Review of the opera “The Demon” at the Mariinsky Theater

The Mariinsky 2 showed the first premiere of the season – the opera The Demon (1875) by Anton Rubinstein, directed by Elizaveta Korneeva, which became her debut on this stage. Contrary to the promotional promises, it was not Valery Gergiev, but his younger colleague Gurgen Petrosyan, who was at the conductor’s stand at the first two performances. Tells Vladimir Dudin.

Before the appearance of this director’s version of “The Demon” at the Mariinsky Theater since 2003, for several seasons without much success, the play directed by Lev Dodin, which moved to the banks of the Neva from the Chatelet Theater in Paris, was staged. The creative tandem of Dodin and Borovsky took what was happening into the plane of the too symbolic and abstract, turning a blind eye to the numerous lengths of the score and packaging the colorful eclecticism of the musical language of the opera into graphic aesthetics. It’s impossible to say that twenty years later “The Demon” at the Mariinsky has finally found its director and acquired any commensurate artistic dimension, but it has nevertheless gained some touches.

Today, listening to Rubinstein’s opera was most exciting in the sense of unraveling the linguistic and musical plot origins, unraveling intertextual connections and associative chains of the musical text. With his “Demon,” the composer seemed to have diagnosed most of the rebellious heroines of Russian opera, anticipating Tchaikovsky’s Lisa and Tatiana. In the guise of Lermontov’s “spirit of exile,” he summarized the richest European experience, mainly in opera, which included Gounod’s Faust, Meyerbeer’s Robert the Devil, and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. In the choral prologue, it was difficult not to hear the triplet figurations of the whirlwind finale of Chopin’s B-flat minor sonata, mixed with the texture of the overture of Wagner’s Dutchman – and, in turn, not to hear in all this the anticipation of the storm scene from Verdi’s Otello. It was funny to note the connection between the orchestral colors and melodymic pattern in the chorus of robbers from the first act with the murder scene from the finale of Verdi’s Rigoletto with its flashes of lightning and increasing suspense. And in the Caucasian dances of the first act, it was impossible not to notice the premonition of eros-thanatos in the “Dances of the Persians” from “Khovanshchina,” foreshadowing the death of Ivan Khovansky.

All this rich associative series, of course, is not present in Elizaveta Korneeva’s performance: so, a couple of impulses towards the poetics of associations, conscious or not. Prince Sinodal is dressed up as Lermontov – which was especially poignant when the slender, sweet-voiced tenor Roman Shirokikh appeared in this role. During her dance with her retinue, Tamara, in a smart, graceful performance by soprano Natalia Pavlova, with her gesture (like the flap of a wing), involuntarily recalled the unfortunate Odette, bewitched by another Russian demon – the evil Rothbart in Swan Lake, which Tchaikovsky had yet to write.

The main psychoanalytic message of the new director turned out to be quite simple: “all traumas come from childhood,” and therefore the public is shown how little Demon and Tamara are playing in a sandbox with its rigid boundaries, beyond which there is one continuous danger and temptation. And yet, the speculative nature of the director’s constructions outweighed in the performance the ability to carefully and meaningfully draw the drawings of the roles, without throwing away lines, and to master stage time.

A choir in hats, depicting an inertly observing society, is seated on the upper tier of the scenery (artist – Ekaterina Ageniy), which resembled a gray hangar and was enlivened by video projections that broadcast either the stormy waters of the Aragva, or an oriental ornament, or the chapel where the “holy prince” was killed. The demon appeared in a shabby long white shirt, a black leather jacket, sneakers and a gray patty wig, slowly and unprincipledly wandering from corner to corner. Evgeny Nikitin, who sang in the first line-up, fully conveyed with his vocals all the painful fatigue of such anti-existence, while his young colleague Magerram Huseynov, with his even lyrical bass, still managed to depict in this image something much more life-giving. Inara Kozlovskaya’s Tamara turned out to be very routine, old-fashioned and sedentary, while Natalya Pavlova’s, with her magnetic artistry and sensitive intonation, which skillfully covered up some problems with the cantilena and low register, – on the contrary, fluttered carelessly. Gurgen Petrosyan gained a little more freedom at the controls on the second evening of the premiere, but still remained a diligent, executive student during the protracted exam.