Chernyakov about Mordier

I have been familiar with Mortier only 8 years old. He appeared in the backstage corridors of the Bolshoi Theater on September 1, 2006, at the end of the premiere of Evgeny Onegin, and immediately began to communicate with me immediately. That is, it was not even communication, but his non -notostable monologue. Immediately about everything and in a very excited manner. In subsequent years, I often saw him like that. It was a kind of capacity, seduction, recruitment style. You seem to start ... Well, not just agreeing to immediately, but follow its development. You even unwittingly nod. At the same time, he talked with you, but also as if with anyone, smiling euphorically and straightening his finger at the nose. Subsequently, I saw how he also talked with other people. Probably, his legal education and stay in the Jesuit school were partially guilty of this, but also his unbridled idealism.

Now I think that he, of course, reminds me of the hero of the film Werner Hertzog Fitzcarraldo, who, contrary to everything, even reality, dreamed of building an opera theater in the middle of the Peruvian tropical forests, among the Indians. Now, knowing personally quite a lot of different people in the world who move the opera case today, I understand that he was completely unusual and even in some ways eccentric. With its great idealism, fanaticism and thirst for eternal battle. All this probably looks old -fashioned today. Today I do not know anyone who is even remotely similar to him - with his neglect of practicality and success, with reproaches rushing after him about supposedly irrational huge financial expenses, with his desire to certainly prove to his whole world. With the fact that theatrical activity is always a manifestation. Solidarity or protest.

I remember his face at the moments of defeats. This is strange, but it was exactly the same in moments of success and victories. He became so quiet, limp, sitting in the corner with an absent look, barely smiling at his own something. Somehow hovering and turned off. I did not even understand if he was feeling anything, happy, unlucky. He turned on to the fullest only when an hour came to fight with someone. He needed a vital opponent or enemy. He immediately began to function one hundred percent. This used all the skills and talents in it. And it was very often impressive.

And then, at the first meeting in Bolshoi, when he fell, I immediately got lost, calmed down. For me, he came to the corridor of the big out of the distant world, where Michael Hanek, Olivier Messian, Patrice Sherro, Bill Viola and Robert Wilson were. He immediately invited me to boldly enter the circle of those who make the theater with him. And he was generous and honest in this. I had a little cowardly, realizing that for him I was still not a proven person, that he is guided by some kind of name, that he trusts his instinct. He always somehow recklessly, artistically fell in love with everyone he invited, did not require any guarantees, was ready to forgive a lot.

I well remember our conversation in February 2008 in Paris, when I, having experienced the next neurasthenic collapse of my relations with the prepared performance, came to refuse him to produce Macbet, realizing that I was fatally at a dead end and put all the deadlines under the blow. Mentally preparing for the role of the guilty and tearing all the plans of the Paris Opera, I was waiting for any reaction, but not the way I heard. Mordier began to reassure me, offer me his help in the brainstorming, books from his library. “Where are you in the coming months? I can come to you, and if I will be useful to you, we will be able to walk and talk about the work. ” “It’s not the most important thing for me to get any project from you, I need to get from you exactly what you yourself would be happy.”

It was important for him to attract as many new people, not known to anyone as possible, to open someone, to look for absolutely, at first glance, unobvious and even strange people. Few opera theaters of the world and their directors are ready to take this risk, but they all work with those whom Mordier once opened today. Today, at the helm of the Canadian opera in Toronto, the Lyon Opera, Brussels theater La Montne, and even the Bavarian opera in Munich, those who once brought Morma into opera, recklessly entrusting everything at once.

He always updated his circle. At different times, Mordier was surrounded by completely different people. Some people disappeared irrevocably, and he never pronounced their names more. Already in recent years, he made opera plans with Pedro Almodovar, released performances with Michael Hanek. I was looking for the most non -obvious combinations. He led the hand of so many interesting people from the outside, which he seemed to say: look, but the opera is not what you used to think, it is interesting, relevant, intellectually, deep, about you and for you.

I do not think that he was someday happy, his whole life was continuous overcoming. Of course, the Salzburg festival was the most successful time of his life, but even then he was subjected to endless criticism from all sides. And later, Mordier in Salzburg is already remembered with nostalgia, comparing with it all the festival years subsequent after Mordier as the years of reducing the bar.

Madrid, too, did not become a full-fledged place for the implementation of excellent utopia, and I always felt how he was painfully worried, how he is washing and even more closed, as if in some kind of tower. One of his last letters to me was devoted to the cancellation of my production of the opera Berlioz Trojans for the painful reason for the lack of funding; He ended this letter with the words that he was painful to tell me this, since, apparently, this would have to be our last joint work after so many years of excellent relationship, and that I can find another worthy company in the future, which will carry out my exciting ideas, and that he, like a poor brother, is forced to stay away and admire my work now only from the audience.

Recently, even a small Russian circle has formed around him, to which I also belonged. In Madrid and Paris, there were many Russian singers and conductors. A trip to Moscow was the last trip in his life. Three weeks ago, deadly ill, he came in the hope of a certain miraculous therapy, about which he learned about the existence of in Moscow. He lived for 10 days in Moscow, in isolation, almost incognito, rarely leaving the hotel room. And it was in Moscow that he had the last time in his life he heard the opera, wishing him to be taken to the opera theater. In Bolshoi, at the premiere of the “royal bride”, he was able to physically master only the first act.

As well as the hero of Claus Kinski in the film “Fitzcarraldo”, Mordier was a rare manifestation of a real obsessed person, in spite of any mistakes and defeats, trying to shift the mountain at all costs. And, despite the boasts and curses, striving to recreate that of his utopia in reality, to see the desired outlines of which he sought.