Alexander Raskatov
A Dog’s Heart
Dutch National Opera
Libretto by Cesare Mazzonis
based on a novella by Mikhail Bulgakov
A Dog’s Heart is based on the book of the same name that the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov wrote in 1925 and which was banned for decades due to social criticism. It is a masterly “modern” parable in which Soviet society, which was still young at the time, is shrewdly filleted. A starving mutt is used by a doctor as a pilot project. He will have human testes and a pituitary gland implanted. Subsequently, however, the mutated animal develops into an unscrupulous human criminal. The only option is to surgically return the animal to a dog.
