The ailing Stanislavsky, who was the director of an opera theatre now known as Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, invited Meyerhold to be his assistant - an invitation that surprised many in Moscow, given their long standing artistic differences. Stanislavsky died soon afterwards, in August 1938. His dying wish was "Take care of Meyerhold; he is my sole heir in the theatre - here or anywhere else." Meyerhold directed his theatre for nearly a year, and was engaged with producing the premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s "Semyon Kotko", when he was instructed that he was to choreograph a spectacle in Leningrad, involving 30,000 athletes. On 17 June 1939, he addressed a conference of theatre directors, in the presence of Andrei Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor who had presided over the infamous Moscow show trials. His speech was not reported in the Soviet press, giving rise to a report that he had declared, defiantly: