Text: Shakespeare

Music: Sergei Dreznin

Concert performances:
Moscow 1985-87
Roter Engel, Vienna 1988
Opera Modern, Moscow (1990-91)
Guildford School for Drama, England, 1993
The Hudson Guild Theatre, New York, USA, May 2007

read libretto

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Critics´voices:

Ophelia´s songs are beautifully scored...The production brought out firmly the depth of the tragedy and gave the impression that the Ophelia story can stand alone from the main text of the Prince of Denmark."
Stage, London

"Ophelia is a delightful, if distinctly eclectic, rendition of "Hamlet's" heroine, which has her belting out her Hey nonny nonnys and Papa Polonius bopping his show-stopper, "To Thine Own Self Be True."
Alan Levy, International Herald Tribune

"Ophelia is an exiting entertainment... It achieves what Leonard Bernstein once set as an artistic goal, a series of virtuoso musical sequences in voice - more intimate than conventional opera, more sophisticated than most Broadway commercial products."
BBC, A new Soviet popular opera

"An exciting, multilayered and homogenous work, despite the multiplicity of its musical languages..."
Der Standard, Vienna

"Those who believe that musical belongs to the Americans or the British, must revise their opinion: Ophelia comes from the USSR and beats the Western commercial products a la Lloyd Webber by miles... The work stands on its own, is original, even fascinating...The dream of American composer Leonard Bernstein of an opera on the basis of a musical is realised: by Sergei Dreznin, a Soviet composer."
Wiener Zeitung, Vienna

History:...
Ophelia was created in Moscow in 1982. Sung in English, it never played in a regular theater, not even a small one off-off Gorky (now Tverskaya) Street or on the fringe of Russia's metropolis. Instead, in four peripatetic years in the 1980s, it moved from artists' clubs to Houses of Culture, from students' dormitories to their institutes. But wherever it went, it delighted, breathing a fresh, vibrant spirit into harshly lit rooms or a lecture hall dominated by a bas-relief of Lenin.

Vienna, Moscow, London...
After moving to Vienna in 1987, Sergei was invited to make Ophelia as a fringe production in the Vienna "scene" club "Roter Engel" ("Red Angel"). For the main part he chose a young student of the Vienna Conservatory, Tania Golden (now a fixture of Vienna's best theaters). "Ophelia" indeed became an important step in her career as a singer and as an actress. So too for the other cast members: Viktor Gernot, Paul Wimberger, Thomas Frank, Susi Dengler and Markus Matthews.

Meanwhile changes in Moscow enabled Mikhail Kisliarov, former student of and assistant to the Bolshoi Theater director Alexander Pokrovsky, to produce Ophelia on the stage of Moscow "Opera Modern" in 1991-92. In 1993 Mikhail was invited to repeat his staging with the graduate students of the Guildford School of Dramatic Art in England.

Recording
Soon after moving to Vienna, an American friend from Moscow called from London and told Sergei that he had met up with record producer Leo Feigin, whose independent label Leo Records was by then firmly established as a major source of avantgarde and new music from all over the world, especially the Soviet Union. Leo had heard Ophelia by chance on the back of another tape sent to him from the Soviet Union, and he encouraged Sergei to make a record of the opera. So he went back to Moscow in fall 1987 and made a studio recording, taping Lena, Anatoly and Arkady. The part of Hamlet on the disc (LR 600) is performed by an American black singer living in Vienna, Hannibal Means.