World premiere of “Meek” by Moscow composer Alexei Kurbatov and Russian premiere of Vladimir Kobekin’s opera “NFB” based on the novel “The Idiot” were held on the Small Stage of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater. Both scores, written in a chamber format, were directed by director Lyudmila Naletova. Musical director of the production is Arif Dadashev. The play’s designer is Marina Ivashkova (scenography and costumes).
There is a fairly extensive corpus of opera scores written after Dostoevsky, including “A Gentle Spirit” (1977), created after “The Gentle” by the English composer John Tavener and staged six years ago on the same Small Stage of the Musteater. About ten operas were created based on the novel “The Idiot”. Director Lyudmila Naletova chose two plots for her homage to the 200th anniversary of the writer, in the center of which are female images in their essential Dostoyevsky hypostases: the nameless Meek, thrown out of the window with the icon of the Mother of God in her hands, and the frantic beauty torn apart by disastrous contradictions by the disastrous contradictions of the beauty Nastrezasya Filippovna … In the play, both heroines find themselves inside the same abyss, one terrible, “spoiled” world, with its unhealthy passions and feverish grotesque life, with its intolerance of all relationships, the only way out of which is death – in fact, a victim. Here is a female sacrifice.
“Meek.” Photo: Sergey Rodionov
The space of the performance is gray, with concrete-colored moving walls, a sparse entourage: an armchair, a table, a desk. In “N.F.B.” – a bed with the deceased Natalya Filippovna wrapped in a shroud, a station bench. Symbolic images – the icon of the Mother of God and the image of the “dead” Christ on the bed from the canvas of Holbein the Younger, which shook Dostoevsky at one time. There is also a terrible black ball, which, like Sisyphus, is rolled around the stage by the heroes. The play does not contain Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, there is no cityscape, but there is its “fantastic and deliberate” environment, there are close-ups of the heroes, their feverish, sick consciousness, torn apart by a bleak, vulgar life. The director works with the artists “psychologically” in detail, revealing the subtle nuances of Dostoevsky’s characters, in which – the heroes’ torment from the tormenting contradictions of pride, denial and the desire to love, from an intuitive understanding of the “low” essence of life, personal sin and the inability to change something in themselves – out of pride and self-deprecation, from terrible melancholy, alienation, or, conversely, stupefying passion.
“N.F.B.” Photo: Sergey Rodionov
“Meek”, where Lyudmila Naletova is also the author of the libretto – a 50-minute monologue of the hero, full of anguish and melancholy, fever, horror that She, his wife, already dead, who killed herself, will never return to him. Between the beginning of his story and the final hopeless cry: “Tomorrow they will take her away! Well, I will!” – the dreary and unhappy life of Him and Her, their meeting, when She comes to lay an icon wrapped in rags, their painful “alien” coexistence, where everyone is absolutely alone and humiliated by life. In the performance of Maria Makeeva, She is a charming, but already broken by all previous circumstances, a person with conflicting reactions. Her former life is a vulgar tragic grotesque with masculine “aunts” in bonnets and boyfriends pulling up her skirts. With Him, with some feverish joy, she is trying to find another world – with a samovar and tea drinking, with a semblance of feelings, but He is an abuser with complexes and resentments against everyone and everything. Kirill Matveev performs this most difficult part-marathon with amazing naturalness and authenticity of the experience, without even for a moment reducing the tone of emotional tension. Here it is impossible to hide behind anything, because Dostoevsky’s center of conflict is man, his internal cataclysms, his hell and heaven. In the score of Alexei Kurbatov, these emotional collisions sound: the agitated and sad monologue of the trumpet, the abyss of “copper” and mocking dance rhythms, meditativeness and otherworldly “bird chirping” in the finale.
“N.F.B.” Photo: Sergey Rodionov
In the opera “N.F.B.” the author of the libretto Alexei Parin masterly pulled the colossal volume and energy of the novel “The Idiot” into one “figure” – the love triangle of Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova and Rogozhin, with its sacrificial denouement – stabbed to death by N.F.B. In this union, not only passion, attraction and opposition unites the heroes, but also a terrible inner judgment, the eternal torment of the soul. The opera libretto loops the stage action, where the starting point and denouement is the dead body of Nastasya Filippovna, lying on the bed and wrapped in a shroud, just as Holbein’s “body” of Christ, stretched out in the image on the wall, distorted by physical torment, suffering … And part of the suffering and rebellion of Nastasya Filippovna are the prayers that accompany her monologues. The action of this performance is a real “arena” of collision not only of Rogozhin, distraught with passion and Myshkin, confused by his compassionate love, but of dark and light forces (literally, Rogozhin is in black, and Myshkin is in white) in man himself, like a struggle in the world of angels darkness and light. By the way, in a similar vein to this interpretation, the heroes of the opera have already been interpreted in the play “NFB”, staged in 1995 in the German Lockum in the premises of a Gothic temple. In this vein, they are written out by Vladimir Kobekin: the vocal image of Rogozhin (Igor Korostylev) is dark, low, “confused”, frenzied, explosive. Myshkin (Vadim Volkov) sings in the “transcendental” countertenor tessiture – expressively, excitedly, at times as on the verge of a nervous breakdown, like all the participants in the triangle who anticipate its denouement.
Nastasya Filippovna is an amazing work by Natalia Petrozhitskaya, literally bursting into the stage with her impetuous steps, with her inner protest. Everything around her is hostile and hateful, except for Myshkin, to whom she treats like a child, not daring to “defile” him with her feelings. Her N.F.B. – aristocraticly chiseled, sharp, with graphically accurate plasticity and some kind of bottomless whirlpool in the voice, which can sound abrupt, glow with warmth, break down with a nervous tongue twister, sing a prayer or sound a terrible “demonic” spell on one note in denouncing oneself – a “harlot” … Her actions are deliberately provocative, pursuing one goal – to die, to be killed, to atone for “guilt” with death. The tension of all these collisions concentrates enormous energy in the performance, which is created by the most complex – rhythmically, vocally, by means of the orchestral language – the musical fabric of the score: the precise and impressive work of the orchestra under the direction of Arif Dadashev. In the finale comes “catharsis” – not ancient, but according to Dostoevsky: an invisible choir, quietly and firmly singing from the darkness the Easter “Your Resurrection”.
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