New routine

Premiere of Halevi’s “The Jewess” at the Mikhailovsky Theater

The performance, even before it began, has already become a sensation. Or rather, the sensation was that it did not start on the appointed evening of the premiere - at half past five an unknown nationalist called the theater and announced that the performance would not happen, because first the building would explode. However, it turned out that the hall with the wardrobe was not afraid of explosions - I don’t know whether this is explained by the genius of the architect Alexander Bryullov, who foresaw such an unexpected reprimand when designing the theater back in the 19th century, or by the visionary gift of the current general director Vladimir Kekhman, who, having embarked on this positions in 2007, this theater was quickly renovated. It was in the lobby of the supposedly mined building that dressed-up spectators (including your humble servant) gathered, experiencing exactly the sensations experienced by herring in a barrel.

We stayed in the storage facility, gradually getting compacted, until the beginning of eight, when the director announced that the performance was postponed until tomorrow. The same was said to all its participants, who, again, were not evacuated anywhere. That is, they were afraid of the promised explosion, but somehow not very sincerely. But the PR effect turned out to be significant - “fishermen everywhere were making noise about this news for a week.”

Although in fact the unidentified telephone terrorist had no reason to be indignant. Jacques-François Fromental Halévy's opera La Juive (1835) was performed in Russia from 1837 as The Cardinal's Daughter or The Jew. Catherine the Great also ordered the use of the word “Jew” in official documents, so even in the 19th century there was a romantic challenge in the invective name “Jew”. Justifiably - the libretto by Eugene Scribe says that the “Jew” is not real: in fact, she is the daughter of a cardinal, rescued from a fire in infancy and raised by the Jew Eliazar, and then condemned to execution for having an affair with a Christian; Eliazar reveals the truth to the cardinal only when Rachel is already at the stake.

The Mikhailovsky Theater, presenting plans for the next season last summer, promised “The Jew,” but gradually the romantic challenge faded to “The Jew.” Which should not so inflame hypothetical Orthodox patriots (as well as Governor Matvienko, who a year ago felt moral discomfort because of the poster for the play based on the world-famous play by Eve Ensler “The Vagina Monologues”, and now the posters on the fence read “Monologues V."). In short, there is nothing radical in the title of the current premiere.

As in herself.

Director Arnaud Bernard said: “I could leave the action in 1414 in the provinces of France, as was the case in the original opera, but then I would tell a contemporary about a distant, unknown episode of history and my production would be an ordinary opera that would not touch spectator." Mr. Bernard intended to touch the viewer by transferring the action to a certain European country in the 1930s.

Well, here, of course, young people in boots, red shirts and quasi-SS caps appeared (costume designer Eva-Mareike Uhlich), began to allegedly beat the Jews with sticks and feet, red banners with a stylized Nazi eagle came down, etc. The artist Herbert Murauer built the entire stage box into a gray hall with overhead light through a transparent coffered ceiling, stylized, in turn, after Albert Speer. And the persecuted Jews, of course, are not left without children in touching dresses and kippahs - they, that is, children, and not kippahs, should shed tears from the most insensitive hearts...

In short, we have seen and re-seen all this (personally, I’ve seen it at least six times). One of the main trends in opera directing in recent decades: if any work involves Jews, sew it on, draw it, hang it up, insert a yellow six-pointed star into the scenery (in Messrs. Bernard and Murauer, it is also, of course, prominently present on the proscenium). Be it in “Samson and Delilah” by Saint-Saëns, or in “Nabucco” by Verdi, and even in “The Jewess” Jehovah himself commanded. In operatic directing (as, indeed, in culture in general), what Thomas Mann called “the tragic immensity of the sphere of the banal” triumphs.

Arno Bernard assures that, being a violinist by first profession, he followed music in everything. With his performance he once again confirmed: knowing music does not make you a musical person. Lush, decorative, intricate and in places very beautiful, Halévy-Scriba's opera did not at all intend to resolve (or even raise) the “Jewish question.” She meant the pleasure of the most respectable public. The achievement of which and the theme of the Holocaust (the current performance, instead of a fire behind the stage, ends with a silent choir on stage undressing before being shot or gas chambered) are two incompatible things. Where is the Holocaust - and where is Scribe? Taste, as is known, is conscience in the aesthetic sphere. One can agree or argue with Adorno’s famous maxim about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. Music after him is possible - for example, Shostakovich. But still, Halévy’s music (like that of Verdi and Saint-Saëns) tells a completely different story. And to mechanically impose a theme on it that would “hit the viewer” is, from an artistic point of view, stylistic deafness (as in all similar productions), and from an ethical point of view, it is speculation.

But, alas, this directorial strategy has long become routine. By God, if Mr. Bernard had taken it and “left the action in 1414 in the province of France” - that would have been an innovation!

However, in art, exceptions are often more valuable than rules, and it happens that a vicious plan is realized at such a level of aesthetic quality that the result is unnaturally convincing. For example, if in this “Jew” the mimance had not hit the stage board and the air with batons, pretending to beat women and children, if they, in turn, had not stretched out their hands, feigning suffering, if they had been able to teach all this mass of people to live on stage, namely to live, “according to Stanislavsky” (as, for example, Dmitry Chernyakov can teach) - perhaps it would not be so obvious that in the garden of the musical text there is an elderberry, and in Kyiv there is an uncle in the stage text.

As for the musical text, the work of the new chief conductor of the theater Peter Feranets was noticeable in comparison with at least his July debut at this console (at the very presentation of the season), the orchestra has clearly grown. The casting, as has happened more than once at the Mikhailovsky Theater, made me ask the question: why were these particular imported singers cast? Italian tenor Walter Borin - Eliazar sang only the famous aria Rachel, quand du seigneur, which was performed in concerts by all self-respecting tenors, from Caruso to Alagna, otherwise his voice did not really sound. For the second tenor part - Leopold (the high-ranking Christian compromised by Rachel), the composer provided for the upper F, so if at least the notes are hit, thank you. However, the achievements of the Italian Gian Luca Pasolini were exhausted. The soprano of the Mikhailovsky soloist Natalya Mironova (Leopold's fiancée and Rachel's rival Princess Eudoxia, renamed Eudoxia for some reason) is more beautiful in timbre than the soprano of the Uruguayan Maria Jose Siri invited to the title role; it would be nice if someone else explained to Ms. Mironova what to sing singing loudly and expressively are not the same thing.

Choirmaster Vladimir Stolpovskikh worked no less than the conductor: the choir sings while performing continuous whimsical mise-en-scène maneuvers. If these maneuvers had not yet been purely formal... Well, the truth of passions and the plausibility of feelings in the alleged circumstances were not revealed that evening in the theater. Once again.

Dmitry TSILIKIN, St. Petersburg