Vladimir Georgievich Ehrenberg: A Mocker’s Fate

Abstract

The article presents for the first time in Russian music scholarship an artistic portrait of one of the theater-related musicians of the Silver Age — Vladimir G. Ehrenberg. The composer contributed almost fifteen years of his artistic life serving in cameo theaters, the most significant of which was Krivoe zerkalo [Distorted Mirror]. Together with Alexander Kugel and Zinaida Kholmskaya, Ehrenberg stood at the origins of this St. Petersburg cabaret, and subsequently (with a few interruptions) he carried out the duties not only of a composer, but also a conductor and the head of the music department. The aesthetic platform of Distorted Mirror was determined with Ehrenberg’s participation. It was particularly after the production of his opera parody Vampuka, the African Bride that the theater set a course for dethroning the clichés of various theatrical genres.

The composer took an active part in the so-called anti-opera campaign launched by the leaders of the Distorted Mirror, and created a number of plays that were very successful among his contemporaries. Among them were Rychalov’s Tour, The Cruel Baron, The Action on the Protested Promissory Note and others. Operetta and pantomime, cantatas and romances, and symphonic music also came in his view (The Modern Symphony, Schumette of Digestion). An ironic view of musical and theatrical clichés has made it possible Ehrenberg to become virtually the chief musical parodist of his time. In his experiments, Ehrenberg, possibly unwittingly, forestalled certain techniques intrinsic to music of later times, including elements of instrumental theater (in his “memo-melo-tragi drama” When knights were Valiant) and the use of non-artistic texts for artistic purposes (The Action on the Protested Promissory Note).

Keywords: Vladimir Ehrenberg, theater of miniatures Krivoe zerkalo [Distorted Mirror], opera parody, operetta-parody, pantomime, Alexander Kugel, Nikolai Evreinov