Dina Goder. World on a belt

World on a belt
Little World Theatre. Opera "The Magic Flute". Director - Ekaterina Pospelova

Dina Goder

Publication date: February 9, 2004

heads The Star will set above our
And let's say in new words,
What for the soul was resurrected again
And life, and tears, and love, -

The little angels sang to the music of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” while they themselves, in felt boots, knitted hats, satin quilted coats and mittens with elastic bands, skied through the snowy forest.

Katya Pospelova's graduation performance "The Magic Flute" is the second project of the Little World Theater, which only six months ago spectacularly opened with the premiere of Michael Nyman's opera. The second - and again heatedly discussed.

First of all, Katya came up with the idea of ​​​​turning The Magic Flute into a Russian opera. She moved the action somewhere to fairy-tale Russia, made the funny bird catcher Papageno a broken nativity scene maker, the beautiful assistants of the Queen of the Night - cheerful village girls, Prince Tamino - a helpless German freezing in Russian forests, the Moor Monostatos - a nimble devil Monostatos, and on top of all this, an artist Alla Shelimova dressed everyone in felt boots, earflaps and patchwork padded jackets.

To justify Russification and significant alteration of the libretto, a legend was created about an unknown autograph of Mozart allegedly found in one of the Russian archives. The manuscript of the opera "The Wonderful Duda", written at the end of the 18th century for some serf theater, turned out to be a version of "The Magic Flute". The timid writers, apparently fearing musicological wrath, did not insist on their legend, and the much more radical hoax that the Shadow Theater staged several years ago immediately came to mind. Then Maya Krasnopolskaya and Ilya Epelbaum came up with the idea that Tchaikovsky had written an opera with the same name before “Swan Lake” and was even present at its home production, where singers, dancers, actors and puppets participated. Maya and Ilya insisted that they were staging a performance based on materials found in the archives, and they whipped up their myth with such foam, publishing in the program so many “testimonies” written in a completely Kharms spirit that even musicologists seemed to remember something similar. But, as you can see, what is allowed in a puppet theater is not allowed in an opera theater...

"Russian Opera" was composed by a large company: Katya Pospelova herself and three poets - Maria Stepanova, Igor Ebanoidze and the most famous of all - the star of intellectual chanson Psoy Korolenko . Apparently, they composed it with pleasure: a cheerful centenity (most of all they “harnessed” the most common Pushkin quotes) was combined with Psoy’s beloved juggling of languages. Tamino’s lyrical German arias easily rhymed with the nativity scene-maker’s simple Russian chants, and Papageno himself, having fallen in love, sang: “It seems like paradise has been opened wide / well, gee – das ist fantastic”!

The resulting text - uneven and torn, stylized as folklore (from the heroic elements of folk theater and raeshnik to spiritual poetry and sensitive romances), turned out to be not at all as simple-minded and "cabbage" as it pretended to be. Love, loneliness, death, religiosity - sounded piercingly in simple words, unusually not drowned out, but elevated by music.

Just before the premiere, Tatyana Grindenko (orchestra of the Academy of Ancient Music), who was the musical director of the production, said in an interview that she would not conduct the opera, because, in her opinion, the singers themselves should lead the orchestra, dictate the tempo and mood of the stage , and not vice versa. And it is also important for her that the singers “do not sing,” but rather recitate: if they maintain the conversational rhythm of speech, the meaning of the text will be clear. In essence, this is how it all turned out: Grindenko did not conduct, and the text was understandable. True, I cannot say that the singers, almost all invited from the Novaya Opera, did not sing - as a rule, they did sing, but this, with a few exceptions, was for the better.

For the performance they came up with a magical move, Hoffmann-style: the small nativity scene that Papageno carries on his shoulder grows to the size of the stage, and the romantic plot of the opera involves animated dolls - the beautiful Pamina, the comic devil, angels with a flute. “I carry the whole world on my belt, / But I hang myself by a thread,” Papageno sang. It is the doll from the nativity scene that the wicked dreamer Tamino falls in love with, recalling the story of Marie and the Nutcracker.

But the best thing that the writers of this performance came up with was recreating the spirit of a home performance. With a chamber hall, a small orchestra and a small stage with almost no machinery, with actors who walk without hesitation through the side door of the hall, wink at the orchestra members and make eyes at their acquaintances in the hall. With all the immediate, friendly and relaxed atmosphere of the Russian home theater, where, it must be said, neither great actors nor operatic geniuses ever hesitated to perform. Of course, the main character in such a performance should not have been the prince, but the “author” of this world - Papageno - the smiling, lively handsome Roman Shevchuk, a homely jeune premier, who shoots with his eyes, is eager to grab or hug all the girls indiscriminately and really likes himself and Yes mom. Charming and curly, naively batting her eyelashes Pamina - Natalia Borozdina, and retarded Tamino, in his earflaps and dead coat, looking like a captured German (the invited Austrian Roman Payer, they say, once sang this part in his homeland, but probably not in such extravagant conditions). And the noble Sarastro - Vladimir Kudashev. (It must be said that everything connected with the temple, where the wise old man and his companions with headdresses in the form of felt boots serve, are the last Masonic mysteries of Mozart left in the plot. No one here even aspires to be Orthodox priests). Dear angels from Maria Struve’s children’s choir. Beautiful and crafty, long-legged Papagena is the German Anna-Verena Schaab, who, after four years of study in Moscow, sings smartly in Russian. And, of course, the devil Monostatic performed by Psoy Korolenko. Having cut his hair and shaved, he no longer looked like a wild Jew with a fiery Hasidic gaze, in which there was definitely something devilish, but became a radiant, ruddy fat man in a red tights with a tail - a good-natured devil from children's matinees, who hums in a nasal voice, makes a goat with his red fingers, he cheerfully widens his eyes and fearlessly shakes his horns in front of the kids in the stalls so that they burst into laughter happily. And I would distribute the “song of the lustful monostatk” among all kindergarten speech therapists:

I came to you to whisper
rustle and rustle,
Touch, fumble, tickle,
It's hot to breathe into your ear.

The only one who was unbearable was Death (aka the Queen of the Night), for whom, although only two arias were left, in them she literally brought out her coloraturas with a knife on the plate. Get her out of our home theater and back into her kitchen!

The intricate, full of inconsistencies “Masonic” plot of “The Magic Flute” has turned into an ingenuous fairy tale, where the main secrets lie not in the quirks of the plot, but in deep miracles: the mystical love of Tamino and Pamina, as if poisoned with a love potion before they knew each other, in The star, which, like a Christmas star, leads the elder Zarastra to a meeting with the chosen Tamino. And, finally, in a small den that has become the whole world.

And as for Mozart’s music, into which this plot is poured, as if into a precious cup, it remained itself. It’s strange to talk once again about how it flows and bewitches, it’s stupid to think that “The Magic Flute” will lose something if in this production it’s performed with cuts, it’s ridiculous to stand in a pose and recite: “It’s not funny to me when a buffoon despised by parody dishonors Alighieri."

It’s just a shame that I wasn’t able to take all the children I knew with me to this performance, and now it’s unknown whether it will ever be possible to see it again. The Little World Theater lives on the principle of a “project theater,” that is, it shows as many performances as it has enough money for. This time there was only enough money for two premiere shows at the Theater Center on Strastnoy, and whether there will be money for parents and children to continue coming to see “The Magic Flute” and not some “Babu Yaga - Against”, no one knows knows. It's a pity.