Sadistic wanderer – Newspaper Kommersant No. 59 (7504) dated 04/06/2023

The Perm Opera staged The Flying Dutchman, an early (1841) opera by Richard Wagner. Director Konstantin Bogomolov and conductor Filipp Chizhevsky tell about how they changed, rewrote and re-toned the masterpiece of the German opera stage Gular Sadykh-zade.

“Attention! A particularly dangerous criminal escaped from the colony! Special signs – a crucifix tattoo on his arm. On the chest, near the heart, there is a tattoo of a woman’s head with a slit throat. Bright green eyes. Leaflets with large, eye-catching letters were hung on the armchairs of the stalls; from leaflets to festively lively spectators – in Perm for the premiere of Bogomolov, as usual, a motley Moscow beau monde arrived – an unshaven man frowned. A sadist and rapist, he was kept in the colony for especially dangerous criminals “White Swan” – a real-life institution near Solikamsk. But he fled, cutting the throat of one of the sentries with particular fanaticism and skillfully poking a knife into the liver of another, who had lost his vigilance and frivolously cleared himself by the gray camp fence.

So, right on the sounds of a spectacular Wagnerian overture with violently uplifting orchestral waves, the performance staged by Konstantin Bogomolov “based on” – more precisely, perpendicular to Wagner’s early opera “The Flying Dutchman”, in which the author is just beginning to gradually grope for his own special path in the German operatic tradition and forge a recognizably Wagnerian style, without completely breaking with the stylistic matrices of romanticism and established operatic forms such as ballads, arias and duets. In the center of the story is a demonic hero, cursed with immortality and longing for redemption and salvation of the soul: to do this, he needs to find a pure and innocent girl, ready to love selflessly and sacrificially, remaining faithful to the grave. Every seven years, the Dutchman is allowed to go ashore to find a true soul, and each time he fails in his search.

It is clear that Bogomolov, running from romantic pathos like the devil out of incense, making the goal of his directorial life to debunk, ridicule and ironically reduce all and every sublime feelings, thoughts and positions, rewrote the Wagnerian plot completely, turning the original inside out. Having made the Dutchman a serial killer and rapist, he removed the fantastic background of the opera: in the play there is not a ghostly crew of the ship – all the choirs sing the same happy villagers. No infernal connotations of the image of the Dutchman – in general, no romantic rubbish, two worlds, otherness, all this is etched from the performance consistently and carefully. On the other hand, a typical product of the German romantic worldview is tightly immersed in the depths of Russian folk life – and this, no doubt, is the know-how of Bogomolov, who is seriously looking for (and, most surprisingly, finding) some kind of conjugation between Wagnerian metaphysics and the deep patterns of the Russian collective unconscious.

The action of the performance takes place in the wilderness of the Ural steppes and mountains, somewhere between Solikamsk and the village of Buranovo (remember the once famous Buranovsky grandmothers and their ensemble, which represented Russia at Eurovision in 2010). Buranovo is an island of untouched natural life: residents dressed in authentic Komi-Permyak costumes with bright embroidery and a predominance of red and white colors (costume designer – Larisa Lomakina, she is also a stage designer), trade in furs, gathering and rendering bear fat. Cozy wooden huts with slanting bright windows hung above the stage. Villagers with bright mugs of blush all over their cheeks – just like the happy Berendeys from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden. And their life flows calmly and measuredly – until an alien with green eyes bursts into them like a lawless comet.

The story turned out to be, nothing to say, fascinating: the Dutchman flees from the colony, wanders through the snowy taiga, stumbles upon the victims of a plane crash – the artists of the Moscow operetta were returning from a tour, but there was turbulence, and the pilot had a heart attack, so everyone died. “Their death was easy, like their genre, because they were all drunk as an insole,” reads the inscription on the scoreboard. The hero hastily collects in a shabby suitcase tsatskas scattered here and there, women’s handbags, fluffy boas, removes red pumps from the corpses, puts on an elegant tailcoat himself, and over it – a black velvet coat with scarlet satin lining. And he instantly turns into the mysterious and elegant “Mr. X” from Kalman’s operetta of the same name: wearing a black half-mask, he appears before Donald, Senta’s father, and sculpts for him a story that he is an “actor of small and large drama theaters” with an apartment on Stary Arbat, and therefore – an enviable groom for his daughter.

Bogomolov constantly appeals to our historical memory and the collective unconscious, resorting to powerful stimulants: from signs of the 90s to the fairy tale “The Scarlet Flower” – Donald brings a flower to his daughter and solemnly sticks it in a vase; immediately there is an acquaintance with the Dutchman (the next caption, meanwhile, says: “The father brought his daughter a scarlet flower and a bloody monster”). The texts and frames from the 1941 cult film “The Pig and the Shepherd” are used, where Marina Ladynina sings the famous “Song about Moscow” – “It’s good in the Moscow expanse …”, and the image of Mister X performed by Georg Ots from the 1958 film – “ yes, I’m a jester, I’m a buffoon, so what … “. They didn’t forget about Murnau’s 1922 silent expressionist film “Nosferatu”, in which a toothy and eared monster sneaks up to the bed of an innocent girl, stretching out its hook-arms (video artist – Alan Mandelstam, in the past – head of the video department of the Gogol Center).

Remarks are constantly reminded of the time of the action: “It was 1993.” Like the recognizable paraphernalia of the same time – the famous Amaretto liqueur (the guest treats the innocent Senta to it during the acquaintance), the Zippo lighter is the first sign of the promised “Western life” … Perhaps, perhaps, only a bottle of Royal alcohol was missing.

The theater chose the first edition of the opera for staging: three scenes (and not acts) run, as usual, without a break, but the action takes place in Scotland, and not in Norway (as in subsequent editions). That is why the names of the characters are changed: not Daland, but Donald, not Eric, but Georg. The overture in the first version does not have a pronounced concert conclusion, but goes directly into the first scene. In the finale, however, there are no last 20 measures, on which the ghost ship dissolves in the haze of the sky and the sea to the accompaniment of harp overflows. The first edition ends harshly and definitely with Senta’s death. True, in Bogomolov’s performance she does not throw herself off a cliff, but cuts her throat herself on a date with the Dutchman in the colony. After all, she did not keep the oath of allegiance given to him, and therefore punishes herself.

As for the musical part, things were more than successful here. Philip Chizhevsky carried out an incredibly thorough and thoughtful work on the score, highlighting and extremely clearly articulating its meanings. Having staged the world-famous Carmen two years ago in Perm together with Bogomolov, he has now drawn on himself a fair share of success, holding both premiere shows very worthily. Particularly enthusiastic, right up to feverishness, was the “Dutchman” on the second day: graphic, aristocratic clarity of phrasing, accentuated aromatism of intonation. The sonorous and clear grace notes, with which the score of The Dutchman is literally dotted, delighted the ear and heart, because it was they who clearly marked the genre of the scenes – for example, the choir of girls with spinning wheels, in which the musical figure of rotation turned into a fanning with birch brooms in a bathhouse. Donald’s comic backing dancers (Timofey Pavlenko sang both evenings) during the first meeting with the Dutchman are also accompanied by ironic grace notes – it is the unique mixture of demonic, genre and comic that makes this opera completely charming from a purely musical side.

The theater put up two full-fledged casts, of which I unconditionally prefer the second. On the first day, Anzhelika Minasova (Senta) paired with Enkhbat Tuvshinzhargal (Dutchman) sounded quite good on the whole, quite cultured, but both seemed constrained and diligent in a provincial way. It was felt that they were still strangers in Wagner’s territory. But the second couple – invited Moscow soloists Ekaterina Morozova and Igor Podoplelov – impressed with their deep familiarity with the part and the image. Morozova is a frenzied, furious, obsessed with her rightness, uncompromising vocal Senta, with a strong, hardy soprano. Slender, fair-haired, charismatic Podoplelov with insinuatingly soft manners, aristocratic habits and velvety, deep notes of the lower register looked very organic on the stage. George on the first day was sung by Muscovite Ivan Gyngazov, on the second day by Boris Rudak, the premier of the Perm troupe. And, as always, Rudak won the unspoken competition: lively, agile, sincere, he truly lived the role, which compares favorably with the phlegmatic Ivan Gyngazov, dragging the guitar behind him like an annoying load.

A drop of tar in a barrel of honey turned out to be cheap pop music that burst out in the finale: not allowing the public to come to their senses, take a breath, savor the last chords, Bogomolov back-to-back, on a blue eye, cut Alena Apina’s song “The Flying Dutchman”, to the primitive rhythms of which all the bows passed. As Katerina Izmailova sang in the opera of the same name, “I can’t bear this.” The whole impression of the opera, the performance and the classy performance was not just smeared, leveled or spoiled – it seemed that it was stained with something dirty, vulgar, not at all going to the point. “For what?” I wanted to shout into the hall. To completely evaporate the pathos of music, in which pathos is the essence, the basis of everything? There was no answer to the silent question.