Operas based on the works of Gogol cannot be compared in popularity with operas based on Pushkin, but they are created with regularity. Back in 1868, Mussorgsky composed the opera The Marriage, and later wrote, but did not finish, the opera The Sorochinskaya Fair. In 1874-1887, Tchaikovsky created three versions of the opera based on the story "The Night Before Christmas", which eventually received the name "Cherevichki", and in 1895 Rimsky-Korsakov composed an opera based on the same plot - he also set it to music in 1880 " May night. Shostakovich, being evacuated in Kuibyshev, worked on the opera The Players, but did not finish it - on the other hand, his The Nose, first staged in 1930, is staged not only in Russia, but also on world stages. More than two dozen other operas have been written to Gogol's texts - Dead Souls, Taras Bulba, Portrait, Notes of a Madman, and The Inspector General received musical embodiment.
In 1971, the Kirov (today the Mariinsky) Theater ordered a new opera based on Gogol by the young composer Gennady Banshchikov. The writer Mikhail Lobodin (1901-1999), author of historical fiction, worked on the libretto. The vicissitudes of the litigation of the Mirgorod landlords, who quarreled from scratch, described by Gogol, remain behind the scenes; a detailed description of their friendship and characters is condensed into a few minutes, and the main attention is paid to the quarrel scene itself. “How they quarreled ...” is even called an opera-stage. There are only two characters in it - tenor and bass.
It took the composer a year of work to compose a half-hour opera. The premiere took place on August 4, 1973. Gennady Banshchikov lived in Ukraine as a child, and he made the main theme of the opera the famous Ukrainian song “I marvel at the sky and wonder at that thought ...” to the verses of Mikhail Petrenko (1817-1862) and the music of Lyudmila Alexandrova, the years of birth and death are unknown), one of the first female composers in the Russian Empire. First, two Ivans sing the song in a duet, like bosom friends, and towards the end they break off relations with the same melody.
Banshchikov dedicated his opera to the composer Richard Strauss, and the complexity of the orchestration of this chamber work is really not inferior to the sophistication of the scores of Strauss and Wagner. This orchestral richness and pathos are needed for one purpose - to show, in full accordance with the spirit of Gogol's satire, how large-scale their most petty passions can be for people
