April 23 is going to be a special date in the newest history of the Bolshoi – the day when the long-awaited Rosental’s Children by Leonid Desyatnikov will come at last. The Petersburg’s composer is known to the audience first of all for his music to the films Giselle’s Mania, The Caucasian Captive and Moscow. Though the Bolshoi still has the production of Desyatnikov’s brainchild in store the atmosphere around it has been getting increasingly scandalous for quite a long time. To blame for it is the tandem of Desyatnikov and a notorious writer Vladimir Sorokin, the author of the libretto to the opera.

Three years ago the Bolshoi’s management concluded a contract with Desyatnikov and Sorokin for a new name. The project was conceived by the two above mentioned authors as well as the then General Director of the Golden Mask festivals, nowadays a humble theatre producer Eduard Boyakov, and the former Bolshoi decision-maker in the field of long-term repertoire planning, a musical critic Petr Pospelov.

Sorokin’s best-sellers Light-Blue Bacon, The Feast and The Ice are translated into a great number of languages, attain a wide circulation, and trigger loud protests on the part of various political organisations. For example, the summer of 2002, young politicians from the "Idushchie Vmeste” (“Going Together") organisation gathered in Teatralnaya Ploshchad and publicly demolished his books and distributed leaflets where the writer was described as "pornographer" and "sophisticated user of four-letter words". Neither do they approve of the stance of the country’s main theatre company’s management who has invited Sorokin to co-operate with.

At the end of February a new wave of discontent was started by the Duma Labour and Social Policy Committee Vice Chairman Sergey Neverov, a deputy of " Edinaya Rossia ". Having secured the support of 293 people’s deputies, at a plenary session, he suggested that the Duma Committee on Culture check the information about the production of the new opera " for the presence of pornography and platitude ". It goes without saying that today it is impossible to curb theatres’ repertoire policy. The deputy’s aspiration to condemn the production which hasn’t yet come out both shows Mr. Neverov as an ignorant man whose confession - " I haven’t read Sorokin " - reminds of the times when in the USSR Pasternak and Solgenitsin’s works were “ judged " in the same way and excites new interest in the opera. The libretto by Sorokin " does not contain either obscene language or scenes of pornography ", the Bolshoi’s PR Department officially claim.

The libretto runs as adventures of clones (they are named " doubles " in the opera, as the word “clone” didn’t exist in the 1940s. The clones bear the names of five classic composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (heroic tenor), Richard Wagner (contralto), Modest Musorgsky (bass), Guiseppe Verdi (baritone), and Petr Tchaikovsky (lyrical tenor). They are a product of the scientific research work of the secret laboratory run by a German scientist Alex Rosental, who found shelter from the fascists in Stalin’s USSR. The clone of Mozart is Rosental’s swan song – Act 1 finishes with his death. Act 2 describes the life in the USSR in the early 1990-s. The clones find themselves in the street homeless and jobless. Reduced to poverty they live the life of beggars earning money by singing in the subway near the Three Railway Stations Square. Once Mozart’s life is changed by the romance with a whore Tanya. In the Finale all the composers, except for the Austrian genius rescued by the force of Tanya’s love, die. The genre implies that this story will arouse Bolshoi’s spectator’s sympathy.

Desyatnikov moderately patterned the score on the style of the five composers. On the whole, however, the opera corresponds to the modern standards and will not impress the Bolshoi’ audience as a vanguard performance.

Both the composer and librettist admit that " they feel parental concern and tenderness towards their clone brainchildren and reject any hint at their being a caricature ". The production of "Children" is endeavoured by Eimuntas Nyakroshus who feels at home in the Bolshoi and whose debut was a production of Verdi’s Ìàcbeth, 2003. It remains to be seen in what way the genre art of the libretto and the symbolistic language of directing will go together. The cast list carefully chosen by Alexandr Vedernikov, responsible for the music performance, consists of the singers who distinguished themselves in the previous premieres; they are Valerie Guilmanov (Musorgsky), Andrey Grigoriev (Verdi), Margarita Mamsirova (Wagner), Vitaliy Panfilov (Tchaikovsky), Roman Muravitsky (Mozart), and Vadim Linkovsky (Alex Rosental). Elena Voznesenskaya from Helikon-Opera will sing Tania.

Rosental’s Children will be the third opera written to the Bolshoi’s special order following The Dead Souls by Rodion Shchedrin which came out in 1977 and " Captain's Daughter “ by a Moscow composer Michail Kollontay devoted to Pushkin’s anniversary. The production that was to see a world premier when Vladimir Vasiliev was Head of the Bolshoi, however, was never held for some unknown reason. Hopefully Rosental’s Children will set a new landmark in the Bolshoi Opera Company’s history.

The national opera history has seen a good number of cases when premiers failed or such masterpieces as The Life for Tsar, Boris Godunov, Lady Macbeth of the District of Mtsensk faced hostility.
Bolshoi’s General Director Anatoly Iksanov sent a copy of the libretto of "Children" to the Duma deputies who, on getting acquainted with the text, admitted, that Mr. Neverov’s concerns and fears didn’t prove to be true. To dot their i’s and cross their t’s in the lengthy story, the Duma Committee on Culture representatives have been invited by the Bolshoi management to attend the general rehearsal of the opera.