Opera singer Maxim Paster dies

At the age of 48, the tenor Maxim Pasteur died suddenly, having served for almost twenty years in the troupe of the Bolshoi Theater, singing Russian opera on stages of the level of Salzburg, La Scala, Metropolitan. It was a rare singer and an amazing actor.

Having met Maxim Pasteur not on the stage, it was easy to be deceived: it seemed that his appearance of a cheerful, corpulent joker set a distinct circle of possible roles, respectable, but not too intricate. The impression seems to be unambiguous, but false. Few people knew how to transform so decisively, those who saw at least his Shuisky in the good old Baratov’s “Boris Godunov” – they know. Here he is, arrogant and stately, as if he has become taller by a good head, regally orders the crowd “Praise!” and waved her handkerchief; here he is prudently and ruthlessly tormenting Boris, telling how he “visited the corpse of a baby”; but in the last act he sings a short phrase – “The grace of the Lord over you” – so that it literally oozes with oil, and malice, and craftiness, and poison.

Born and educated in Kharkiv, Pasteur ended up at the Bolshoi in 2003. It was a time of take-off, innovation, unusual and ambitious projects, patronized by the then theater director Anatoly Iksanov and chief conductor Alexander Vedernikov.

Maxim Pasteur sang a lot of the current, everyday repertoire, but it so happened that these symbolically significant projects over and over again could not do without him. In this case, “they didn’t get along” – not a figure of speech, he really brought into them that color, without which they would have lost something very important. So it was with an unprecedented attempt at an authentic reading of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (2003) under the guidance of maestro Vedernikov, where he sang Bayan. With The Flying Dutchman directed by Peter Konwitschny (2004); it was the first Wagner in many years at the Bolshoi, the first experience of co-production with a Western theater (the Bavarian Staatsoper), one of the first post-Soviet works with an invitation to a European celebrity director – in a word, the event is deafeningly loud, and yet now it seems that unforgettable in that premiere there was a seemingly unpretentious role of the Helmsman, Pasteur sang and played him so charmingly. With “Children of Rosenthal” by Leonid Desyatnikov: in the unthinkably sensational opera to the libretto by Vladimir Sorokin, it was the clone of Tchaikovsky performed by Pasteur who was, perhaps, the most delightful and funny vocal phenomenon.

He perfectly knew how to exist in the old, costume-conditional opera performances, but just as organically and naturally he took on complex artistic tasks from the arsenal of the latest stage direction.

For this versatility, modern directors loved him. Especially when it came to Russian music, which since the 2000s he has been performing, among other things, on the world’s first-class stages – Podyachiy in “Khovanshchina” (say, in the performance of Mario Martone on the stage of “La Scala”, 2019), Zinovy ​​Borisovich in “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (including in the Salzburg production by Andreas Kriegenburg, 2017), finally, his crowning Shuisky, whom he sang with all sorts of directors (including a ten-year-old version of Calixto Bieto in the Bavarian Opera). But still, his collaboration with Dmitry Chernyakov became a completely special line: this is whose exactingness to the acting abilities of opera singers is well known.

Until very recently, Pasteur participated in Chernyakov’s performances many times – at the Bolshoi and abroad, in Russian opera (for example, Berendey in the Parisian Snegurochka, 2017) and in Europe (Captain in Wozzeck of the Bolshoi Theater, 2009), at leading roles (as in the Berlin “Betrothal in a Monastery”, 2019) and in episodes (as in last year’s Munich “War and Peace”). Each time one could look forward to a surprise, a juicy, unusual and memorable work – it seemed to be a stable fact of operatic life, after all, his career was at its peak, 47 years old is not age. And it is terribly hard to realize that this series of surprises, transformations and miracles ended so early.

Sergei Khodnev