On 27 October, following a lengthy absence, the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre will see the return of Hector Berlioz' opera Benvenuto Cellini, staged by Vasily Barkhatov (full-scale revival of the 2007 production).
The roles are being rehearsed by Sergei Semishkur, Alexander Mikhailov, Andrei Popov and Dmitry Voropaev (Benvenuto Cellini), Anastasia Kalagina, Violetta Lukyanenko, Lyudmila Dudinova and Oxana Shilova (Teresa), Evelina Agabalaeva, Yekaterina Krapivina and Yulia Matochkina (Ascanio), Nikolai Kamensky and Oleg Sychov (Giacomo Balducci) and Nikolai Gassiev, Sergei Romanov and Viktor Korotich (Fieramosca). The (spoken) role of the elderly Benvenuto Cellini will be performed by Sergei Shnurov.
Reviving the ten-year-old production, Vasily Barkhatov is entering a dialogue with his former self. Audiences who saw the production in 2007 or 2008 may discover many of the details have been altered, but the fundamental directing principle has remained the same: the opera's plot has been radically updated and brought as close as possible to the present day. The Renaissance-era jeweller and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini is made a scandalous figure in today's glamorous "beau monde". The great directing innovation of 2008 has also been retained: the opera production now features the addition of a spoken role with the elderly Benvenuto Cellini (these texts have been compiled by Natalia Skorokhod, based on Cellini's memoirs).
Vasily Barkhatov spoke about his work on the new version of the opera: "I have little in common with the man and the stage director who staged this opera in 2007. But now I cannot cardinally change the idea. I am trying to pick it up gently and carefully, and, like an elder brother of my own twenty-four-year-old self, to clean it up, remove the excess noise from the air, throw out every second mise-en-scène and make the production more readable: I am changing many of the details and approaches for new ones."
The libretto of the opera Benvenuto Cellini was written by the dramatists Henri Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly after motifs from the book La Vie de Benvenuto Cellini: fils de Maître Giovanni florentin écrite par lui-même à Florence/, which was published in 1822. The Renaissance-era jeweller and sculptor's autobiography inspired them to create a full-scale comedy, though the libretto was rejected by the Opéra Comique. The next year, the opus was accepted by the Opéra de Paris.
The stage premiere of Benvenuto Cellini took place on 10 September 1838, but it only ran for three performances – a fourth was intended following a lengthy interval. Soon, the composer removed the score from the theatre. In 1852 Franz Liszt mounted a production of the work in Weimar (Berlioz had transformed two acts into three and swapped around the positions of several parts). Thanks to Liszt's initiative, Benvenuto Cellini soon became a topic of interest in London and Vienna, and since then it has been an infrequent though welcome guest at the world's opera houses.
Premiere performances at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre will also take place on 31 October and 11 November.
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