The Twelve Chairs (Shostakovich)

The Twelve Chairs () is an unfinished operetta by Dmitri Shostakovich based on the 1928 novel "The Twelve Chairs" by Ilf and Petrov. Shostakovich announced the work in July 1939, for the Leningrad Theater of Musical Comedy. In October that year, he assumed he would be finished with the operetta at the end of that year, but he never finished the work.
The music was written in 1939, along with work on an unfinished "Lenin Symphony" and seven other operas, which included an opera about the Baltic Fleet in 1917, an unidentified Civil War opera, operatic adaptations of his music for "Volochayev Days", and "The Great Citizen", the novels "A Hero of Our Time" and "Masquerade" by Lermontov, "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Ostrovsky, and incidental music for Romain Rolland's play "Liluli". Only a little music from "The Twelve Chairs" has survived from this period of false starts.