The Triumph of Time and Disappointment by Elizaveta Moroz was shown at the Diaghilev Festival

The Diaghilev Festival presented a joint production with the Nizhny Novgorod Opera and Ballet Theater – Handel’s oratorio “The Triumph of Time and Disappointment” in a stage version directed by Elizaveta Moroz. It was not so much the theatrical side that turned out to be truly triumphant, but the work of the conductor and musical director of the performance Dmitry Sinkovsky, his orchestra La Voce Strumentale and the ensemble of baroque singers, believes Gular Sadykh-zade.

The first Roman oratorio by the young Handel, who arrived in Rome, apparently at the very end of December 1706 and immediately began to eagerly absorb the vibes of a Catholic culture that was not yet very close to him, bears all the signs of a real Italian opera. It has a lot of dizzyingly virtuoso da capo arias, some strikingly beautiful duets, and no choir at all. Once in a musical and linguistic environment alien to him, Handel tries to appropriate it and make a career in Rome, following the advice of older Italian friends and patrons, including, in particular, three influential cardinals. One of them, Benedetto Pamphili, became the author of the libretto, in which the pious motif of the confrontation between earthly and heavenly, bodily and spiritual, worldly pleasures and the desire for higher joys is displayed in poetic form.

In those years, any theatrical performances in papal Rome were strictly prohibited; but oratorios on instructive subjects were allowed. In Handel’s “Triumph” there are not living full-blooded characters, but allegorical characters – Beauty, Pleasure, Time and Disappointment (in fact, the word Disinganno is difficult to accurately translate, but offers a range of meanings, the closest thing is sobriety of the mind, the rejection of illusions). However, Handel, who has already acquired some operatic experience in Hamburg, gives them the liveliness and immediacy of human reactions: the struggle for Beauty, exhortations of Pleasure to indulge in pleasures and calls of Disappointment to turn to Truth and spiritual life – the core along which the plot develops.

The composer wrote three parts for castrati, and only Time (Tempo), a stern old man, sings in tenor. In the play by Elizaveta Moroz, the roles of Beauty (Bellezza) and Pleasure (Piacere) are entrusted to two sopranos – respectively Dilyara Idrisova and Yana Dyakova; and it must be admitted that both coped with insanely complex graces more than satisfactorily. I was a little dizzy when Dilyara Idrisova sang her virtuoso aria in perfect coordination with the solo violin in the hands of Dmitry Sinkovsky, who, in the spirit of the old practice, was the first accompanist and at the same time the conductor leading the performance. The famous aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” (“Let me cry out grief with tears”), known to everyone from the opera “Rinaldo”, in fact, first appeared in a Roman oratorio and put into the mouth of Pleasure, only with completely different words, but Yana Dyakova she sang it so soulfully and meaningfully that tears came to her eyes.

The most deafening applause, however, went to countertenor Andrey Nemzer (Disappointment), and well deserved. His voice of a soft, not at all forced timbre sounded flighty and flexible; the intonation is the most sincere and touching, the phrases are charmingly rounded, the cadences are comforting, the mastery of style is amazing. Sergey Godin was also good – Time: his unexpectedly thick, dark baritone coloring tenor ideally merged with Nemzer’s voice.

They finally conquered both, performing a duet from the second act closer to the finale. Here Handel breaks out into the operational space of the imitation polyphony so dear to his heart and writes a canon of harmony, in which Time and Disappointment welcome Beauty’s decision to withdraw from the world. Switching to the ancient polyphonic language associated for Handel’s contemporaries with spiritual, church music, the duet seems to soar above the homophonic, typically operatic style of the oratorio, rising to the level of heavenly joys.

The newly created orchestra of the Nizhny Novgorod Opera La Voce Strumentale (which grew out of the Sinkovsky Ensemble of the same name) sounded stylistically impeccable: dry, clear, clearly articulating, sometimes falling into an uncontrollable drive itself, and infecting the audience with excitement – this is exactly the case when a well-performed Baroque music directly affects the senses, bypassing the brain.

The very production of Elizabeth Moroz, unfortunately, never rose to this contagiousness – there was too much flickering of mimams, the director’s not too deep thoughts were articulated too deliberately and pretentiously. For example, this: people are just things, objects like a table and a chair, if they are not inspired by the desire for higher knowledge, if suffering and repentance do not become the meaning of their life. At the forefront, couples change obsessively, many times: one becomes a “chair”, the other substitutes his back so that a round tabletop is hoisted on it. And on the table a card game is played: Pleasure plays against Time and Disappointment.

The performance begins with fragments of indistinct phrases uttered by young voices: a young man and a girl are engaged in a dialogue. She tells something about her birth, that she is not sure that the baby was not mixed up. The young man assures that she was alone in the ward, so they could not replace the child; finally, the phrase “Beauty is…” is interrupted in mid-sentence by the orchestra, playing an overture.

The artist Sergei Illarionov built on the stage a kind of old theater with an empty parterre and a gallery enveloping it. Multi-colored and assorted columns of different orders support the vaults of the gallery; above it hangs an oval ceiling with broken glass here and there; there are many folds, draperies, cracks and dull gold in the decor, the stage is half-hidden behind heavy folds of a velvet curtain. Visual counterpoint to what is happening is the video on the upper tier – however, attention from it was constantly distracted by what was happening below.

One of the columns is made up of human skeletons: this is how the Vanitas motif is introduced into the stage design – the vanity, vanity of life, supported by a pile of whitening skulls in the corner. A procession of freaks in fantasy costumes slowly brings in and places a white coffin in the center: Beauty lies in it, apparently not the first time she died. Her attributes are a glittering golden dress and a gray wig.

The coffin is one of the semantic and visual dominants of the performance; in the finale, Beauty drags him with an effort, preparing her deathbed. The action of the performance fits between these two points: the extraction of Beauty from the coffin and the placement in it, but this time already voluntarily. In this interval, a lot of things happen – the seduction of Beauty by Pleasure, the use of Beauty as a street girl, the delivery of Beauty for a short-term “rent” to everyone, in a flimsy booth behind curtains, Beauty’s flirting with a young man, long discussions of Disappointment about the frailty of human life, accompanied by ironing handkerchiefs , menacing warnings of Time, leaning out of the television monitor, that Beauty is doomed and its charms will fade with time. But it turns out that this is just a dispute between the parties, a card game in which the stake is Beauty.

Pleasure fails, while Disappointment and Time, phlegmatically throwing cards on an impromptu table, indifferently observe the crushed Beauty. Yielding to unscrupulous propaganda, she dies, disappointed in herself, having lost her taste for life. Having lost her hair, tore off the garland and jewelry from her golden dress, and in the end, she took off the dress itself and even her own skin, naked to the muscles and tendons, Beauty sings a farewell aria: “You, the chosen messenger of heaven, will no longer see in my soul insidious desires or vain ardor.” And then voluntarily fits into the coffin. The lid slams shut with a thud, and the coffin rides along the guide rails straight into the mouth of the crematorium furnace. And Time and Disappointment, having reached the goal – to destroy Beauty, proving to it the futility and meaninglessness of its existence, do not show any sympathy, or even curiosity. They just keep playing.

It is impossible not to notice the femoptics of the director herself; her sympathies are undoubtedly on the side of Beauty, and not Time and Disappointment, presented in the performance in male roles. It turns out that the men drove Beauty to suicide, despite the fact that Beauty was not even a prize, but a bet in the game. Pleasure, meanwhile, is consoled by the fact that it finds a replacement for it: having snatched a young man from the stalls, it imperiously leads away a new victim. In this quartet, only Beauty is the loser.