Vladimir Georgiyevich Ehrenberg

Vladimir Georgiyevich Ehrenberg was a Russian composer and conductor active in St Petersburg at the beginning of the twentieth century. His date of birth is thought to lie between December 1874 and January 1875, and he died in Kharkiv in September 1923. Self-taught, he combined music with his work in the law courts.

In 1908 he founded, together with Nikolay Yevreynov, the cabaret theatre Krivoye Zerkalo in St Petersburg, which specialised in satirical theatrical miniatures. As the company's musical director, he was responsible for the music of Vampuka, ili nevesta afrikanskaya, a parody opera premiered in 1909 that enjoyed remarkable success: by around 1927 it had been performed a thousand times. With a libretto by Prince M. Vol'konsky, it ridiculed the musical, textual and dramatic clichés of the conventional nineteenth-century opera. Until 1916 he composed and conducted numerous parodies of this kind at the Krivoye Zerkalo.

His legacy endures above all in the use of the term 'vampuka', which in Russian came to denote operatic and theatrical clichés. He also composed the one-act opera Svad'ba, based on a vaudeville by Chekhov, and a cycle of songs to verses by Kozma Prutkov, the collective pseudonym of three nineteenth-century Russian poets.