Maria the Terrible – Newspaper Kommersant No. 239 (7440) dated 12/23/2022

The Russian premiere of the opera Ivan IV by Georges Bizet took place at the St. Petersburg Opera, almost 160 years after it was written. About the little-known creation of the author “Carmen” on a plot from Russian history tells Vladimir Dudin.

The Byzantine scope of the personality of the Russian autocrat during the period of his obsessive love for the Circassian Maria Temryukovna, as well as the poorly civilized customs of the Russian court, where they drink, eat, walk and make aggressive raids, fulfilling the boundless will of the tsar, all this fits well into the paradigm of the European opera of the second half of the 19th century. By that time, Verdi had already written Simon Boccanegra, Sicilian Vespers, and The Force of Destiny, for which he received a huge fee from the directorate of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, and was preparing for Don Carlos with an episode from the life of another formidable European monarch, Philip II. Berlioz worked on the grandiose historical epic Les Troyens, the elderly Meyerbeer conceived his dying blockbuster, The African, Gounod delivered his progressive Faust. The main masterpieces of Massenet, Saint-Saens and Delibes were still far away. Paris was looking for new sharp topics, becoming more and more daring and fashionable Offenbach’s operettas.

The libretto for a plot from the life of Ivan the Terrible went to Bizet after Charles Gounod – he wrote his Ivan IV, but the opera was not accepted for production. However, if Gounod at least used the rejected musical material in his Faust, then Bizet was much less fortunate. Until 1933, when the score of Ivan IV was found among the papers of Bizet’s second husband Emil Strauss, it was considered lost, even burned. It was discovered by Guillaume de Van, curator of the library of the Paris Conservatoire. The exact date of completion of the opera could not be established, only the period between 1862 and 1864 is known. But what can I say, even if world recognition came to Carmen only after Bizet’s death.

Five acts of “Ivan IV” inherit the traditions of French lyrical tragedy and grand French opera with indispensable dance numbers. The plot basis is quite historical: the libretto by Francois-Hippolyte Leroy and Henri Trianon describes the events around the marriage of Ivan Vasilyevich to a Circassian princess and a conspiracy against the tsar and the young queen in 1564, which marked the beginning of the oprichnina.

For convenience, the premiere at the St. Petersburg Opera was called “Ivan the Terrible”, at the same time boldly giving it the title of “worldwide”, since, they say, all the rare previous European productions (in France, Germany and Switzerland) were made with cuts. The genre of the performance, called for by an avant-garde poster in the style of an Eisenstein film, was defined just in case as a “romantic fantasy in two parts”, while dressing the characters in museum-quality costumes with an abundance of fake gems on the dresses of the royal couple. The colorful score of Ivan IV, generously spiced with harmonic and rhythmic delights, clearly required a large stage space, which this theater on Galernaya does not have, but the director and artistic director of the St. Petersburg Opera, Yuri Alexandrov, has not been embarrassed for a long time. Yes, and how much is needed to depict the mountains and rivers of the Caucasus in the first act and the crenellated Kremlin wall in all subsequent ones. Georgy Savelyev’s video projections from time to time added either a peacefully flowing mountain river in the first picture, reflecting the colorful murmur of strings and harp in the orchestra, or the red smoke of a carbon monoxide feast in the Kremlin chambers, or the fiery sabotage of the conspirators.

In Bizet’s music, dramatic contrast is built around two poles. One shows the sacral-oriental three-part, already set in the first choir of mountain girls, which then receives many genre and tempo refractions from pastoral to fandango, bolero and lezginka. Three-part is opposed by the brute force of two-part – the squatting-stomping of the Russian boot. There were several compositions at the St. Petersburg Opera, but perhaps the best one was the one where Grozny found his ideal embodiment in the dramatically gifted bass-baritone Alexei Pashiev, Maria received the freedom-loving fearless voice of the lyric soprano Olesya Gordeeva, and the episodic role of the Young Bulgarian went to gambling Larisa Pominova, the owner of a luxurious amber mezzo. Tenor Yaramir Nizamutdinov easily mastered the most difficult virtuoso part of the Circassian prince Igor, while at the conductor’s stand Alexander Goikhman gave an unknown score so contagiously and stylistically prominent that I wanted to listen to the French speeches of Ivan the Terrible again.

Moreover, for three hours of opera music there are about five quite competitive hits. But for all the seductiveness of the French charm of the music of the 25-year-old Bizet, it was much more entertaining to follow the running line of the libretto, captivating with assertiveness and excitement to eerily topical themes and meanings. The song of the Terrible at the feast with the words that “God created you to trample the earth with the hoof of your horse” reeked of Mephistopheles in couplets. The choir of captives lamented plaintively: “Let us mourn our forests and fields, we mourn the heavens that have overturned our wondrous country.” After that, a furious argument followed, where the obstinate Mary, who refused to marry the despot, threw accusations in his face: “Your name is in the blood! It is like a challenge to God!” However, from hatred to love, as it turned out, there was only one step: after all, having married the tsar, Maria could not betray her sovereign husband when her brother Igor crept in to rescue the tsarina.

However, it was even more exciting to realize how, in just a few years, in the same “Carmen” by Bizet, some of the storylines of “Ivan IV” would turn into a gender inversion: Maria’s brother Igor would become Michaela, who went to save Jose from the spell of a gypsy, honest and law-abiding Maria would modulate into Jose, and Grozny himself will turn into Carmen, to whom everything is permitted and no laws are written. In the meantime, at the beginning of Ivan IV, the young Grozny gives the beautiful Maria a white mountain flower, which she will keep like José.