OPERA: Not exactly about love
Russian opera in Moscow
Reviewed in this article: Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Helicon Opera, 17th May), Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel (Nemirov-Danchenko Theatre, 6th May), Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges (New Stage, Bolshoi Theatre, 1st May) and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress(New Stage, Bolshoi Theatre, 10th May).
One of the drawbacks of my travelling work in Russia is that only too often my schedule means I miss some fascinating musical curiosity by a day or two. Thus a trip to Kazan and Chistopol last week meant missing an unusual visit to Moscow by the controversial rock-musician (ex-Can) and disciple of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, the remarkable Holger Czukay, as well as the Russian premiere of the opera Pyramus and Thisbe by John Frederick Lampe, of whom even I have not heard (English, 1702-1751, apparently). Conversely my return to Moscow meant foregoing a performance by the opera company of the Republic of Tatarstan of Verdi’s Nabucco, which at the very least would have been something for my memoirs.
But during my present six-weeks traversal of the Russian Federation, I have been able to take in, in Moscow, the four greatest Russian operas of the last century — and I can scarcely pass by the opportunity to contrast and compare.
As the lights went out last night before the performance of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at the Helicon Opera, I was rather startled to hear the crystalline voice of a middle-class English lady behind me say to her friend ‘So this is a ballet, is it?’ The friend replied ‘Oh, it’s an opera I think’. The Russian gentleman next to them helpfully offered, in English, ‘It is an opera about love’.
I was tempted to reply, ‘More about sordid passion, venial betrayal and unremitting corruption, actually’, but at that moment the excellent Alexander Voloschuk lifted his baton, and we were off. Whether the English ladies were shell-shocked or carried away I do not know, but they were still there at the end, clapping enthusiastically. Strange to me that this was in fact the first opera I ever saw, forty years ago at Covent Garden, and I was at the time just as, if not more, unprepared as they were. Like Coleridge’s wedding guest, I went from that performance as ‘one who has been stunned’ and I suppose it was in its way a turning point in my life. Of course that version was the watered-down one finally approved by the Russian authorities some thirty years after the original production had been savaged by the article in Pravda, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, written on the orders of Stalin, an article which nearly destroyed Shostakovich’s career and left the already vulnerable composer a prey to neurotic fears for the rest of his life. (For a recent insight into this affair see the perceptive article by David Conway, ‘A New Year’s Message from Dmitri Shostakovich’, in the April 2002 issue of Slavonic and East European Review). The savage indictment of the libretto (based on an nineteenth-century story by Leskov) and the music — in which the only lyrical passages are given to the vamp and murderess Katerina Ismailova, the ‘Lady Macbeth’ of the title — were bound to offend the prurience of the Stalinist state. The witlessness of the priest was I suppose acceptable, but the depiction of the police as a bunch of troglodytes and, even worse, the accompaniment of the coupling of Katerina and her lover Sergei with highly descriptive grunts and whistles from the brass, woodwind and percussion, were not to be borne.
The concept retains in full its power to shock and this production, set in the grim factory-like atmosphere of the Ismailov mills, and originally staged in the year 2000, does not fail the composer’s original intentions. A suitably blowsy performance, gaining strongly in focus and precision, by Svetlana Sozdateleva as the (anti-) heroine, an appropriately odious persona (but excellent singing) from Vladimir Ognev as her repulsive father-in-law Boris, and a brisk performance by Nikolai Dorodzhin as Sergei, complemented this. Shostakovich described the opera as a ‘tragedy-satire’, and these two seemingly incongruous styles are the essence of the opera, as they are indeed of Russian life. I shall not forget from this production the chorus-line of tap-dancing policemen, the factory hands rifling Boris’s pockets when he is discovered dead (of the poisoned mushrooms Katerina has fed him), or the priest dunning them for his cut. Nor will I forget the final moments when Katerina and her mirror-image, the prostitute Sonyetka, for whom Sergei has betrayed her, dance a slow arabesque about each other as they drown in a Siberian river.
For all his genius, Shostakovich’s music did not of course suddenly arise fully-formed. In Lady Macbeth we cannot but be aware of the driving rhythms, angular melodic line and raucous orchestration of Prokofiev, whose Love for Three Oranges had taken the opera houses of the world by storm in the 1920s. In the very comfortable New Stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, opened last year, (and therefore the only theatre in Russia I think without a hammer and sickle emblem above its proscenium), I saw a revival of Peter Ustinov’s 1997 production. It perhaps suffers in comparison with the famous (or infamous) ‘scratch-and-sniff’ production by the ENO of a few years ago, which remains the only attempt so far to bring smell-o-vision into the opera house (although did not Wagner consider broadcasting incense during Parsifal?), and which showed no fear at any point of going over the top. You can’t be too unrestrained if you are going to let this bizarre fairy-tale hit the spot. And in the Ustinov production — well, the Eccentrics who infest the stage and help and hinder the plot were just too well-behaved, the jester Truffaldino was more Bob Monkhouse than Tommy Trinder, the sardonic devil Farfarello was almost polite, the wicked Princess Clarice was a bit too suburban to be a whip-wielding dominatrix. Full marks however to the podgy Prince of Oganes Georgiyan and the implacablility of the evil witch Fata Morgana (Olga Korzhumova), the exposure of whose undergarments causes her to doom the Prince to his dangerous quest for the Three Oranges. And inevitably the terrifying female cook, who guards these treasures and is won over by a magic ribbon, (Vasiliy Kirnos, a full blooded basso profundo equipped with beard, apron and pendulous breasts), gained storms of applause. A pleasant enough, if not great evening, with (as in all the operas reviewed here) the reward of hearing a full-blooded Russian orchestra, with its unique tone-colours, play the wonderful music
Prokofiev’s music and topic themselves recall a forebear, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel, which has just received a new production at the Nemirov-Danchenko Theatre. Like Lady Macbeth this work, based on a barbed ‘fairy-tale’ by Pushkin, also had an uneasy relationship with the authorities, although in Rimsky’s case the authorities were Tsarist. The work was first given in a performance at a private theatre in 1909, a year after the composer’s death, and was not allowed a public performance until after the Revolution. This was because the story-line had no less resonance at the beginning of the twentieth century than when Pushkin wrote it. The old, and not too bright, Tsar Dodon, fearing for the security of his country, is given a magic cockerel by an astrologer. The astrologer assures him that it will give him full warning of any danger, and takes as a reward a promise that Dodon will give him anything he may require at a later date. In fact the cockerel’s actions lead not only to military disaster for Dodon, but also to his infatuation with the mysterious Queen of Shemyakhan, whom he brings back to marry. The astrologer appears and asks for his reward — the Queen. Tsar Dodon strikes and kills him for his impertinence, at which the cockerel swoops down and pecks the Tsar to death. The palace and kingdom collapse. After which the astrologer coolly strolls on stage as an epliogue, asking the audience why it is so upset — after all, everyone was make believe, except for the astrologer and his friend the Queen.
Alexander Titel and Vladimir Arefyev’s production is set in the first act in a suitably bucolic Russian palace, with bearded muzhiks and peasant women clad in primary colours and armed with birch brooms, and the Royal family and the Tsar’s General in a variety of uniforms. Surely it is no coincidence that one of the Tsar’s sons, the jingo militarist, bears more than a passing resemblance to Stalin? The astrologer (Oganes Georgiyan again, singing in a haunting counter-tenor) is however a Levantine con-man with a pencil-moustache and a suit and hat just as sharp — the last person you would trust a kingdom to. (During the epilogue however he appears endearingly cuddling a real, and beautiful, cockerel). The second act opens on the field of military disaster with a vast pile of assorted army and naval headwear — and you can immediately feel the audience around you thinking Afghanistan and Chechnya. The treatment of the Queen of Shemyakhan (the equally haunting Yelena Semyonova) is just sensational — a head poised above a disturbing surging chrysalis, or three-dimensional amoeba, of gauze from within which a wild assortment of limbs bulge out erratically at moments of tension. At the collapse of the palace, the gauze rips open and three Queens clad in black burst out, ‘Alien’-style, and race across the stage. All really creepy, and excellently conceived and executed. The only disappointment in this production is the Queen’s procession in the third act, which is supposed to contain strange monsters from her menagerie. Here we had just some silver-clad dancers wrapped in black plastic. Now at the ENO production at Sadler’s Wells a few years ago we had some genuine monsters, from the Soviet era — clumping astronauts, hammer-wielding Stakhanovites, flag-waving gymnasts — truly weird.
It is perhaps rather odd to think of The Rake’s Progress, written by the long-exiled Stravinsky to a libretto by WH Auden and Chester Kallman, and first performed in Venice in 1951, as a Russian opera. The definitive David Hockney-designed Glyndebourne production, using Hogarthian line and cross-hatching would seem indeed to have made it, in the cultural consciousness, irreversibly English. But Stravinsky was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov too. And in this new production at the Bolshoi New Stage (the first performance was in February), perhaps simply because it is taking place in Moscow, you can clearly descry, behind the neo-classical façade, the strains of the composer’s native land.
The Bolshoi performance is sung in English (though given the varying qualities of the singers’ pronunciation I needed the overhead translation in Russian), and is set in more or less the present — the Truloves’ garden recalls indeed the Hockney of California. The outstanding voice here was Yelena Voznesenskaya as Anne, and the final episode with the mad Tom (Vitaly Panfilov) believing himself Adonis and Anne to be Venus was the most moving rendition of this scene I have experienced. A pity that Nick Shadow (Sergey Moskalov) was rather underpowered, but Vyatcheslav Voynarovsky made the most of his vignette of the auctioneer, Sellem.
Like the other three operas, The Rake is not exactly about love, although love certainly comes into it. In all four operas, however, the sentimental aspect of love is completely set aside — passion is there to compete with so many other desires. This brutalist attitude, so trendy today in Western society, is all too familiar, for quite different reasons, to Russians. One of the continually fascinating things about visiting this great country is the opportunity to understand these contrasts from the other side of the looking-glass.
Presently Mr Buchler will return from Russia, whereupon ERO shall present him with Hyperion's edition of John Frederick Lampe's Pyramus and Thisbe [Opera Restored], in inadequate reward for services rendered to right-wing Russophile musicologists everywhere.
Allen Buchler, May 18, 2003 01:58 PM