The opera The government inspector by V. Dashkevich and Y. Kim: On the question of intertextual connections between the libretto and the music

Abstract

This work is devoted to the opera by Vladimir Dashkevich, a classic of contemporary Russian music, based on Yuli Kim’s libretto The government inspector after Nikolai Gogol’s comedy of the same name, which is the subject of close scientific attention for the first time, ensuring the novelty of the material presented. The aim of the study was to identify and systematize the intertextual connections found in the libretto and musical score of the opera, as well as to determine the role of borrowings and self-borrowings in the formation of the semantic space of musical comedy. Along with the main literary source, the libretto draws on lines from Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, the comedy The Gamblers, quotations from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, an allusion to the poem Devils, a phrase from his fiction, and the title of A. N. Ostrovsky’s comedy There Was Not a Penny, But Suddenly Altyn. Five self-quotations have been identified in the music, introduced into the opera to characterize the Gorodnichy’s wife Anna Andreevna, his daughter Maria Antonovna, and Khlestakov’s servant Osip. All of them are borrowed from film scores created by the tandem of authors over several decades.