ABSTRACT
Sometime in or around 2004 Personal communication from Olga Digonskaya, 16 Sept. 2007 the Russian musicologist Olga Digonskaya stumbled across a folder in the Glinka Museum in Moscow containing musical manuscript in Shostakovichs handwriting. Her first reports of this discovery emerged in Russian-language publications summarized in her essay Unknown Shostakovich Autographs in the Glinka State Museum of Musical Culture included in the chapter Shostakovich published in Moscow that same year. The choice of Aleksey Tolstoy to replace Bedny was a clever one. He was an important and well-considered literary figure of this period, still remembered today for his historical novels and science fiction, and for his wider role in Soviet cultural politics. All direct quotations from the libretto come from the version translated by Gerard McBurney and Laurel Fay for the world premiere of the Prologue to Orango given by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on 2 December 2011 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles.
