Music in search of utopia

Tchaikovsky's powerful romantic opera, 'Mazeppa', is likely to be better appreciated at its Irish premiere this weekend than it is in the composer's Russian homeland, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY

FEW COMPOSERS possess the opulent flair of Tchaikovsky. His lyrical, romantic music seduces and beguiles without ever fully concealing the emotional torment which inspired it. His opera, Mazeppa, which makes its Irish premiere in an Opera Ireland co-production with Opera de Monte Carlo on Sunday at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre (under Alexander Anissimov and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, complete with National Chamber Choir, Opera Ireland chorus and 20 members of the Organ Hall Chamber Choir from Moldova), most powerfully expresses Tchaikovsky’s grasp of the evil men do, as well as of course, the damage invariably done in the name of love.

“It combines the battle, the struggle, for a private and a political utopia,” says Opera Ireland’s Dieter Kaegi. “Maria wants her private utopia and she also wants to rebel against the patriarchal, rural, traditional society she has been born into and the social role it has imposed upon her. The lyricism, the power and energy of the music, is overwhelming.”

Kaegi sighs contentedly and admits how much he has been enjoying the rehearsals with an impressive cast, which includes leading Russian soloists Valeri Alexeev (bass baritone) in the title role, the Bolshoi’s Elena Manistina (mezzo soprano) and Vsevolod Grivnov (tenor). Kaegi, who is Swiss and has been artistic director of Opera Ireland since 1998, believes in the magic of Russian opera with its nationalist themes.

“It is like no other,” he says. “The Russian composers are interested in the struggle of the ordinary people against the power of the ruler.”

Opera Ireland's 1999 production of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunovbrilliantly captured this communal quality, and Kaegi, a quiet, thoughtful individual not given to wasting words, remarks that the Irish public appear to have a particular affinity with Russian opera.

Mazeppa, first performed in Moscow on February 15th 1884, is a tremendous piece, with long orchestral passages (particularly the battle sequence) and many dramatic choruses. Yet possibly because of its intriguing, and admittedly complicated, historical context, it is rarely performed outside Russia. Based on Polvata, a long narrative poem by Pushkin, itself drawing on real-life events in early 18th-century Ukraine, the opera has a political undercurrent.

Ivan Stepanovich Mazeppa, Ukrainian Cossack leader and thorn in the side of Peter the Great (1682-1725), sought political independence. He sided with Sweden in a bid to defeat Peter and, to this day, while revered in the Ukraine and a national hero, he is reviled in Russia, where the Orthodox Church shuns him.

In the opera, much of the dramatic focus is placed on his determination to have Maria, the much younger daughter of Kochubei, a wealthy Ukrainian noble. The father (performed by Michail Ryssov) is opposed to Mazeppa’s intentions and even reminds the soldier that the girl he is wooing is in fact his goddaughter. Mazeppa doesn’t care. His romantic bid finds strong support from Maria, who is spectacularly infatuated with him, despite the age gap and the devotion of her friend, Andrej (Vsevolod Grivnov), who loves her unrequitedly. Mazeppa is used to getting what he wants, and when he asks Maria to make her choice, she chooses him.

It all goes very badly wrong. When her mother, Ljoebov (sung by Elena Manistina), goes to see Maria, by then living with Mazeppa, and begs her to intervene, the girl finally realises the danger her father is in. She attempts to save him, only to arrive as he is being executed.

"It is a bit like Hamlet," agrees Kaegi. "Maria ends up quite mad, very like Ophelia. When all terrible things have happened, the execution of her father, she just sits there, holding the dead Andrej" – who has been killed by Orlik – "and sings a lullaby. It is such an unusual ending for an opera, very quiet, not the usual big finale, just a gentle fade-out."

It appears to endorse Shakespeare’s vision of history as a tale told by an idiot.

HAVING SEEN THREE previous European productions, Kaegi, who has also directed Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerelat the Tchaikovsky Theatre in Perm, on the edges of Siberia, speaks of the emotional power of Mazeppaas an opera.

“It is very moving,” he says in his understated way, adding that it can move one to tears. Tchaikovsky ensures that his audience shares the grief of the protagonists. No, you don’t admire Mazeppa the man, but you can see that he does regret what he has done and, as Kaegi stresses, we are sympathetic to Maria. It is her tragedy “and yet she doesn’t know what has happened”.

The role of the wilful young dreamer is performed by Irish soprano Sinéad Mulhern, who has recently moved to Brussels from Berlin, where she was a member of the Ensemble Komische Oper.

“Apart from being an extraordinary singer,” says Kaegi, “she is a stunning actress capable of showing different shades of emotion. She has many dimensions as an actress and has caught the essence of Maria.”

It is a demanding role and ranges from lyric moments to big expressive, dramatic passages.

Why is Tchaikovsky, who wrote 11 operas, such a consummate operatic composer? Kaegi considers the question.

“He always chose such very strong stories as librettos and he was able, unlike many composers, to balance the music and the words, and not prioritise one over the other. He also had an assured theatrical sense,” he says.

Aside from drawing on the greatness of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, who stood slightly outside the mainstream of Russian nationalist music was the most western and certainly the most international of 19th-century Russian composers. He certainly influenced Igor Stravinsky, whose father, the bass Fyodor Stravinsky, created the role of Orlik (sung by Gerard O’Connor in this production).

Opera Ireland has previously staged productions of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Oneginand The Queen of Spades,both sung in Russian, as Mazeppawill be with English surtitles. Obviously there are vast differences between Eugene Oneginand Mazeppa. Eugene Onegin, which was first performed in 1879, follows the dramatic emotional development of Tatyana, who suffers Onegin's rejection of her girlhood love, only to reject him years later, as a married and now sophisticated society woman, when he finally sees her worth.

"The timescale is so much shorter in Mazeppa," says Kaegi. "It all takes place in days, weeks and Maria is only a young girl."

The set moves from a comfortable country house, suggesting wealth and ease, to a prison cell, then on to Mazeppa’s office and the execution square, then back to the country house, now devastated, where Maria sits singing her lullaby to a corpse. The opera has always had one major problem, if magnificent music can be considered a difficulty.

“Well, yes, the events took place in the early 18th century and of course, the music” – a late 19th-century romantic score – “is much later. We have got around this by setting it around the 1960s or 1970s,” Kaegi says. The production has the look of a Chekhov play, he adds, albeit one set several decades later.

THE STORY OF Tchaikovsky is a dark one. Born some 600 miles east of Moscow into a tradition which had only begun to evolve and to move away from a provincialism which appeared almost clumsy when compared with the achievements of German, Italian and French composers, Tchaikovsky as a young man could look to the pioneering legacy of Mikhail Glinka. Berlioz then appeared like a thunderbolt from the heavens in 1867 and Russian music could look to composers such as Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. To this list was soon added the name of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. His time under Anton Rubinstein at the St Petersburg Conservatory seemed to guarantee his future.

It is ironic that, for so many, the mention of Tchaikovsky evokes exquisitely ethereal ballet scores and the rousing rhythms of the 1812 Overture. His symphonies are among the finest, culminating in the Pathétique. His range as an orchestral composer also includes marvellous overtures, such as Romeo and Juliet(1869), as well as one of the most famous piano concertos of all time and a violin concerto that has a place in the elite big five of the 19th-century repertoire. His life was dominated by ill-health and emotional turmoil.

Pressurised into a farcical marriage by a determined fan, he tried to keep his homosexuality secret, as homosexual acts were subject to the death penalty in Russia.

He toured Europe and the US as a conductor. His romantic music, which can be grand and as subtle as a whisper, seems to personify all that is Russian and yet is outside the nationalist school.

To this day his death, on November 6th 1893 at the age of 53, remains a mystery. Did he drink contaminated water by accident? Or was it intentional? Did he take poison? Was it a suicide of honour? No one knows. His state funeral, said to be the largest St Petersburg has ever witnessed, drew mourners who loved the music created by a Russian artist of genius and who knew little about the unhappy, despairing man.

He lies in the Alexander Nevsky cemetery, near Glinka, and quite close to Dostoyevsky’s grave.