Die nicer
„Siberia“ von Umberto Giordano
Source: dpa
The Bregenz Festival is the best-attended musical theater event in the world. This summer, an opera classic of Italian Russophilia will be celebrated on Lake Constance. In “Siberia” a courtesan flees from St. Petersburg to the tundra – now she also ends up in the gulag.
Ein melodrama. Pure tears. With an effective star appearance for a soprano. This is how Umberto Giordano’s Russophile “Siberia” presented itself at its premiere in 1903. At that time it had to replace Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” at the Milan Scala, which was not finished. So now in Bregenz. Giordano’s best-known opera, the revolutionary spectacle “Andrea Chenier”, was performed there in the 2011/12 season.
While this year “Madame Butterfly” is being shown outside on the Bregenz lake stage, “Siberia” will be shown indoors as a rarity opera at the festival. The opera by an Italian composer set in Russia with a creative team and cast that is partly Russian.
The calculation seems to work out at Austria’s second largest classical music festival after Salzburg and the most popular music theater event in the world. By July 7th, 90 percent of the 189,000 tickets for the 26 “Butterfly” performances had already been sold. And the “Siberia” premiere co-produced with the Bonn Opera was apparently full. And the audience loves it.
With the 105-minute three-act play, based on an original libretto by Luigi Illica, Giordano wanted to continue the success of his “Fedora”, which also revolved around the then exotic Russians. But the sentimental “Siberia” story about a luxury courtesan, who follows her officer lover to Siberia from among her St. Petersburg gallants because he became a murderer for her, lacks the little bit of melodic hit substance between varied sound aesthetics with snowstorms, daffodils and balalaikas, that even such a tear must have.
Lots of room for love
After all, in the poetic-realistic, at the same time clearly stylized Bregenz production by Vasily Barkhatov, there is plenty of room for the pulsating feminine outbursts and Stephana’s beautiful death in the snow after a fruitless escape, for the tormented love affair of her gallant Vassili (somewhat pale with the voice in her throat: Alexander Mikhailok) and the bittersweet baritone rancor of the edgy Scott Hendricks as Gleby’s discarded lover and pimp.
Admittedly, Barkathov has glued the loose ends of the little work together, which was entirely focused on the smooth musical effect, in a more coherent way and grafted another level on to the briskly told colportage. Here not only a woman for sale finds her true love in the tundra wasteland and dies in the end in line with her profession. A second woman, her daughter who was born in the Gulag (age-worthy: Clarry Bartha), searches for the Slavic origins of her family from Rome using black-and-white video and also acting on stage among the historical protagonists. At the end she sinks into the snow next to her dying mother with her brother’s urn. sob!
Feeling is in the smallest hut: “Siberia” at the Bregenz Festival
Source: dpa
But this is how virtuoso parallel, repeatedly merging image compositions succeed in Christian Schmidt’s stage, which is quite unusual for him and consists of a ruptured concrete cube, behind which the steppe spreads out in a photo-realistic way. One sees various interiors, sometimes a bourgeois salon, then an archive, a prisoner’s dining room and a prefab playground, where even the wallpaper gently melts and disappears. This turns into a piece about remembering as a fragmentary process. Which also ennobles the often torn Giordano score, which only concentrates on the sentimental moment, with its well-versed folkloric sprinklings.
“Siberia” gains in intensity thanks to Valentin Uryupin’s rousingly coherent conducting of the Wiener Symphoniker. It is solidly outshined by the triumphant, ready-to-use soprano of Ambur Braid’s Stephana, who plays more subtly. In 2022, Bregenz once again confidently took the art curve. In 2024 Elisabeth Sobotka, who has governed here solidly but not really innovatively for nine years, will say goodbye to Berlin. Before that, however, “Rigoletto” director Philipp Stölzl will return to Lake Constance for the new “Freischütz”.