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Vasily Barkhatov (biography) | |
– What do you consider to be most important in this story? What accents are you focussing on?
– The most important thing is the human stories – about normal people. Naturally, Otello won’t be “blacked up”. A white Otello has not been an unusual idea for a long time. Between him and Desdemona what is important is not the difference in skin colour, and neither is it the difference in age – it is the difference in culture that matters. What did Verdi actually have in mind? Otello is a man with his own background – Arabic, Ethiopian, whatever you like – but what is important is that he has unbending and incredibly harsh principles. And Desdemona is a true European who has been raised liberally. Not impertinent, but much more free. She has no such great number of vetoes and limitations in her head.
Their love affair is just like the love between a Soviet diplomat and a French actress. Or between a soldier and a poetess – the nationality here is not at all important. And everyone says, looking at them, “Well, they won’t be together for long. They’re totally different. In a month at the outside they won’t have anything more to say to each other.”
He is, basically, not a bad man. But he has some kind of complex because for six hours she could chatter about the systems of Stanislavsky or Schopenhauer and he wouldn’t understand a single word. And he gets bored in the opera. She notices this. And then he might be told “You know, Desdemona and Cassio went to see Wagner last night, they sat there for five hours and left looking happy.” And he’d think “Damn! I’m an ignorant oaf!”
It is common to interpret Desdemona as a woman apologetic to Otello in all four acts. That always disturbed me because the role involves these Venetian passions! There are times when Desdemona understands that she is also an independent person in her own right. She is a woman who can easily say some sharp words or slap someone, and not just act slavishly towards Otello. It’s very important that she intercedes on Cassio’s behalf with absolute confidence.
– How important is Iago for you as a typical image of an operatic villain?
– You mustn’t confuse him with Gounod’s Méphistophélès who always underlines his wicked attractiveness. Iago is not working for the audience. His aria Credo is, outwardly, filled with pathos, albeit pathos within inverted commas. When a man is unable to speak seriously about certain things he will overact somewhat. Iago knows that there is no Satan, while there is data from the stock exchange that alters every day, there are currency rates, social welfare and other tangible, material things. He is not at all grasping. He knows neither devotion nor hatred. He’s just a systematic man. A faceless man. He has a specific business plan for the near future. As the saying goes, “it’s nothing personal, it’s just business.” It’s not that he deliberately wants to harm Otello, it’s not that he finds his position as Otello’s conspirator particularly demanding. This doesn’t really worry him – it’s just a certain stage of his business plan. He doesn’t torture people deliberately. He walks over anyone in his way, yet doesn’t reflect on this. He has no streak of narcissism. He does nothing superfluous to what is required. It’s simply that his system of actions has to lead to a specific result.
There is such a moment in the opera: Otello and Desdemona remain overnight in an abandoned boat on a beach. The head of the government, influenced by his young and freer wife, allows himself this. To Hell with protocol. They have sat down on the beach and they begin to recall the past. All lovers, even if they are together for no more than a week, have a favourite pastime – remembering how they met: “And do you remember telling me about the war?” and “Yes, yes, I remember!”
So Iago understands that, however strange it might seem, it is easier for a man who has just woken up happy with his wife to be convinced of her infidelity than it is for a man away on business who doesn’t see his wife for six months at a time. Such lunacy could only occur after a night of blissful love! People can be highly strung as it is, excited and somewhat disorientated. Another day he would have slept in and not killed his wife, while Desdemona herself would have packed up her belongings and gone home to her mother instead of putting her own neck in a noose.
If you tell such a tale to a man who is in a state of euphoria, whose marriage still resembles a holiday romance, if you say that everything is exactly the opposite way around then he will take all the energy he has invested in his love and divert it in some other direction. And the very next night Otello murders his wife.
It is not at all diffi cult to understand Otello. In my production there is nothing that makes him any more prone to explode than other people. I believe that in similar circumstances anyone could act that way. Iago lays out the intrigue brilliantly. He needs only cruel and irreversible consequences, he doesn’t need for Otello and Desdemona to argue and then not speak for two weeks. Iago has no need to do anything nasty; he merely needs specific results.
– What other performing traditions with respect to this opera do you disagree with?
– In this opera there is a story of a huge number of people who drown during a storm. I’ve always thought it strange that the storm is generally interpreted as some kind of “attraction” in this opera. It is generally depicted vividly and so it does not appear again. Yet if those caught in the eye of the storm are so weather-beaten then probably not all have survived. Correspondingly, there are victims, and these victims naturally leave widows and Otello somehow has to answer for this. And beginning from Act II the widows and orphans are constantly fi lling Otello’s reception room – this is a global problem that has to be dealt with and which he cannot deal with at all because of his own personal circumstances.
Speaking with Yekaterina Biryukova
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