Opera “From the House of the Dead” by Dmitry Chernyakov at the Ruhrtriennale festival. Review

One of the main events not only of the Ruhrtriennale arts festival in Germany, but, perhaps, of the entire European September was the production of director and artist Dmitry Chernyakov and conductor Dennis Russell Davis – Lesz Janacek’s opera “From the House of the Dead” based on “Notes from the House of the Dead” » Fyodor Dostoevsky. We attended a performance in Bochum Dmitry Renansky And Esther Steinbock.

This could only have been imagined here – in the Centenary Hall in Bochum, one of the main venues of the Ruhrtriennale festival, a former production workshop converted for the needs of contemporary art. There are few places where you can achieve the effect produced by the beginning of a performance: when from somewhere very far away, from the dark depths, a crowd of prisoners runs towards the audience, like a herd of wild animals, seriously accelerating. The impression is all the more powerful because this time there is no boundary between the stage and the auditorium. Dmitry Chernyakov decided to stage an immersive opera for the first time – he organized the space as three prison wells located one behind the other, so that during the performance both the action and the audience move from the first to the second, and then to the third. There are no seats at all, part of the audience looks down from the galleries, and the second part is right “in the courtyard”, along with the performers. Sometimes the viewer may find himself at arm’s length from the singing soloist – a state that cannot be imagined in any, even a chamber opera house.

Probably, it was not only the desire to experiment that drove Chernyakov when he came up with the form of the performance. After all, Janacek’s opera “From the House of the Dead” is almost devoid of action in the ordinary sense of the word; it is actually a series of operatic monologues-self-portraits introducing us to the inhabitants of the prison. Chernyakov is a recognized master of theatrical action on the opera stage, and thanks not only to the “unity” of the audience with the performers, but also to the precise director’s work with literally everyone, and not just the soloists, the fragmentation of the material is not felt at all. It was important for the director that the audience also feel themselves in the circumstances of the “house of the dead.” And not at all in order to once again scare us with prison, hard labor or the Gulag – which is easier to do with Russian material.

The director seems to be “blurring” the status of the society he is showing. Yes, it is a man’s world, but it is not necessary to see it as a penitentiary. The people in suits who appear are not specific jailers, but rather the authorities, the beneficiaries of this cruel system. Chernyakov (or rather, costume designer Elena Zaitseva) has neither prison uniforms nor guard uniforms. Here the social environment itself is organized in such a way that everyone can find themselves “above” or “below”, a rapist or a victim, simply because society is painfully deformed (and in this sense, “From the House of the Dead” forms a kind of duology with another recent premiere by Chernyakov – “War and Peace” at the Munich Bavarian Opera). In this sense, the “political” Goryanchikov, who finds himself in this dehumanized community, can be considered a representative of the public, one for whom the nightmare of unfreedom has been fully realized. And, apparently, there is no way out. In Janáček’s finale, Gorjanchikov is released, while in Chernyakov he goes crazy and dies; the moment of liberation turns out to be just a momentary vision; the final desperate cry of the hero accurately resonates with the mood of the music – and is remembered, like the prologue, forever. The unstoppable collective force is at the beginning of the performance, the irrevocable individual tragedy is at the end.

It’s tempting to say that the experiment carried out by Dmitry Chernyakov would have made a strong impression on the material of almost any opera score. But it is precisely in the case of “From the House of the Dead” that this gesture takes on a very specific artistic meaning: Janacek’s feverish expressionism was always cramped on the opera stage, and in each new theatrical work he more and more passionately sought to break out of the framework of the stage portal, in which music felt like in a museum display case with a “do not touch” sign. One of the main reformers of musical theater in his operas in the 20th century acted exactly like his heroes – violating the rules of the everyday, being in borderline states of passion and affect, committing actions that went beyond the given canon, behavioral comme il faut. In this sense, Chernyakov’s performance seems to be perhaps the most authentic reading of “From the House of the Dead” of those that have appeared on the world stage in recent years: the radical solution is read by the director from the poetics of Janacek’s theater with his search for the truly tangible authenticity of a private, intimate experience of life – and completely the non-operatic vulnerability of all his characters.

Achieving such a result would, of course, be impossible without the well-coordinated teamwork of the performers, led by Dennis Russell Davis. At the performance of the Ruhr Triennial, it is difficult to believe that in a year the honored American conductor will turn 80 years old, and “From the House of the Dead” became his first major opera engagement in many years – so recklessly does he throw himself headlong into the proposed circumstances of Chernyakov’s production. The Bochum Symphony Orchestra is hidden on the periphery of the “Centenary Hall” from the eyes of not only the audience, but also the artists, forced to follow the conductor on video monitors, but you forget about this risky acoustic situation (masterfully supported, however, by both the musicians and sound engineers of the project) in a few minutes after the start of action. “From the House of the Dead” looks and sounds like a rare example of the unity of music and stage for modern musical theater – not conducting a dialogue with each other, but merging into an indivisible whole.

The soloists work in a similar way in the Bochum production. With his latest opera, Janáček posed a serious challenge to the casting directors of theaters and festivals: in the list of characters in From the House of the Dead there is no division into protagonists and figures – the score was written for an ensemble of virtuoso singers-actors. In Bochum, Chernyakov meets again with John Daszak (Skuratov) and Stefan Rügamer (Luka), the talismanic artists who have accompanied him throughout his career, and discovers new names for his theater, such as the powerful bass-baritone Johan Reuther (Goryanchikov). And here’s what’s perhaps most important: no matter how accurately each of the roles was built individually by the director and actors, the premiere of the Ruhrtriennale will be remembered primarily for how they all merge into the collective body of the performance – from the young Aleya to the 29-year-old Bolshoi soloist theater Bekhzod Davronov to the Old Prisoner 74-year-old Neil Shicoff, who ended his career in the mid-2010s and sensationally returned to the stage for six shows of “From the House of the Dead.”