Opera at the parade – Newspaper Kommersant No. 27 (7472) of 02/14/2023

Conductor Dmitry Yurovsky at the podium of the Svetlanov State Orchestra introduced the Moscow Philharmonic audience to Alexander von Zemlinsky’s little-known opera Tsar Kandavl, written in 1938 but not performed until 1996. About how it sounded in Moscow in 2023, tells Yulia Bederova.

This season, Dmitry Yurovsky, the chief conductor of the Novosibirsk NOVAT, has several joint performances with the state orchestra, and almost all of them have non-obvious titles in the programs. One of them is Tsar Kandavl: the last opera of Schoenberg’s teacher and relative Alexander von Zemlinsky has never been performed in Moscow before, like his other operas. In 2010, Vladimir Yurovsky was supposed to perform his “Dwarf” at the Bolshoi Theater, but due to illness he canceled the idea. The Florentine Tragedy was planned at the Bolshoi this season to be staged by Alexander Molochnikov paired with Rachmaninov’s Francesca da Rimini, but the production was cancelled. There is a possibility that the Dwarf, now scheduled for April at the Novaya Opera, will still take place.

The large-scale Kandavl became a kind of sad greeting to those who missed the repertoire discoveries adopted in the programs of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra under the other Yurovsky, and the exquisite opera titles that adorned the philharmonic seasons of recent years. Alas, Kandavl was performed in a conductor’s concert transcription, where some of the characters, along with the music, were cut, and the innovative drama tended to the tried-and-true genre of literary and musical composition: artist Klim Kudashkin read fragments of text between musical episodes, not without hesitation.

In the original, “King Candaules” based on the play by André Gide, based on an episode from Herodotus’ “History” about a self-satisfied ruler who paid with his life for his passion for beauty and the desire to demonstrate his wealth to outsiders, is the last pinnacle of Zemlinsky’s work and one of the voluminous pearls of all Viennese ” long modern”, which stretched almost until the end of the 1930s. These were decades when psychoanalysis, symbolism, impressionism, romanticism, expressionism, neoclassicism were splendidly intertwined in different ways in the music of Richard Strauss and the New Viennese, as well as in the popular and then completely forgotten works of Zemlinsky, Korngold, Franz Schreker, Ernst Krenek and other authors. . Composer’s fates also developed differently: Strauss fell silent, Schoenberg had success in America, Korngold abandoned dodecaphony and headed the Hollywood film music workshop, Zemlinsky’s ally Viktor Ullman worked behind barbed wire in Theresienstadt and died in Auschwitz. And Zemlinsky himself, having managed to get to New York, sought the production of Kandavla, but at the Metropolitan he was told directly: nude (the boastful tsar gives the magic ring to the fisherman Giges and sends him invisible to the bedroom of his own wife, so that at least someone I also saw how beautiful she was) on a decent stage is out of place. Zemlinsky soon died in poverty, and the opera, completed only in the clavier, had been waiting in the wings for sixty years. Now it is sometimes staged in theaters from Salzburg to Buenos Aires, and not so long ago it was presented at the Flemish Opera directed by Andrei Zholdak, where Dmitry Yurovsky conducted.

The Moscow premiere became an echo of those European developments, but only in the local performing version. The role of Kandavl was played by Mikhail Agafonov with impeccable Russian pronunciation in German and almost military bearing in phrasing, playing the pervert tsar and the aesthete tsar as a grown-up Siegfried (as if the Wagnerian hero had not died, but taken a place on the throne, where he would be bored from flattery and wealth). Nissia was sung by Lyubov Stuchevskaya, whose image in the course of the play migrated from written coquetry to the obsession with Turandot (Stuchevskaya sang this part in NOVAT). In Alexander Sukhanov’s Giges, there was more obedience than desire, but also a musicality, noticeable behind the general passion for an endless solemn march. In this total march-likeness, it seems, there was not so much the oppressive spirit of the 1930s, penetrating in Zemlinsky’s transparent and wasteful writing at the same time, but the desire to fit the slow tension of the drama into the framework of a parade defile. That, however, did not prevent the orchestra as a whole from sounding clear and harmonious, shining with neat colors of groups and instrumental solos. So the acquaintance with the opera, can be considered, took place, although it was partly capped. And the passion for the ceremonial demonstration of luxurious beauty, as it turned out, is characteristic of more than one Kandavlus.