Pericola by Offenbach appeared in Russia just a year after the French premiere, in 1869. It was first performed in French, but already in the same year a translation into Russian was ready. The operetta was called "Singing Birds" - in the couplets that end the operetta, the wandering artists Piquillo and Pericola, leaving Lima, compare themselves with migratory songbirds.
The libretto of one of the most famous operettas by Jacques Offenbach was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovke Halévy based on Prosper Mérimée's comedy The Carriage of the Sacred Gifts. The heroine of the comedy had a real prototype: the famous Peruvian actress and singer Maria Micaela Villegas Hurtado (1748‒1819), nicknamed Pericola, beloved of the Viceroy of Peru, Manuel de Amata y Hunet. Unlike other characters in similar stories, the real Perichole, like her stage incarnation - the heroine of comedy and buff opera, had a relatively happy fate. For a quarter of a century she performed on stage, later got married and even did charity work.
The Russian public, from the sophisticated to the common people, immediately fell in love with Pericola, perceiving it in different ways: as “the most delicate, most piquant dish of its time”, the embodiment of Watteau’s “bucolica aʼla”, “neo-Voltairianism of the 19th century” (theater critic Alexander Kugel), and as a “beautiful, poetic, smart and graceful”, “touching and charming” thing, and as a “light cheerful trifle” (Boris Isakov).
This love invariably accompanies the "Pericola" for a century and a half of stay on the territory of our country. Anastasia Vyaltseva, Lyubov Orlova, Klavdia Novikova performed in the title role after the legendary first Russian Pericola Vera Lyadova, who tragically passed away a few months after the brilliant premiere. To match the main character were also performers of male parts. The role of Piquillo was played by Mikhail Lentovsky, the Viceroy of Peru - Fyodor Chaliapin, Vladimir Kandelaki, Evgeny Evstigneev. Excerpts from Perikola are unforgettable performed by Claudia Shulzhenko, Irina Bogacheva, Tamara Sinyavskaya, Elena Obraztsova, Georg Ots. And among the directors were such eminent directors as K. A. Mardzhanov and Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. The performance by Nemirovich-Danchenko, staged in 1922 at the Musical Studio of the Moscow Art Theater, was incredibly popular in Moscow: it was held over a thousand times. But Offenbach's melodies were also heard in other parts of the USSR: from Arkhangelsk to Ashgabat, from Khabarovsk, Vladivostok and Blagoveshchensk to Grozny and Tbilisi, from St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Omsk to Kharkov and Kyiv.
The production by conductor Philip Chizhevsky and director Philip Grigoryan is the first in the history of the Bolshoi Theatre. Presented for the bicentenary of the birth of Jacques Offenbach on the Chamber Stage. Boris Pokrovsky, it is a vivid example of a musical comedy in the "serious" repertoire of the Bolshoi Theater.
