On 24 December (19.00), the Mariinsky II will host a performance of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress directed by David Pountney (co-production of the Mariinsky Theatre and the Teatro Nacional de Sāo Carlos, 2003). This performance will mark the production’s return to the theatre’s repertoire after a nine-year break. Valery Gergiev is Musical Director and conductor of the performance.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky began working on The Enchantress, his favorite brainchild, 1885. The creator of The Oprichnik, Vakula the Smith, The Maid of Orleans, Mazepa, and the highly successful Eugene Onegin was by then a well-known composer in Russia. “The audiences placed such high hopes on The Enchantress that no other opera of Tchaikovsky’s could compare,” recalled Herman Laroche, a renowned Russian music critic. The world premiere took place at the Mariinsky Theatre on 20 October 1887. The composer himself conducted the first four performances. The greatest singers of the Mariinsky Theatre appeared in lead roles, including Ivan Melnikov (Grand Prince), Maria Slavina (Princess, his wife), and Fyodor Stravinsky (Mamyrov). The opera flopped as Ippolit Shpazhinsky’s lackluster libretto came into conflict with the score. It was Shpazhinsky’s first experience as a librettist. After a total of twelve performances, the opera was taken out of the theatre’s repertoire. Tchaikovsky was greatly shaken and rattled by this failure; he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck: “I am still convinced it is my best work. Meanwhile The Enchantress is laid aside to collect dust in the archives.” The opera’s future stage life was no less complicated; it received due recognition only in the mid-20th century, when it was staged anew by the Kirov (now Mariinsky) and the Bolshoi Theatres. The text basis for the production was a version of the libretto, created by Soviet poet Sergey Gorodetsky in 1941. The Mariinsky Theatre’s third revision of The Enchantress came in 2003 with a production of David Pountney, one of the most famous European opera directors at the time. He noted, “I think that Tchaikovsky himself was somewhat confused about his title character’s nature. Despite the plotline, which paints her as a Russian Carmen, the music seems to contradict that as it is very grave and full of dignity. This was key to me.”
The production will also be performed at the Mariinsky II on 5 January (19.00).
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