On the stage of the theater. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko presented the opera “Not Only Love”

Director Evgeny Pisarev and conductor Felix Korobov presented “Not Only Love” by Rodion Shchedrin on the MAMT stage. Shchedrin’s early opera with a libretto by Vasily Katanyan (based on the stories of Sergei Antonov) looks like an operetta, but hides a completely operatic intensity of passions. Tells Yulia Bederova.

“Not Only Love” from 1961 is now a repertoire rarity, although it could have been a theatrical hit. Even on the stage of the Mariinsky Theater, which brought together the entire operatic Shchedrin, “Not Only Love” was staged last, as if embarrassed by its lyrical and production playfulness in an elegant song-ditty form on the verge of vaudeville and psychodrama. The Mariinsky Theater production looks elegant and conventional – according to a recipe that, like butter porridge, will not spoil any comic opera. By the way, this is roughly how comic operas by Evgeny Pisarev were solved at MAMT and at the Bolshoi Theater. In the new version of “Love,” convention and relative elegance are also present, but they bear the gloomy stamp of graphic expressionism, which gives the work a completely different nuance.

On the stage there is the black-gray earth of artist Maxim Obrezkov and the gray-white cloudy sky of video scenographer Asya Mukhina. Object reality is represented by faded wooden benches, boxes, iron buckets and pitchforks. In the video, in full accordance with the libretto, it often rains, saying hello to world cinema. This biblical setting carries both mood and plot potential – the poetry of sadness in it is mixed with the energy of economic prose: “When will we sow?”

It seems that collective farmers in one post-war village are yearning for forced idleness, like the collective Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district, having escaped from Shostakovich. But there is another reason: there are almost no men on the collective farm, everyone was destroyed by the war. But there are women – where would they go if they were born before the war, and they are not given passports (and so on until 1974), leaving the collective farm is an unrealistic idea. However, nothing is said about passports in the opera. But they talk about rotten logs, a leaky roof of the barn, where the same rain pours all the time through the holes. “Everything here is rotten!” – shouts Varvara Vasilyevna, the “middle-aged chairman”, when she first falls in love with a visiting young man with stylish manners (“pipe trousers, cap with a button”), and then abandons her love in a huge monologue scene. Actually, he’s “middle-aged” in the story, 29 years old. They don’t live that long – or at least they don’t fall in love during such years with a 20-year-old dunce in a village where “there are no men”: “What kind of man am I? I am Volodya!

In the opera by Shchedrin-Katanyan, who tied motifs from various Antonov stories into a knot, there is irony in several buckets. The number structure itself, drawn with a cinematic pen (wide and close-up shots, landscape and portrait, polyphonic and chordal, plangent and dance overlay each other, shift accents, rhythmize the form), is not only outwardly simple-minded, but also, in fact, ironic. The audience applauds gratefully after the numbers, be it the magical quartet of village alcoholics about “Rain-Rain” (in the manner between Bizet and Georgy Garanyan), mischievous choral ditties, the tragic song of Volodya’s bride Natasha (Maria Makeeva builds the heroine’s line freely and soulfully), idiotically Volodya’s playful couplets about pigeons (Kirill Matveev is a gift for the production, he sings and dances, and takes the upper C, and funny portrays a pigeon, and smiles like Eduard Khil, and miraculously turns into a tragic hero). Or Varvara Vasilievna’s song, full of drama: Larisa Andreeva heroically carries the difficult image of “Lady Macbeth of a healthy person” through all the potholes and expanses of the role.

Another thing is that the musical mosaic, where everything begins with a mixture of Puccini and Tchaikovsky, captures Prokofiev along the way, rushes further through proto-minimalist, seemingly jazz, quasi-Bachian, deceptively Stravinsky territories and slows down at the anti-Glinka final chorus, superimposed in the opera on the obvious textual and semantic ambiguity. We never know where we are: in thaw poetry, in village prose, in the dashing rhyming of vegetarian ditties (no stage could bear real ditties), in neo-folklorist or expressionist narrative, while rhymes like “secrecy – distance” pass through the score endless rain.

The directors clearly sense this duality and respond to it in their own way. On the transparency of the composer’s manner – with a translucent color scheme, on the frame of opera – with the silhouette of a generalized house-barn from many Russian opera performances, on the hooligan quotations – with the prank of film replicas from “Kuban Cossacks”, on the spring of the numbers – with the mise-en-scène relief of the musical, with the quoted lyrics – with the frank sadness of the thought-out finals.

True, not every rhythmic attraction or editing sequence comes out perfectly. The orchestra, choir and soloists, like couples in a stage quadrille borrowed from the film “Love and Doves,” come together and then diverge at times, and the balance of humor and tragedy sometimes seems a stretch. We are either in a stage poem, or in a caricature, or in a full socialist realist parade, or in the space of a dramatic epitaph. This is understandable. Those dying villages after the war that Shchedrin saw in folklore expeditions, where there were no men, but sometimes displaced family members of enemies of the people were encountered (whoever the cartoon characters “The Girl with a High Voice” and “Katerina the Divorcee” were in the play), the solution looks like rather rudely), they died completely after decades. Those life, folklore and artistic realities were so acute that after the premiere at the Bolshoi Theater, shows were canceled, and now they are almost comical, like a pitchfork in the hands of a bride, and fit smoothly into the theatrical structure of the musical. But this is a sad musical, and there is no happy ending in sight. To the quiet strumming of the balalaika, the collective farm choir babbles the final ditties (“We are happier with the harmonica, more fun with the balalaika… A dove circles in a clear sky, we really need lasting peace”) and freezes in a silent photographic scene from a traumatized life, drowned in the rain of history. In the play she appears as terribly realistic phantoms, and even Shchedrin’s irony cannot completely protect them.