Mhe knows all about satire. With animals too. He also loves to tell stories: the Russian composer Alexander Raskatov, who now lives in France. He has just celebrated his 70th birthday and brought a gift himself to the Opera Forward Festival of the National Opera in Amsterdam: his new opera Animal Farm, based on George Orwell’s fable, written before the Ukraine war.
Raskatov’s first satirical opera, “A Dog’s Heart” based on Mikhail Bulgakov, premiered here in 2010. Orwell’s material about the failure of the Soviet revolution could not be more topical at the moment. The program book reprints the foreword to the 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, in which the former Trotskyist sees the destruction of the Soviet myth as a prerequisite for the revival of the socialist movement. Raskatov, who was born on the day of Stalin’s funeral on March 9, 1953, reads Orwell as a later-born and in the libretto quotes Trotsky, Stalin and his henchman Lavrenty Beria. He even sees an analogy in him with the character of Squealer (James Kryshak), for whom he decrees one of the play’s most brutal scenes.
Without prelude, with the first orchestral beat you are in the middle of the piece. Satire does not tolerate length. So it gets down to business in the extended Dutch Chamber Orchestra with seven percussionists, electric guitar and saxophone, hot or sugar-sweet for the empty promises of Blacky (Elena Vassilieva), cooked up and raw, whipped up to the point of mass hysteria in the excellent choir of the Amsterdam Opera. The construction of the windmill is greeted with socialist realism, and its destruction is said goodbye with a funeral march. Deep trombones announce the entry of the printing press for “Pravda” until the decreed “good thinking” is musically erased.
In the second part it becomes more “Russian”, with folk song-like confessions of crimes never committed, jubilant children’s choirs and hypocritical lamentations. Raskatov also has his own style of brevity for the vocal parts, which is derived from the respective vocal range. Holly Flack wins a new height record in whinnying as Mollie, the young vain mare who is constantly grooming her ponytail. Old Major, the wise pig elder, has a noble grunting bass with Gennady Bezzubenkov, while the imperial Misha Kiria gives his baritone ruler’s voice to the corrupt pig Napoleon.
Director Damiano Michieletto had the idea for this production years ago, and now he did the right thing: no Russian bashing. He understands Orwell’s fable literally and thus elevates it to the timeless and paradigmatic: the rule of the pigs, which gradually shed their animal masks and become more and more like humans, becomes a historical continuum, regardless of the political persuasion (Klaus Bruns costumes). It is power itself – its conquest, its preservation, its rituals, its paranoia – that Michieletto addresses. The setting for the revolt of the animals is the slaughterhouse, with cages, mincers, butchers in bloody aprons (stage design: Paolo Fantin). What is happening in it is a process of slowing down, a freezing in lying about the doctrine that is issued in slow motion at the end: Napoleon is always right.