About the work
Alexander Raskatov's opera „Animal Farm" was premiered at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam in 2023, to a libretto by Ian Burton and the composer. It is based on George Orwell's famous 1945 fable. The work translates Orwell's satire on the betrayal of revolution into a garish, multifarious modern operatic language.
Plot
On the run-down farm of the drunken farmer Jones, the ill-treated animals rise up and drive out the human. They found an order of their own, „Animalism", on the principle that all animals are equal. Soon the cleverest among them, the pigs, take the lead — above all Napoleon, who drives out his rival Snowball with dogs and seizes power. Step by step the pigs turn the ideals of the revolution into their opposite: they appropriate privileges, rewrite the commandments and exploit the other animals just as the humans had done. The famous commandment finally reads: „All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." In the end the ruling pigs can no longer be told apart from the humans with whom they now make common cause.
Cultural significance
„Animal Farm" was one of the most widely noticed opera premieres of recent times and was also shown at the Salzburg Festival. Raskatov's setting of Orwell's parable on Stalinism and every form of totalitarian seizure of power struck a topical nerve and quickly established the work in the international repertoire of contemporary opera.