Stravinsky’s melodrama Persephone staged by Anna Guseva premiered at the Diaghilev Festival

The key event of this year’s Perm Diaghilev Festival is the double premiere of Stravinsky’s melodrama Persephone and his own Symphony of Psalms, staged by director Anna Guseva under the musical direction of Teodor Currentzis. The culmination of the festival plot followed with interest Gular Sadykh-zade.

Magic, myth, ritual, mystery are the most suitable definitions for the megalomaniac project of Teodor Currentzis and his comrades, which unfolded on the vast stage of the former workshop of the Shpagin factory, now bearing the proud name “House of Music”. Even before the first bars of Stravinsky sounded, under barely audible rustles, murmurs, sighs and mysterious whispers, an act was performed in front of the stunned audience, directly referring to the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. The solemn ceremony of initiation – initiation into the priests of the goddess of fertility Demeter – went slowly, thoroughly; monotonous mumbling, incantatory formulas, fragments of quasi-oriental melodies, ringing and noises spread, grew, until a huge orchestral wave swept over the stage and hall.

The psychedelic music of the Prologue for the performance was written by Currentzis himself, reasonably believing that the preamble to Stravinsky’s melodrama would clarify the mythological story of the abduction of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, by the king of the underworld Pluto – “the king of winter”, as he is called in Andre Gide’s libretto. It was something like an epigraph, revealing the esoteric meaning of what was happening.

The stars swam in the darkness, intertwining in round dances and forming constellations; the dim moon hung over the sky. Darkness – ancient Nyukta – enveloped the world; only magic crystals shone dimly in the center of the stage: either pomegranate seeds, or dying coals. When the darkness dissipated, it turned out that the luminous grains were the cores of scarlet flowers, similar to poppies.

The poppy shoots at the end of the Prologue are frantically, in a hurry, being weeded out with their bare hands by mimams artists and dancers; they take away armfuls of flowers with them, and the world immediately turns out to be colorless, colorless. And then suddenly enters the sonorous tenor Eumolpus – the narrator and priest of Demeter (Egor Semenkov); the main part of the performance begins – “melodrama” with music by Stravinsky.

The new work of Anna Guseva and her production team – artist Yulia Orlova, choreographer Anastasia Peshkova, lighting designer Ivan Vinogradov and costume designer Gosha Rubchinsky – is something between a grandiose multi-figure performance, a theatrical performance and a magical ritual. Conscious immersion in the archaic, in ancient sounds and rhythms. Stylistically and aesthetically, Persephone continues last year’s project of the festival – a production of Carl Orff’s oratorio “De temporum fine comoedia”, nominated for the Golden Mask in five nominations, but in the end received only a special jury prize. Both performances add up to a dilogy with more content: they have a common message – a frenzied spell of the world, knocked out of the grooves, having lost its foothold and rushing in its madness to death.

The stage composition of the current two-part performance involved the choir and the newly created dance troupe MusicAeterna Dance, an impressive mimamsa group and the wonderful children’s choir “Spring”, which showed miracles of understanding, coordination and stage culture: the children sang cleanly, clearly and meaningfully. The MusicAeterna orchestra, which barely fit in the makeshift orchestra pit (in fact, on the floor of the workshop, at the foot of the stage), sounded fantastically bright, harmonious, almost perfect. But even during the performance of the Symphony of Psalms, in the score of which there are no violas, violins and clarinets, the orchestra seemed monstrously huge.

There are very few characters in Persephone itself. The narration is conducted on behalf of Eumolpus, describing the events taking place on the stage and their background, constantly remembering Homer. From time to time, Eumolpus reincarnates into Persephone’s beloved Triptolemus/Demophon, a plowman of royal blood, who gave people the skills of agriculture and was brought up by Demeter from infancy as the future earthly spouse of her daughter. Then in Pluto – in the middle part of the melodrama, “Persephone in Hades”, the tenor is instructed to tell Persephone the important words of the god of the underworld: “You came to rule, not to sympathize.” The part of Eumolpus was excellently sung and played by Yegor Semenkov, and the mime-dancing part of Pluto was performed by Alexander Chelidze, artist of MusicAeterna Dance.

But the main sensation and decoration of the performance was the phenomenally artistic, slender, flexible to the point of gutta-percha Aisylu Mirhafizkhan (Persephone), also an artist of MusicAeterna Dance, originally from Kazan. For the first time, her heroine emerges from the dusk somewhere far away, on a hill, among gravestones. She, just born, is dressed in a scarlet dress, like poppies, because she is the goddess of spring. She is nursed and cherished by the priestesses of Demeter, the choir of nymphs calls her to dance with them in the meadow. But, looking into the core of the flower, Persephone sees the world of Hades and the suffering of the souls there. And, according to Gide’s libretto, she finds herself in the realm of the dead not by force, kidnapped by Pluto, but by her own will descends there in a fit of pity for the unfortunate. The moment of descent into Hades is effectively resolved, in the spirit of the baroque theatre: Aisylu hovers over the stage on complex suspensions, bending like a blade of grass, and gradually sinking into a bleak world where everything is black and black. The motif of descending into the grave, into the bowels of the earth, is emphasized again in the finale, when Persephone stands above the earthen hill and gradually, slowly sinks into it. The part of Persephone was written for a reader, and Mirkhafizkhan did an excellent job with the French pronunciation; her voice sounded expressive, free and booming, measured speech was emphasized by sculptural gestures.

After the intermission, the Symphony of Psalms began, a three-part symphonic-choral score written in Latin texts of Psalms 38, 39 and 150. Visually and stylistically, the second part of the performance was in no way connected with the first, but there were clear semantic parallels. The first part is an appeal to the Lord, prayers for forgiveness, the second is hope, the third is praise to the Almighty: the same movement from darkness to light, from despair to hope, as in Persephone.

Currentzis did not neglect Stravinsky’s wishes and involved a children’s choir in the performance (conductors often replace the boys’ choir with a women’s choir). Dressed in light tunics, the choristers sat at two long, angled tables, holding lamps in their hands: the warm light of artificial candles illuminated their children’s faces, and the mise-en-scène itself was reminiscent of the Last Supper. In the center, on the big screen, faces changed every minute: old and young, male and female. The girlish features blurred, turning into masculine, mimic grimaces of grief, sadness, joy, hope created an emotional counterpoint to the sounding music – and yet the flickering of faces rather distracted, interfered with listening to the music of the Symphony of Psalms, which sounds divine under the hands of Currentzis.

The myth of the eternal return, reflected in different cultures – in particular, in the myth of the rebirth of Osiris, in the spring holiday of Novruz, in the Eleusinian mysteries associated with the agricultural calendar cycle – continued in the Christian tradition, reflected in the rituals of Easter. Proto-Christian motifs in Gide’s libretto are obvious: “Persephone” ends with very important words, referring to the gospel text and put into the mouth of Eumolpus: “In order for spring to be reborn, a grain is needed that is ready to die in the ground and be the golden harvest of the future.”

The very fabric of the performance was thoroughly permeated with ritualism: slow gestures, frozen plastic pictures composed of mimams and choirs, mesmerizing ostinato rhythms. The fusion of theater and ritual, leading to the creation of a synthetic art form, Gesamtkunstwerk on a new round of evolution is the artist’s eternal desire to transform society and man, to set new algorithms for history. Both Wagner and Scriabin, visionaries who knew no compromises, who believed in the power of Art as a new deity, rushed about with this ambitious idea. Visionary Currentzis, perhaps, continues this series; but will he succeed in conjuring the world, returning it back to loose grooves? As they say, wait and see.