introduced the history and music of the work.

Lolita was published by Schott

Schott Music

Schott Music is one of the oldest German music publishers. It is also one of the largest music publishing houses in Europe and is currently the second oldest music publishing house. The company headquarters of Schott Music was founded by Bernhard Schott in Mainz, Germany in 1770.Established in...

; it is available in Russian, Swedish, English and German. Ariane Comstock translated it to English. The performance time is given as three hours.

Roles

Role	Voice type Voice type A voice type is a particular kind of human singing voice perceived as having certain identifying qualities or characteristics. Voice classification is the process by which human voices are evaluated and are thereby designated into voice types...	Premiere cast 14 December 1994 (Conductor: Mstislav Rostropovitch)
Lolita	lyrical coloratura soprano Coloratura soprano A coloratura soprano is a type of operatic soprano who specializes in music that is distinguished by agile runs and leaps. The term coloratura refers to the elaborate ornamentation of a melody, which is a typical component of the music written for this voice...	Lisa Gustafsson
Humbert Humbert	baritone Baritone Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...	Per-Arne Wahlgren
Claire Quilty	high tenor Tenor The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...	Björn Haugan Bjorn Haugan Björn Haugan was a Swedish born, Norwegian operatic lyric tenor.-Background:Björn Haugan was born in Söderhamn Municipality in the province of Hälsingland within Gävleborg County, Sweden...
Charlotte, Lolita's mother	mezzo-soprano Mezzo-soprano A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above...

Synopsis

Lolita is the only staged opera after Nabokov's novel, which was written in English in the United States. The story of the "famous and infamous novel" is told by Humbert Humbert, a 37 year old literary scholar, who becomes obsessed and sexually involved with his landlady's daughter Lolita, who is 12 years old at the beginning of the story. Shchedrin called the novel "a wonderful thriller begging to be transformed into an opera". He commented further: "It feels like a nostalgia for beauty; it is a symbol, really. ... For me personally, Lolita as a character is less of a human being but rather an archetype, a symbol of beauty but a fleeting beauty." He kept most of the plot, but moved the beginning to a court where Humbert is sentenced.

The publisher summarizes: "Humbert Humbert, professor of literature and sophisticate, is obsessed with 12-year-old fatherless Lolita. He seduces the girl and lives with her for some time after marrying pro forma her mother (who dies shortly after). Three years after the end of their increasingly fraught relationship, Humbert meets Lolita again, now married to another man and expecting his baby. Humbert's jealousy, however, is not directed towards Lolita or her husband, but towards the Mephistophelian

Mephistopheles

Mephistopheles is a demon featured in German folklore...

 film director Quilty, who has used Lolita for porn films. Humbert takes bloody revenge on Quilty – and is sentenced to death in the electric chair."

A review of the German premiere has more details: Humbert marries Charlotte, Lolita's mother, to get closer to Lolita. When Charlotte detects Humbert's passion for her daughter, she panics and dies in a car accident. Humbert keeps her death a secret to Lolita and travels with her through the United States. The girl escapes to an affair with Quilty, who abuses her for porn films and is killed by Humbert. Humbert dies in prison; Lolita, again in a new affair, dies giving birth. Lolita's death was in the novel, but originally not in the opera until the German premiere.

Music

The opera is scored for a large orchestra consisting of 4 flute

Western concert flute

The Western concert flute is a transverse woodwind instrument made of metal or wood. It is the most common variant of the flute. A musician who plays the flute is called a flautist, flutist, or flute player....

s (3rd doubling alto flute

Alto flute

The alto flute is a type of Western concert flute, a musical instrument in the woodwind family. It is the next extension downward of the C flute after the flûte d'amour. It is characterized by its distinct, mellow tone in the lower portion of its range...

, 4th doubling piccolo

Piccolo

The piccolo is a half-size flute, and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. The piccolo has the same fingerings as its larger sibling, the standard transverse flute, but the sound it produces is an octave higher than written...

), 2 oboe

Oboe

The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...

s, English horn, 3 clarinet

Clarinet

The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...

s (3rd doubling alto saxophone

Alto saxophone

The alto saxophone is a member of the saxophone family of woodwind instruments invented by Belgian instrument designer Adolphe Sax in 1841. It is smaller than the tenor but larger than the soprano, and is the type most used in classical compositions...

), 2 bassoon

Bassoon

The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family that typically plays music written in the bass and tenor registers, and occasionally higher. Appearing in its modern form in the 19th century, the bassoon figures prominently in orchestral, concert band and chamber music literature...

s, contrabassoon

Contrabassoon

The contrabassoon, also known as the double bassoon or double-bassoon, is a larger version of the bassoon, sounding an octave lower...

, 4 horn

Horn (instrument)

The horn is a brass instrument consisting of about of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. A musician who plays the horn is called a horn player ....

s, 3 trumpet

Trumpet

The trumpet is the musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a "buzzing" sound which starts a standing wave vibration in the air...

s , 3 trombone

Trombone

The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...

s, bass tuba

Tuba

The tuba is the largest and lowest-pitched brass instrument. Sound is produced by vibrating or "buzzing" the lips into a large cupped mouthpiece. It is one of the most recent additions to the modern symphony orchestra, first appearing in the mid-19th century, when it largely replaced the...

, a percussion section requiring 3 players (instruments include a.o. glass chimes, siren, wind chime

Wind chime

Wind chimes are chimes constructed from suspended tubes, rods, bells or other objects and are often made of metal or wood. Wind chimes are usually hung outside of a building or residence, as a visual and aural garden ornament, and are to be played by the wind....

s, tin whistle

Tin whistle

The tin whistle, also called the penny whistle, English Flageolet, Scottish penny whistle, Tin Flageolet, Irish whistle and Clarke London Flageolet is a simple six-holed woodwind instrument. It is an end blown fipple flute, putting it in the same category as the recorder, American Indian flute, and...

 and xylophone), harp

Harp

The harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...

, celesta

Celesta

The celesta or celeste is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. Its appearance is similar to that of an upright piano or of a large wooden music box . The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal plates suspended over wooden resonators...

, harpsichord

Harpsichord

A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...

 and strings

String section

The string section is the largest body of the standard orchestra and consists of bowed string instruments of the violin family.It normally comprises five sections: the first violins, the second violins, the violas, the cellos, and the double basses...

. In addition to several minor roles, the opera requires a boys' choir

Boys' choir

A boys' choir is a choir primarily made up of choirboys who have yet to begin puberty or are in the early to middle stages of puberty and so retain their more highly pitched childhood voice type...

 and a "choir of judges" who all sing bass

Bass (voice type)

A bass is a type of male singing voice and possesses the lowest vocal range of all voice types. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, a bass is typically classified as having a range extending from around the second E below middle C to the E above middle C...

.

The music of Lolita-Serenade, which is part of the opera, has been compared to that of Alban Berg

Alban Berg

Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...

's Lulu

Lulu (opera)

Lulu is an opera by the composer Alban Berg. The libretto was adapted by Berg himself from Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora .-Composition history:...

:

Despite the darkness and violence – Lolita is, after all, the story of a predatory, obsessed, self-deluded murderer and the lost childhood and early death of an orphaned 13-year-old girl – Shchedrin's Lolita Serenade has many moments of affecting tenderness, from the gently intertwining flute tendrils that begin it to the sweetly sad epilogue that ends the piece. The scoring is striking and memorable, especially in the use of spare, unadorned harpsichord figures to impart a sense of fragility and lost innocence. Anyone who (as I do) responds to Berg's Lulu Suite should hear this remarkable composition, which is drawn from the same well.

The opera begins with only flutes and cellos playing, symbolizing the difference in age of the protagonists. The scene opens with Humbert accusing himself at a court. A "choir of judges", all "Russian" basses reminiscent of the chant in the Russian Orthodox Church

Russian Orthodox Church

The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...

 calls him a "beast".

Shchedrin's music has been termed chamber music

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

 for extended parts of the opera, reflecting the psyche of the protagonists with compassion, also some comic characters such as two singing Advertising Girls. In a scene between Humbert and Lolita reminiscent of Carmen

Carmen

Carmen is a French opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, itself possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin...

, Shchedrin quotes Bizet

Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.During a...

.

In the end Humbert stammers syllables of Lolita's name against a boys' choir chanting Ora pro nobis (Pray for us).

External links

• Jörn Florian Fuchs: Lolita stirbt bei den Maifestspielen Wiener Zeitung
  Wiener Zeitung
  Wiener Zeitung is an Austrian newspaper. It is one of the most famous newspapers in Europe and one of the oldest, still published newspapers in the world. It is the official publication used by the Government of the Republic of Austria for its formal announcements. It was founded in 1703 under the...
  
  6 May 2011
• Birgit Schmidt: Shchedrins Oper Lolita: Beeindruckende Deutschlandpremiere suite101.de 1 May 2011