Abstract
Although Theodor W. Adorno condemned operetta to be a bourgeois genre with no potential of social subversion, in the Soviet Union, the operetta culture flourished during the state's entire existence.
Soviet operetta composers and librettists soon understood the need to implement principles of Soviet socialist culture to the cosmopolitan genre. This paper discusses the way Socialist Realism had been introduced to Soviet operetta.
Focusing on Boris Alexandrov's Wedding in Malinovka (1937) and Isaak Dunayevsky's operettas Free Wind (1947) and White Acacia (1955), the paper analyses Socialist Realist features of the most significant pieces of the genre. The paper argues that the three pieces mark shifts of thinking about the nature of the socialist operetta - while the former was praised for its score influenced by mass song style, it was also criticised for the so-called "Viennese features" of the plot; the Free Wind marked the first big success in implementing Socialist Realist literary scheme to an operetta libretto while also being criticised for alleged "dirtiness" of the musical numbers; the third case shows how the so-called theory of conflictlessness had been overcome in post-Stalinist operettas despite mixed reactions of the reigning discourse.
The paper examines the way Socialist Realism was reflected in different layers of the synthetic genre of operetta, what were the main points in the debate surrounding it, and what were the links between operetta and Socialist Realist literature discourse. Not by coincidence, the premieres of the analysed operettas overlap with the milestones of the Soviet cultural paradigm: 1936's discussions around Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the Zhdanov doctrine and anticosmopolitanism campaign of 1946, and the cultural loosening of the post-Stalinist era.