From Page to Stage: Ukrainian Opera Rediscovered with Help of UMD Professor Presented at The Clarice

The Program Explored “Harkusha” and the Evolution of Ukrainian Composer Mykola Lysenko’s Vocal Music in Conversation with Influential Works.

April 30, 2026

A composite portrait of Pavlo Harkusha, an elderly man with a moustache, wearing a dark suit with a white shirt, centered in front of the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag. The background is a sepia-toned vintage document with handwritten Cyrillic script and musical staves, framed by sunflowers and green oak leaves.

For more than a century, fragments of an unfinished opera by renowned Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko sat largely unexplored. New research by Michael Lavery, assistant professor of Russian in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, revealed how the pieces fit together and led to a recent world premiere by the Maryland Opera Studio.