Vladimir Ogorevich (Sergey Semishkur), son of Prince Igor (Ildar Abradzakov), Yaroslavna (Oksana Dyke), mother of one, wife of the other, at center
Dear friends and readers,
Geoffrey O’Brien writes inspiringly accurately of this year’s (rehearsals began in June 2013) new HD-opera production of Alexander Borodin’s large fragments towards an opera, now titled Prince Igor, and arranged coherently in a new way to provide a contemporary as well as essentialist Russian meaning:
At the dramatic center of one [realm, or first act] is the captive Igor; in the other the bereft Yaroslavna. The music they sing, each in solitude, is insistently about loneliness and separation. The music they sing together after they are reunited in the last act cannot compare to the mournful power of what they sing alone.
Yaroslavna is as strong a character as Igor, but like his it is a strength measured by the frankeness with which each confesses to being at a loss, overwhelmed, grief-striken. Yaroslavna’s long lament performed at the beginning of the 2nd act — ‘Terrifying nightmares torment my sleep, I often dream my beloved is beside me … Yet he fades away further and further’ — makes audible the strong, sustained sorrow that seems to lie at the root of the opera (NYRB, March 10, 2014, “A great Prince Igor“.
I was deeply moved by Oksana Dyke’s singing and enactment of the role of Igor’s wife. Abandoned as her husband goes off to glorious war (ironies are strong here), she is to take care of the life of everyone at court and in the countryside. In her interview with Eric Owens, Dyke bubbled over delightfully with talk in Russian, and within the opera she was Sarah Siddons come back, somewhat subdued. Her face was serene with beauty, and she sang what I feel daily. I bonded with her, and felt that for other people she (and other characters) might evoke the experience of other of life’s traumas and dream joys. She was terrific, her voice lovely, surely she will someday be a diva.
I was also irresistibly impressed (as was everyone around me) by the stage filled with 12000 individually made poppies (allusions to the carnage of WW1 through staging and set and words of the free translation), through which danced and writhed a full complement of Rites of Spring-like wild yet controlled young men and women. (See plot-summary, wikipedia.) The battle Igor proposed at the opening of the opera is over and huge movie black-and-white images of men’s faces suffering terrible takes over the stage after Igor is announced captive. One of the faces is Igor himself and he dreams of friends and family members taken captive and made into slaves. He hears the “hit tunes” of the opera (as Owens phrased) allure all the more for their familiarity, e.g., (“Take my hand, I’m a stranger in paradise”). There was a familiar refrain I can’t describe but that kept coming back throughout the opera and when it started up, like a rabbit my ears perked up attention was held.
Izzy (Russian Roulette) made the important point that the re-arrangement did have the effect of making the wife central, keeping the hero off-stage and leaving a lot unexplained. Dyke was the central presence of the opera. Its mid-section becomes her fending off Prince Galitsky (Mikhail Petrenko) a rake and rapist and trying to save women from trafficking (see below for photo). The opera becomes woman-centered. Not that that’s a bad thing …
Slightly disappointingly (but causing me no surprise) as I stood on-line during the first intermission to get a coffee to drink with my hard-boiled eggs (my lunch), I found myself among three young woman who seemed educated. Not one connected the poppies on stage with the symbol of the poppy of WW1. They had no idea there’d been one (so they said). When I spoke of millions dead in WW1 they looked blanker.
Less excusably they also looked surprised to hear that the production had turned a medieval epic, probably glorifying war, into an anti-war parable. Eric Owens had just described the source as a medieval heroic epic and said more than once that the fragments were newly cobbled together: these had been made into a pageant, but now they were a strongly dramatic story with lots of confrontations. Do some opera-goers not listen to what is said by the host or hostess? As the opera opens, Igor rushes a plethora of young men off to war after 1815 and they begin to straggle back in 1821, filled with war horror stories.
Nazi or WW2 like uniforms
I did wonder what planet they lived on when lastly I asked how they liked hearing “Stranger in Paradise.” The chorus master (a man in his 70s) at the Met on stage this time knew the 1950s movie and reference, but not these women. Maybe they had never heard of this movie, were too young, and didn’t recognize the music? more likely they just didn’t want to give away anything of their thoughts (people are like this) or were partly having me on. So I fell silent but then they began to talk to me. About what I no longer remember.
At any rate Tcheniakov and Noseda’s re-interpretation of the epic poem was lost on them. If so, I sincerely hope it was not lost on the many other people in the auditorium: this opera production is intended to speak to our political situation today, e.g., to the endless colonialist wars. Igor’s captor, Khan Konchak (Stefan Kocan) berates him, as Igor sings of all the losses Igor’s war has caused, and the limited role Konchar will give Igor.
The ending is a depiction of a people utterly debased and shattered, trying to put their lives back together. The song was heroic but when it ended Abdrazakov as Igor broke away from everyone worshipping him to begin to rebuild a house with some doors, and others taking his cue took bricks and began to re-build too. The implicit idea is the war was wrong, the defeat a lesson, and now it’s time to rebuild destroyed places and lives.
This far shot show us Igor’s son, Vladimir and Konchakovna, at times a sheer dream and at others a woman the young man had loved
This newly conceived opera is also meant to be and is complexly psychologically acute. Tcherniakov used big screen movie images of say a face out of which a hallucination (like the dancers in the field of poppies) can emerge, the garb of the Nazis and suggestive costumes, intertitles, the chorus dressed to look like illustrations in 19th century novels of impoverished looking desperate people dressed in Russian style of the later 19th century. Abdrazakov sang movingly among the poppies especially — again it was a familiar tune, but now in context I saw how sad it was, about how people feel about life’s losses. I enjoyed this opera enormously because it reinforced the way I feel often and made such feelings valid.
Tcheniakov told Gelb during the filmed interview that he transformed the source into (he hoped) a sort of 19th century novel in the spirit of Tolstoy. In one archetypal scene, the soul of Prince Igor is fought over, by a male pacificist, who oddly is sternly dressed as a soldier (Duke of Wellington) but have no fear, he hardly ever stirs before noon. Prince Galitsky (Mikhail Petrenko, a base baritone), rival to his brother, is a Lovelace-like rake who seeks to enslave the female population of the village while Igor is gone:
In the poppy fields we first see the female dream erotic figure of the piece, Konshakovna (Anita Rachvelishvili) in white slip with a huge wig of curly black hair down to her waist. Jungian.
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This is the first of the four operas we chose to go to this year that came up to the standard of great effective opera Jim loved to go see and hear. The text had been transformed into modern art: the staging was interdependent with movie techniques continually and vice-versa. Both a product of 19th century psychological novelistic art; at the same time the source is a nationalist memory of history — in fact it seems Igor won most battles, only the one that was written about was a defeat.
The principals in the poppy field, Igor singing a famous beautiful piece of music I’ve heard many times before
I imagined Jim with us enjoying it, coming home to read more about the text and careers of the artists, and talking away about it, making the odd ironic joke as we ate our spaghetti together. How busy were those poppy fields. How they broke up into 16 separate pieces to be hauled off stage at night. Had Jim been there we would not have been walking home in the cold up the hill, but seated comfortably in his Jaguar with him. I felt so sad as next season was announced and images from those planned as HD-versions shown on the screen. He would have loved to have seen the new Cav and Pag. Although he saw and heard none of this season, he did read about it, and at moments in the summer he and I even had hope he might live to go to a few.
He can know nothing of these, he’s missing out.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
I have never seen a production of “Prince Igor”, but have CDs of the entire opera. Although Boridin’s musical output was not large, he wrote wonderful music. I’d have loved to have seen and heard it with you and Izzy.
Clare
As you can see I am incapable of describing the music: I can’t even remember which songs the familiar refrains are known to me as — but they were beautiful, especially the long sequence at the close of what is now Act I, where the dancers danced through the poppies all around Prince Igor and he sang on and off too. Some of this was brought back in the apparently nearly wholly invented dumb show stage business at the close of the third act: where we see by gesture and symbol Igor renounce war and start to build a new community together.
I suspect you mean “Stranger in Paradise” from the musical “Kismet”, which is taken from Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances” from the opera.
Yes but there were others I recognized — somewhat less familiar so I couldn’t come up with the title. Often these classical “tunes” turn up as refrains in movies, the more beautiful poignant ones are still used in BBC mini-series costume dramas (instead of hiring a composer).
Dear Ellen:
Thank you so much for this insightful review! Your insights are admirable. While translating the libretto to the opera, I was wondering if perhaps some of the “love parts” of the opera would not be perhaps a bit too “corny” for the modern viewer, but you have convinced me that the Met update (only one of the “All Borodin” versions, incidentally) can speak to a 21st century audience.
Not having seen the Met version yet (I am over here in St. Petersburg, but I have heard that it was on P”BS Great Performances”), I am a little puzzled about the following: “As the opera opens, Igor rushes a plethora of young men off to war after 1815 and they begin to straggle back in 1821, filled with war horror stories.” Please fill me in on how these dates fit in with the story in the Met version.
The original story, “The Tale of Igor’s Army,” tells of the events of 1185, with
the provincial Prince Igor attacking the nomadic Polovtsians of the steppes. Interestingly, while Igor is moderately praised for his bravery, The Tale is not really a glorification of war, but instead something of a criticism of Igor for being too glory-hungry, being defeated, and “sinking the wealth of his people to the bottom of the river Kayala.” Of course, the Tale also laments the break-up of Rus.
Another aspect that could speak to a modern audience is the issue of interracial and interethnic love. Igor’s son and the Khan’s daughter did in fact marry, and this was rather typical for numerous noble families on both sides of the Rus/Polovtsian divide. In fact, the Russians fought the Mongols for the first time (in 1223) defending their Polovtsian relations (It is likely that Igor’s grandson died in this battle). This ethnic mixing also occurred at other levels between these two peoples, but mostly as a result of what you referred to as “trafficking,” which seems to have been an unfortunate – but then acceptable – part of life on both sides.
I won’t even bring up the previous partnership between Prince Igor and Khan Konchak (dug up from the chronicles).
Please don’t be to hard on the young women with no clue about “Stranger in Paradise,” nor even that there was a WWI (nice observaton about the poppies on the 100th anniversary). I have hope that their generation’s unprecedented access to the global brain will ultimately lead to a kind of internet-based renaissance.
Oh, by the way, “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” is also from “Kismet,” for which, amazingly, Borodin was credited over 60 years after his death!
You can find some of my Igor stuff on WordPress: igortale.wordpress.com will not be too helpful, since most of it is in Russian, but igoropera.wordpress.com has the English translation of the original scenario suggested to Borodin some 30 years before the opera premiered.
Thanks once more for your thoughts! Keep them coming!
Your final paragraph brought tears to my eyes. We all suffer terrible losses in this life, and I am so sorry for yours!
Sincerely, Fred Patton