The Nose
The Nose is a satirical opera by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It tells the story of a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own.
The opera was written between 1927 and 1928, and is based on a story by Gogol. In 1929, the opera was criticised as "formalist" by RAPM, and it opened to generally poor reviews in 1930. After sixteen performances, it was not performed again in the Soviet Union until 1974, when it was revived by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Boris Pokrovsky.
The music is a montage of different styles, including folk music, popular song and atonality. The apparent chaos is given structure by formal musical devices such as canons and quartets, a device copied from Alban Berg's Wozzeck.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
Act one
The morning after shaving Kovalyov, one of his regular customers, a barber finds a nose in his bread. He tries to get rid of it by throwing it in the Neva river, but he is caught by a policeman. Meanwhile Kovalyov wakes and finds his nose missing. He later sees his nose in the Nevsky Prospekt.
The Nose was a satirical California-based magazine patterned after [[Spy Magazine]].
