Review of the production of “Vampire” by Heinrich Marschner at the St. Petersburg Opera

For the first time in modern Russian history, the St. Petersburg Opera Theater presented (staged by Yuri Alexandrov under the musical direction of Maxim Valkov) one of the key texts of German and European romanticism – Heinrich Marschner’s opera “The Vampire” (1828). Talks about her Byronian genealogy and current overtones Vladimir Dudin.

What Heinrich Marschner and librettist Wilhelm August Wohlbrück (the composer’s brother-in-law) did not put into their text almost 200 years ago, today another era has brought to life from the dust of the archives, endowing this romantic story with acutely relevant resonances. And the director himself did not hide the fact that he saw in the opera, little known to professional and even more so to the general public, an opportunity to deal with the phenomenon of vampirism in modern times: “We had to abandon the horror story. We are talking about a man who bears a curse and enjoys it. Vampirism is a great evil and a great torment for those who practice it.” He was also inspired by the example of the St. Petersburg Theater of Musical Comedy, where the musical “The Vampire’s Ball” by Jim Steinman became the absolute box office record holder for the number of receipts in the entire history of the theater. But in Ball of the Vampires, Count Krolock, a broad-minded, educated aristocrat, and his unconventional son Herbert “advertise” their anti-world as a world of freedom from earthly madness and prejudice (and are vitally interested in increasing the number of “users”). This, let’s say, can captivate today’s rebellious youth, who are familiar with the vampire theme from modern mass cultural products like “Twilight.”

Marschner’s main character, Lord Ruthven, is the embodiment of insatiable egoistic Evil, the energy of destruction, which must be put a limit at all costs. The opera’s libretto is based on John Polidori’s acclaimed tale of the vampire lord, written in 1819, when Byron, his physician-secretary Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the latter’s wife Mary whiled away their time in a Swiss villa, trying to outdo each other in writing scary stories. It was then that Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” appeared, but for the time being “The Vampire” by Polidori (which was mistaken for the work of Byron himself) worried the public throughout Europe more. Nine years later, in the year of the premiere of Marschner’s opera, when Chopin and Schumann were eighteen, romanticism still reigned in the courtyard, and Gothic horrors still terribly attracted the artistic community, which, since the time of Hoffmann, had been raving about face-to-face encounters with the other world. – opportunities to test your spirit and body for strength and find out the limits of the power of evil spirits in matters of marital relations.

Paradoxically, Marschner took the prototype of the dramatic structure of his opera from Mozart in Don Giovanni, seeing in the image of his Vampire a continuation of Mozart’s seducer, tormented by insatiable desire. Ruthven needs to seduce three brides of different classes, just like Don Juan – three women, in order to add another year to his life. In Ruthven’s duet with Emmy, the bride of the servant of the Davenaut house, who finds them kissing, one can almost hear a quotation from Zerlina’s scene with Don Giovanni and the peasant Masetto.

The experienced ear also caught the threads that connected “The Vampire” with the intonational world of Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” and the chorus of evil spirits anticipated the famous witches in Verdi’s “Macbeth,” as did the overture—the chilling horror of Adam’s “Giselle.” But unlike any other, Marschner’s “Vampire” had more connections with the music of the textbook opera “Freeshot” by his closest friend Carl Maria von Weber – starting from the introduction and continuing through lines in different phases of two acts, including at least a male quartet glorifying wine in any time of year (a clear reminder of the chorus of hunters from The Gunslinger), or the episode of Ruthven’s disappearance in the underworld. Singspiel conversational dialogues delivered in Russian also made Marschner’s opus similar to Weber, as well as the reliance on everyday genres and urban folklore, which became an important link in the creation of a national German opera that dreamed of emancipating itself from the Italian operatic dictatorship.

Marschner combined the principles of the verse structure of vocal numbers, borrowed from Weber, with the dynamics of symphonic development, which, in turn, captivated Wagner, who years later wrote his “Flying Dutchman” under the impression, among other things, from this opera: for example, in “The Vampire” there is the ballad Emmy, which seems almost the twin sister of Senta’s ballad from The Dutchman. All this romantic beauty, hitherto unheard of, was more than realized by conductor Maxim Valkov. He had soloists at his disposal, whose voices fit into the style of the opera like a glove. Three victims of the Vampire – Malvina, Zhante and Emmy – found the voices of sopranos Evgenia Kravchenko, Svetlana Arzumanova and Sofia Nekrasova, from whom the music demanded charm, girlish sweetness and strong vocal technique. But the men here received vocal tests that were much more serious, starting with the performer of the title role – baritone Alexei Pashiev, whose singing and playing could be seen reincarnating himself in the parts of Mozart’s Don Juan and Mephistopheles from Gounod’s Faust. His strong rival was in every sense the high tenor Yaramir Nizamutdinov in the role of the antagonist Edgar Aubry, who fought to the bitter end for the soul of his bride Malvina in a range of expressive means from Ottavio from Don Juan to Eric from The Flying Dutchman.

In the main action of the opera, Yuri Alexandrov did not disturb the audience with any directorial perpendiculars and shifts in time (God forbid he disturb certain feelings), telling grown boys and girls a terrible bedtime story in the native, well-packaged visual style of the artist Vyacheslav Okunev. With all the breadth of possibilities of associations and allusions from which a bright and independent theatrical statement could grow, at the first approach to the forgotten masterpiece he was forced to hide behind “historical authenticity” with a stilted coloring in black and red tones. At first it seemed that he was about to start playing a parody of the cliches of sublimely romantic speech, endowing the singers’ spoken dialogues with hysterical and diligent emotionality. During Aubrey and Ruthven’s first conversation scene, the audience even laughed after the straight-talking tenor’s slightly idiotic lines like, “You’re so strange. Aren’t you a vampire?” No dismissal followed, and everything that followed passed under a degree of vampire horror. But thanks anyway for trying to restore justice to “Vampire”.