'Orango', Shostakovich's Ape-Man
Shostakovich's unfinished 1932 opera about a human–ape hybrid, inspired by Ivanov's programme
Background
In 1932 Dmitri Shostakovich began an opera, 'Orango', satirizing a human–ape hybrid paraded as a Soviet spectacle, a direct cultural echo of Ivanov's hybridization programme, then fresh in the public mind. He abandoned it after a prologue.
The fragment lay unknown until a scholar found it in the Glinka Museum, and it finally premiered, eight decades late, in Los Angeles in December 2011. Its very existence is evidence of how deeply Ivanov's experiment had entered the Soviet imagination.
Alongside Bulgakov's 'Heart of a Dog', 'Orango' shows the ape-man as the era's recurring nightmare: the fear that Soviet science really might dissolve the boundary between human and animal, and put the result on stage.