A Dog’s Heart

in collaboration with Complicite, London

Judging from his affinity for vocal music, it was just a question of time before the Russian avant garde composer Alexander Raskatov produced his first opera. With his choice of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satiric novel ‘Heart of a Dog’ (1925) he follows in the footsteps of works by fellow Russians Shostakovich (‘The Nose’) and Schnittke (‘Life with an Idiot’). In a score laden with fantasy and emotion, he tells the absurd tale of a professor who implants a human pituitary gland into a stray dog, which proceeds to become more and more human. The utopia goes awry as the transformed beast turns into a cruel figure from whom everyone learns the sensation of fear. The tale has been interpreted as an allegory on post-revolutionary Soviet political and social power structures.

Read more on De Nederlandse Opera website