On 11 September and 12 September, the Mariinsky II will host the Russian premiere of The Dawns Here Are Quiet. The opera was written by the famed Chinese composer Tang Jianping after Boris Vasilyev’s novel of the same name. The production will be performed by the largest Chinese music theatre – National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) – that is also a long time partner of the Mariinsky Theatre.
The opera The Dawns Here Are Quiet was commissioned by the National Centre for the Performing Arts to mark the 70th anniversary of the victory over fascism. It premiered in Beijing in 2015. According to Wan Fang, who is the author of the libretto, the tragic story of five female soldiers has truly shocked her. The feelings of sorrow, aversion to war and reverence for life she experienced while reading the novel were reflected in the libretto she was writing. Following the libretto, stage director Wang Xiaoying created a production, which seeks to show the brutality of war, the pain of military losses, the fragility of human life, eternal and universal human emotions.
The story unfolds retrospectively: the opera opens with an aria of the aged officer Vaskov, who came to the birch grove to lay flowers to the place of the female anti-aircraft gunmen’s heroic death. The creators of the opera sought to make every single female character unique and memorable. All female voices are different and the soloists include a coloratura soprano, a lyric soprano, a dramatic soprano, a mezzo-soprano, and a contralto. The chorus plays a special role in the opera as it gives ‘voice’ to the birch grove, while the authors simultaneously follow the Slavic and the Chinese traditions of breathing life into nature. According to the composer Tang Jianping, he was charged with a difficult task of stylistically adapting Russian music (including songs of the Soviet times) while looking at them through the prism of Chinese musical and theatrical esthetics.
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