The Nose, op. 15

Shostakovich was twenty when he began his first opera, on Gogol's story of a civil servant whose nose detaches itself and rises to a higher rank than its owner. He assembled the libretto with three collaborators and scored it for a small, hard-edged orchestra including an interlude for percussion alone. The Maly Opera Theatre in Leningrad staged it in January 1930; the Association of Proletarian Musicians attacked it as formalist and it disappeared after sixteen performances. The opera waited until 1974 for a Soviet revival, at the Moscow Chamber Musical Theatre.