Opera
Khovanshchina; Semyon Kotko (Royal Opera House)
Power play
Michael Tanner
Auden once suggested to Stravinsky a category of anti-opera, of which PeIleas, From the House of the Dead and Boris would be defining members. Surely he would have done still better to choose Kho- vanshchina, which is defiantly lacking in every traditional ingredient of the genre, at any rate until Act IV, scene one, when Musorgsky produces a dance for Persian slaves. It is the only trite part of the opera, and disconcertingly one of only two scenes that Musorgsky orchestrated. The rest of the work is ruggedly argumentative, with Suffering Mother Russia as the pervasive theme. The chief characters, almost all unsympathetic, seem implausible for politi- cians only in the degree of their concern not only for personal aggrandisement but also for their country. The comprehensive- ness of their rancour, their preparedness to stab anyone in the back, literally, and the confused way in which they present their positions all make for slow but compulsive watching and listening. So revolutionary is Musorgsky's work here — in a different league from Boris, though that remains by far the more moving work — that it is hard to think of any opera since which has risked so much in the way of unalluring- ness. Somehow, despite the clumsiness of the dramaturgy, the composer-librettist manages to connect the public and private so that we rarely bog down in the minutiae of the characters' power play. Their inca- pacity to maintain a perspective which Musorgsky himself achieves and enables us to share is part of the work's fascination.
Because it is so radical a conception, the extremely conservative nature of the ICirov's production jars as it doesn't in Mazeppa, which is itself so traditional an opera. Kho- vanshchina invites bold direction, whereas what we get is more of the stand-and-deliv- er style of acting which seems to be the only one that Russians can conceive. The crowd, painted in such sharply realistic colours in its stupidity and credulousness, Shouldn't be made or allowed to behave with such operatic conventionality, with the members of the splendid chorus turning to one another and shaking their heads as if they are astonished to be told that Russia has fallen on hard times. Nor should the individual actors get away with merely singing over the footlights. Even so, the passion with which they sing, the projection of their personalities, is so powerful that critique soon retreats and the satisfaction, so uncommon nowadays, of seeing a great team working to great ends is enormous. I saw the second cast, but I doubt whether, all told, it makes much difference, much as I would have loved to hear Larissa Diadko- va's Marfa (but that is only in the third cast). The painfully shrill singer of Andrei's would-be seducee Emma, common to all three casts, is the only blot. Despite the agonising number of long intervals, this is an evening of the kind that leaves no doubt about the force and depth of art.
In some ways the production of Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko, which dates from only a year ago, is more polished, and nods in the direction of modern styles, but not vigorously. The set is of a wasteland of railway tracks and broken machinery, with elements of Nature — water, a tree, some flowers — making transient appearances. The lighting is garishly effective. The prob- lem is to find a style for this highly ques- tionable work, which is so coarsely propa- gandist much of the time, though it also contains a fair proportion of life-size char- acters, that an integrated mode of acting is probably not possible. It is directed by the same man, Yuri Alexandrov, who restaged Mazeppa and Khovanshchina, and some of the time you can see that; but elsewhere he goes in for highly stylised direction and, as the fervently patriotic ending approaches, he begins, one suspects, to send the whole thing up. At any rate, the chorus starts behaving strangely, its members adopting parodistically exaggerated postures as they scan the horizon for the enemy; he seems to be trying to make the work into a satire on militarism instead of an attack on one particular manifestation of it. It's perfectly clear that that couldn't have been the intention of the librettist or composer, who were living in a reign of terror — Meyer- hold, who was to have directed the first production, was arrested shortly before the piano score was finished, so any suggestion of criticism of the regime, however cryptic, would have needed heroic qualities.
In the circumstances, it isn't surprising that the score is only intermittently on a high level. Things are best when there is no drama, only cantata-like reactions to it, such as the closing minutes of Act III, which are also the most conventional in the opera. The second heroine has gone mad and joins the first, and the women's chorus, in a huge and loud lament which sweeps the act to the kind of end that has the audi- ence yelling before the curtain descends. It is thrilling rather than moving, but it is a relief after so much made-to-measure musical prose. Once more the singing of all the soloists (again the second cast) was too good for singling any one out not to be invidious, and somehow Gergiev seems to have persuaded himself that he believes in the music's stature.
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