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The Enchanted Wanderer was staged for the Concert Hall and the staging decisions dictated a 360° view – will there be any significant changes to the production when it is transferred to the Mariinsky Theatre?
Yes, there will. We presented this work at a festival in Vilnius at the opera and ballet theatre, which has the standard opera house structure. And we were able to adapt the production to the stage quite quickly; in my opinion it turned out more interesting than what we have now at the Concert Hall. But perhaps the specific nature of the hall affected the fact that on stage there were special constructions that could be raised to form something like a balcony, and the chorus, when it went onto the balcony, looked like a church choir. The stage space was enveloped in black velvet and the underlit golden reeds… As if a divine light was being poured onto everything that was taking place on stage. When it was transferred to the Mariinsky Theatre I took the Vilnius version as a basis.
The production is several years old – has your attitude to it changed?
Nothing is eternal in this world. When a man lives with his wife their relationship never remains exactly the same. They change. The spouses will reach boiling point then there will be a diminuendo, then coolness, then infidelity, and after that some new passion in their relationship will develop. Just as our lives are never totally smooth, so it is with a production and my attitude to it. I leave it and then I come back to it. And in that time I have staged many other works in other towns and cities.
Successful productions, I believe, include The Story of Kai and Gerda, which I staged in Novosibirsk before the turn of the New Year. The production was very beautiful, a contemporary one. Not an opera even, but a musical…
I can’t live on the music of The Enchanted Wanderer alone. Right now I have complex and extreme material – The Mystery of the Apostle Paul at the Concert Hall. With regard to Shchedrin, from what I know The Enchanted Wanderer is his finest work. I have always respected Shchedrin though he was not my favourite composer. You can write that: I have told him so myself. But I certainly never expected to hear such depth and such boundless Russian anguish and Russian hopelessness of living as there is in The Enchanted Wanderer. And the idea that a Russian person has everything except the wish to live happily. It’s all there. Moreover, I heard in it a very original stage genre. When I spoke with Rodion Konstantinovich he told me that he had never considered this himself. It is, I would say, a Wagnerian kind of work, when one scene ends then that end is the start of another, and so there is uninterrupted movement until it reaches its collapse, a collapse into silence, into universal emptiness – “and then silence”. Then – which amazed me – it as if follows Leskov, each scene has its own plot. One scene will being with specific events, specific relationships and everyday details, but very quickly, imperceptibly for the audience, it all enters some generalised sphere. Like with Chekhov: we are sitting, talking and drinking tea and we don’t notice how in this space of time – drinking tea – human destinies can be destroyed. Whether the composer had set his eyes on this aim or not, he comes to a generalisation from the specific, the frequent, the narrative, from Leskov’s plot, and this generalisation affects us all, Russians and non-Russians – everyone on this planet, however we got here and for what reason.
There are productions that exist thanks only to the cohesion of a given ensemble. And there are productions where different performers come, each of them adding their own nuances. Here it so happens that the first cast is almost unchanged. Is this intentional or due to circumstances?
The three of us, when we came to the Concert Hall for rehearsals, were like hermits. We had to find the right atmosphere and tonality for this work. On one hand it is intimate, while on the other it is general and globalised. Here we needed silence. To work in silence. So that there were no silly questions that performers often ask: “why do I have to do this, why must I do that?” Here there was none of that. At the start we had problems with the ballet dancers. But we started literally every time with the prayer Our Father, which they read, and now, as they say today, they are fixated by this work, they want it, they are bursting to perform it. But can you imagine what it is for a performer to stand stock-still for fifteen minutes during a performance? And they are listening to the music, standing and singing as they listen.
There will be one newcomer. Unfortunately – or perhaps for the best. That’s Yemtsov. This is because Andrei Popov is on tour with The Nose in America. Yemtsov has a beautiful voice but psychologically and physically he is a different person altogether. And it is hard to say how well he will be able to transform himself and perform all the different character facets of the roles of the monk, the landowner and the devil. The other cast members are the same as before.
Shchedrin and Karetnikov are contemporaries, and in both The Enchanted Wanderer and The Mystery of the Apostle Paul the specific role of the chorus is great – these are external parallels, but is there anything else these operas have in common?
No. In The Enchanted Wanderer Shchedrin, despite the hopelessness of the story (not the music!) leaves light behind, as Tchaikovsky did in The Queen of Spades. Or not even light… you can’t call it light, but life goes on and in life everything repeats itself, in a different context, but everything will develop. In The Mystery of the Apostle Paul as I hear it nothing is repeated – everything comes to an end. So between twenty and forty boys will be present in the finale – caretakers with wings and brooms who slowly cleanse the Universe of civilisation and pseudo-civilisation. We think that we are civilised people, but in fact we are doing everything to destroy the Earth and our own selves.
If we are speaking of The Apostle Paul I have a very seditious idea. From the point of view of eternity I see no just people and no guilty people. The Christians are good and Nero is bad. That’s impossible. If you consider what the Christians went on to do – pagans in comparison, they are like little children. This conglomerate of displacements and substitutions as a rule comes down to who destroys whom. That may be an antireligious idea…
I have always been a believer, but to put things in a stupid way, if you live to the age of fifty and everything that is done is done with God’s blessing – the burning of children, suffocations in gas chambers, famine – then some of us have been guilty and we bear the punishment – that is no argument. Yes, we must have faith, but let it not be blind. Not blind. We are approaching – now as never before at such speed – the destruction of our Earth, our home. Although we serve this up as civilisation. We save ourselves, we protect ourselves from the fear of death, we distance ourselves from this, we entertain ourselves. It seems to us that we are doing something grand, but grand for whom? If we raise children today so that they have no fundamental elementary morals… Whether this will work in the production or not it is too early to say…
Shchedrin succeeded in creating what he envisioned, although it cost me a great deal in terms of my health. And it will cost more to come. It’s not so easy.
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