Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 156 h Firuza Melville much. The stereotypical link between sex, violence, ballet or opera and Rus- sia has been more recently re-established in a rather vicious manner by Bar- rie Kosky in his staging of Shoskatovich’s Nose , based on Gogol’s story in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (October, 2016), or quite tastefully and with a thick dose of irony and black humour in Robbie Williams’s (2016) Party like a Russian [oligarch] , where the chorus performs a slightly ‘en- riched’ theme from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet : ‘Party like a Rus- sian, End of discussion…’. This song can now be perceived as some sort of a prediction of the end of the era of Russian oligarchs in England. Of special interest is the latest staging of Scheherazade premiered in May 2019 in the Perm Theatre of Opera and Ballet with the financial support of Roman Abramovich. Choreographer Alexey Miroshnichenko kept the origi- nal music of Rimsky-Korsakov but abandoned Diaghilev’s version of the libretto. Miroshnichenko’s Scheherazade is Farah Diba, the last wife of the last Shah of Iran who was played by the prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Theatre Diana Vishneva. Shah Mohammad Reza Pehlevi was performed by Brazilian dancer Marcelo Mourão Gomes. Such a stellar performance cre- ated the atmosphere of true tragedy when Diaghilev’s original finale of mass massacre in Shahriyar’s harem was turned to the scenes of the Iranian revo- lution of 1979. Farah Diba has never seen the ballet. It was planned that it would travel to Paris to show it to the former Empress. It is now very un- likely she will see it in the foreseeable future. Bibliography 1. Abbate Carolyn, Parker Roger. A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred years. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 2. Frolova-Walker Marina. Russian Music and Nationalism. New Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 2007. 3. Frolova-Walker Marina. Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 4. Golestan Palace Library. Portfolio of Miniature paintings and calligraphy, ed. M. H. Semsar. Tehran, 2000. 5. Kirstein Lincoln. Nijinsky Dancing. London, 1975. 6. Lobanov-Rostovsky Nina. Collecting Bakst // Designing Dreams: A Celebration of Léon Bakst. Ed. by Célia Bernasconi, John E. Bowlt, Nick Mauss. Milan: Mousse Publilshing and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2017. P. 84–93.