Sergei Khodnev about the opera “The Jewess”

By calling Jacques Fromental Halévy's opera "La Juive", once known in Russia as "The Jew" and then as "The Cardinal's Daughter", "The Jew", the Mikhailovsky Theater paid not only a prudent tribute to political correctness. If you look at it, the main character of the opera, Rachel, is precisely a Jew by faith, in which she was raised by her adoptive father, the Jewish jeweler Eleazar. But in fact, she is the daughter of an Italian aristocrat, Count Brogni, who separated from her in infancy under rather difficult circumstances. And then he became a cardinal, yes. But Rachel herself does not know about his paternity. But Eleazar knows. And Prince Leopold, who is in love with Rachel, doesn’t know either - but the niece of the German emperor, Princess Evdokia, is in love with Leopold like a cat. But it is only the backstory and the plot of the libretto, written by Eugene Scribe, that smacks of the sweet and harmless sophistication of the script for the series. "The Jewess" ends with one of the most terrible endings in operatic literature - Rachel and Eleazar are executed, and the libretto specifies that they are killed by publicly boiling them alive.

Scribe, it must be admitted, did everything to tickle the nerves of the audience, and to draw the characters to match the fashionable romantic imagery, and not to fall into a completely black-and-white opposition - good versus bad, “ours” vs. "not ours." The moral message contained in his libretto is, generally speaking, straightforward: intolerance and the cruelty it engenders are disgusting. Moreover, it is not even very important who exactly personifies them. No one will sympathize with the jubilant, bloodthirsty crowd demanding the extermination of the Jews, but the triumph of the cornered Lazarus, dooming his adopted daughter to death in order to finally properly wound Cardinal Brogni, is also painful.

Of course, it was apparently necessary to first have a revolution, then Bonaparte’s rule, then a restoration, then the accession of the “bourgeois king” Louis Philippe in order to bring Jews to the main opera stage in France - and not biblical kings, prophets and priests, but practically ordinary people New time. The opera takes place in 1414 in Constance during the Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church held in this city (the same one, if we talk about cruelties, that condemned Jan Hus to be burned). Although in 1835 the production of the opera was hardly intended as a manifesto in defense of tolerance; a beautiful Jewish woman (albeit imaginary) as the main character is also a tribute to the tastes of the time when Balzac praised the “purely biblical type of beauty” of Esther van Gobseck, the heroine of Lost Illusions, and the actual namesake of Scribe-Halévy’s heroine, the legendary actress Rachel , made her first successes on stage. What can we say about the scenery - in accordance with the fashion of the Middle Ages, grandiose Gothic palaces and temples towered on the stage, the decoration of which even Viollet-le-Duc would envy.

And it was also a triumph of the genre of “grand opera” itself - a colossal performance for about six hours, where there was everything that could be expected from an opera house of that time: spectacular arias, bright ensembles, ballets, lush costumes, crowded choir scenes, the notorious scenery again same. Countless theaters and playhouses, where the opera was performed for another hundred years, tried in their own way to meet the given standard, but then Halévy’s work, which raised objectionable, inconvenient or unpleasant (that’s where it depends) questions, was forgotten for several decades. To return her to the stage only in the 1990s, when she could not help but rejoice at the avant-garde of opera directing, which could only handle complex social problems.

Naturally, this could not be done without cuts, and in this regard, “The Jewess,” staged at the Mikhailovsky Theater, is no exception - the magnificently tawdry “content” is considerably shortened, which makes the original conflict look all the more sharpened. The aggressiveness of this conflict is emphasized in the most brutal way by both the direction of the Frenchman Arnaud Bernard and the scenography of the German Herbert Murauer, who set the action of the opera during the Holocaust. Translating any social disorder into a totalitarian setting with greatcoats and riding breeches is, to put it mildly, not the rarest technique in the director's opera house of the last two decades, but in this case, how could one not use it. And as a result, in the finale, Eleazar, answering the cardinal’s question about where his daughter is, with the exclamation “Here she is!” points not to the cauldron, but to the Dantean horror of the threshold of the gas chamber suddenly opening on stage.

Such a concept, let’s say, makes this sharp and, moreover, harmonious performance somewhat predictable, but, on the other hand, the achievement of this production is not in one “picture”. This is also an absolute success for the musical director of the theater, Peter Feranets, and a demonstration of the strengths of the current Mikhailovsky troupe - one of its decorations, soprano Natalya Mironova, was also nominated for the Golden Mask for her Evdokia in this performance. And at the same time, a certificate of managerial success - the famous American tenor Neil Shicoff, who, in the decline of his career, made Eleazar his signature role, is in “The Jewess”. It is not surprising that two performances of “The Jewess” in Moscow, on the stage of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater, were included in the program of two festivals at once: on March 18 - just a performance from the Golden Mask competition program, but with a performance on March 22, the Chereshnevy festival opens forest".

Musical Theater named after. K. Stanislavsky and V. Nemirovich-Danchenko, March 18 and 22, 19.00

Killer fathers – Weekend – Kommersant