Swift and Corrosive

GIUSEPPE PENNISI takes a sniff
at Shostakovich's 'The Nose'

The Nose by Dmitri Shostakovich is performed less often than it should be, even though there is now a revival outside the Russian Federation. In the last two years, I reviewed a high tech production seen in Aix-en-Provence, Lyon and New York and soon reaching La Scala [The Quality of Mercy, 14 July 2011] and the traditional low cost but effective Moscow Chamber Opera staging [Full of Irony, 26 February 2011]. The former is an international production signed by William Kentridge and by very well known conductors (eg Kazushi Onu). The latter is a very functional production by Boris Pokrovskij (and slightly updated by his successors) with a completely Russian cast.
I saw a new Zurich Opernhaus / Rome Teatro dell'Opera joint venture on its 27 January 2013 opening night. The plot is the surrealist tale of a pompous military officer losing his nose in the barber's shop -- it gets cut out merely by chance -- and searching desperately for it throughout St Petersburg. Meantime, the nose had disguised itself as a State Counselor. The search for the nose -- and the nose's attempt to have its own personality -- became a pretext for an abrasive satire of society. In the Cyrillic alphabet, if the letters meaning 'nose' are inverted, they become the word 'dream'; thus, the search could be an unreachable dream.

A scene from Shostakovich's 'The Nose' at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Photo © 2013 Laura Ferrari

After its initial triumph in a small secondary St Petersburg theatre on 18 January 1930 and a short revival the following year, the opera disappeared from the Russian scene until 1974 because of the difficulties Shostakovich had with Stalin and his entourage. It was staged almost simultaneously in Düsseldorf (in German) and in Florence and Rome (in Italian) in 1964 with considerable success. Theatre managers considered it a daunting enterprise to produce twelve short scenes in three acts (the opera lasts less than two hours), in well known St Petersburg locations around 1880 (from the huge Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan to the Summer Garden, and from avenues to artisans' shops).

Andrey Popov as Stiepàn and Paulo Szot as Kovalyov in Shostakovich's 'The Nose' at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Photo © 2013 Laura Ferrari

Peter Stein (stage director), Ferdinand Wögerbauer (stage sets), Anna Maria Heinreich (costumes) and Lia Tsolaki (choreography -- in addition to thirty singers, there are some twenty dancers and mimes), move the very swift and corrosive action -- a bitter-sweet satire of bureaucracy and middle class. The cast entails at least thirty singers in sixty-two different roles (the concert piece in scene seven has twenty-one singers on stage) with the ability not only to master difficult vocal skills (melologue, polyphony, hyper-acute tonalities) but also to act and to dance effectively.

In Rome, an international cast was headed up by Paulo Szot as the protagonist Kovalyov; many were Russians, some quite well known Italians, some, for the smaller roles, members of the Rome Opera Chorus. It worked quite well due to the musical direction of the young Argentine conductor Alejo Pérez who handled the balance between a crowded stage and a score for a small chamber orchestra where, into a basic Slavic approach, Shostakovich inserts jazz, atonality, and traditional instruments such as the domra, balalaika and flexatone. The Nose had, as it should always have, the right tint of Alban Berg's Wozzeck in reverse or upside-down; musically, both of them are experimental and abrasive in their social critique: while Berg is sad and gloomy, Shostakovich in The Nose is airy, bold, full of irony and somewhat dreamy. With its applause, the audience showed that it had had a lot of fun.