THE FIRST BULGARIAN CHILDREN’S OPERETTAS BY PANAIOT PIPKOV – AN ATTEMPT AT A CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATION
Keywords:
Panaiot Pipkov, Dimo Boichev, children’s operetta, “The Cricket and the Ant”, “Children and Birds”Abstract
Panaiot Pipkov’s children’s operettas were performed on multiple occasions in different cities in Bulgarian in the period from 1910 until end-1930s and were received very well by the audiences. Nevertheless, today they are almost entirely excluded from concert and school performance programmes. The article poses the following questions: are Pipkov’s works topical today and are they relevant to our national music scene; are they capable of tugging at the heartstrings of children’s and adolescents’ audiences that grew up amidst a digital and multimedia environment; can the characters from “Children and Birds” and “The Cricket and the Ant” and their musical features provide excitement and cultivate moral backbone?
The present publication is an attempt at a new musical and dramaturgical analysis of the two operettas - an analysis which is focused upon the compositional concept of the composer viewed through the prism of the above-stated questions.
