On 200th Birthday, Wagner Premiere Wins over Moscow
Two centuries after the birth of Richard Wagner, audiences in Russia are beginning to overcome decades of suspicion shadowed by the horror of World War II and embrace the music of the great German composer.
The Novaya Opera (New Opera) in the Russian capital scored a major triumph with a new production of Wagner's blazingly intense opera of doomed love "Tristan and Isolde" that was astonishingly the Moscow premiere of one of the cornerstones of Western music.
The gaping absence of the opera first heard in 1865 is explained by both the huge technical demands of a piece that lasts almost five hours and the suspicion with which the German titan was held after the Soviet victory over Nazism in World War II.
"This has long been a dream of mine to present 'Tristan' in Moscow," the Novaya Opera's British chief conductor Jan Latham-Koenig said. "Neither before, or after, did Wagner reach such levels of intensity in his writing."
So far all three stagings of "Tristan" in Russian history have been in Saint Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theater.
The Russian premiere took place in 1899 and this was followed in 1909 with a staging by the legendary director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the innovative theater genius who was murdered in the Stalin purges.
The opera was never performed in the Soviet period but in 2005 the Mariinsky's director Valery Gergiev -- one of the few Russian musicians to champion the music of Wagner -- conducted a new production that is now rarely performed.
While Gergiev this summer will perform Wagner's "Ring" tetralogy in Saint Petersburg, the best known opera in Moscow, the Bolshoi, currently does not have a Wagner opera in its repertoire.
For Latham-Koenig, the reasons for Russia's treatment of Wagner go back to the promotion by the Nazis of a composer adored by Adolf Hitler and lauded by the Third Reich as the standard-bearer of a new German music.
"There were the political considerations after the Second World War. Wagner was not flavor of the month after 1945," he said.
Latham-Koenig said that this is the fifth occasion he has conducted Tristan and such was the importance of the Moscow premiere that "I would not be taking the responsibility if it was the first one."
-- 'A historic and artistic event' --
The premiere of Tristan, an idea that was put forward by Latham-Koenig himself, was an act of almost crazy ambition by the Novaya Opera, usually seen as Moscow's number three opera after the Bolshoi and Stanislavsky Musical Theater.
"What Jan proposed is a challenge but a very important one. We are not scared of doing this," said the Novaya Opera's general director Dmitry Sibirtsev.
The initial run of two performances last month, that also marked 200 years since Wagner's birth in 1813, gathered glowing reviews for what the Kommersant daily's music critic Yulia Bederova described as a "heroic step".
For Vedomosti daily's critic Pyotr Pospelov the production directed by German Nicola Raab "was not just a historic event but an artistic event" that showed the intent of the Novaya Opera to be a serious player in Russian opera.
The Novaya Opera was founded by the former Moscow city mayor Yuri Luzhkov to be an opera for the people -- cheaper and more accessible than the Bolshoi with an emphasis on visually powerful productions.
Its founding director Yevgeny Kolobov was universally admired but the house then floundered somewhat after his death in 2003, rediscovering its momentum under the imaginative leadership of Latham-Koenig.
For the first two Moscow performances, the Novaya Opera brought in two foreign Wagner specialists, Claudia Iten of Switzerland to sing Isolde and Michael Baba of Germany as Tristan.
While the pair won huge ovations the Novaya Opera now faces a huge challenge as future performances will use its own Russian singers.
The Novaya Opera, like most Russian opera houses, uses a repertory system that dates back to the 19th century where operas are performed sporadically over a period of several years rather than in one long single run.
"This was a surprise for me as Wagner is not in my repertoire," said Novaya Opera's Mikhail Gubsky, who will sing Tristan in the next performances later this year. "It is a great step in the development of a singer."
The absence of Wagner from the Russian repertoire means that singers have little experience in dealing with the German language and using the vocal weight needed to be heard above the volume of Wagner's huge orchestra.
Russia has almost no Wagner singers of international renown -- Yevgeny Nikitin of the Mariinsky Theater being one high-profile exception.
"It is going to be very important how the Moscow singers perform in the next performances. But it is now clear that they already have something to base themselves on," said Kommersant.
After the success of "Tristan", Wagner lovers in Russia can also look forward to another major Moscow premiere in the autumn when the Stanislavsky Musical Theater takes on "Tannhauser".
Source: Agence France Presse
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