Libretto by Dmitry Shostakovich
(4 characters, 33 musicians & 6 chorus singers)
Stage version & staging by Yuri Alexandrov
Premiere: 8 December 2000

This work for four bass singers and chorus, written between 1948 and 1960, is a ferocious parody on the countless pogrom meetings that exposed and passed judgement on cultural and scientific geniuses of the Soviet Union. The characters in the work, an anti-musical caricature, are "figures from the world of music" - people who took part in the meeting to discuss "the battle of realism against formalism in music".