Yet a comparison between Serebrennikov and Meyerhold is valid in many respects. The legendary reformer of Soviet theatre was also an extravagant rebel; he, too, shocked audiences, shattered conventions, drew on the most diverse styles of theatrical production. He demanded absolute commitment and incredible physical fitness from his actors. Meyerhold\u2019s stagings aroused either admiration or fierce opposition: they left no one indifferent. The same is true of Serebrennikov, who some believe to be a brilliant visionary, while others regard him as an outrageously overrated director who continues to capitalise on his relatively recent persecution by the Putin regime.<\/p>\n
Hubert Zapi\u00f3r (Don Giovanni). Photo: Frol Podlesnyi<\/p>\n What I find seductive in his theatre is the pure acting element as well as an ability \u2013 long forgotten in Poland or perhaps never highly regarded \u2013 to soften pathos with the grotesque, to relieve tension by means of irony and black humour. True, Serebrennikov\u2019s stagings are generally overloaded with ideas, sometimes not very coherent, full of incomprehensible allusions and tropes leading nowhere. But even if they annoy, it is impossible to take your eyes off them and then to get rid of the reflections whirling in your head.<\/p>\n That is why I went to Berlin for the premiere of the last part of the so-called Da Ponte Trilogy, produced by Serebrennikov with the Komische Oper for over two years. I decided to miss the first two parts, because I had had enough of both Cos\u00ec fan tutte<\/em> and The Marriage of Figaro <\/em>for the moment. However, the story of the punished rake promised to be provocative even when compared with the director\u2019s previous ventures. First of all, Serebrennikov announced the whole thing as Don Giovanni \/ Requiem<\/em>, which smacked of Teodor Currentzis\u2019 earlier Mozart experiments. Secondly, he decided to imbue the narrative of the opera with references to the Tibetan<\/em> Book of the Dead.<\/em> Thirdly \u2013 to replace Donna Elvira with a male victim of Don Giovanni\u2019s conquests, Don Elviro, portrayed by the Brazillian sopranist Bruno de S\u00e1.<\/p>\n It promised to be at least a beautiful catastrophe, but what did come out of it was a production thrilling with its pace, teeming alternately with horror and wit, interrupted again and again at the premiere by applause and bursts of laughter from the audience. Yes, it is another excessive production, drawing liberally on both Serebrennikov\u2019s previous stagings (including, not surprisingly, that of Pushkin\u2019s Little Tragedies<\/em>, staged at the Gogol Centre when the director was already under house arrest) and \u201call the means used in other plays\u201d, as in Meyerhold\u2019s case. Once again, it is a production that leaves us with more questions than answers, unknown perhaps even to Serebrennikov himself. It contains the most recognisable elements of the Russian artist\u2019s theatre \u2013 from dreams and ravings, the sometimes unobvious multiplication of characters, to disjointed narrative.<\/p>\n And yet it is watchable \u2013 probably because Serebrennikov, despite seemingly turning everything inside out, still highlights the most essential aspect of the title character\u2019s story. It is not a story about promiscuity or obsession, it is a story about the mechanisms of power and its links to sex. Thus, the homoerotic subtext of the introduction of Don Elviro recedes into the background: the age, gender and orientation of the \u201cvictims\u201d do not matter at all to Don Giovanni, just as they did not matter to Casanova, the greatest lover of all time. Yet Serebrennikov completes this spectacle of power with a surprising conclusion: that the descent into the hell of agony can give even a villain a chance and influence the fate of the world. Hence the reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead<\/em> and Jungian archetypes. Hence the idea to explain everything from the end and start the action already to the sounds of the overture, with a daring scene of Don Giovanni\u2019s supposed resurrection at his own funeral.<\/p>\n Photo: Frol Podlesnyi<\/p>\n This is an arch-Russian scene, played out on several planes, with sets simpler than in Meyerhold\u2019s productions, based on boxes of raw pinewood that perfectly organise the space (arranged in diverse configurations, they will stay with us until the end of the performance). A group of grotesque mourners bid farewell to the protagonist as if he were a Soviet dignitary. To kiss the deceased, they have to lean over the edge of the open coffin, sometimes climbing the steps to do so, then perform a suitable show of despair in front of the rest of the congregation. Meanwhile, in an adjacent box black-clad bodyguards (excellent choreography and stage movement by Evgeny Kulagin) are desperately struggling with the Commendatore\u2019s corpse, trying to pack it into a black body bag. In the midst of this pandemonium Don Giovanni begins to show signs of life and, to the evident frustration of the mourning-faking participants in the funeral, is immediately transported to the hospital.<\/p>\n The rest of the production is made up of a series of snapshots of the real agony of the protagonist, who goes through the successive states of the Buddhist bardo<\/em> \u2013 from life, through dream-like ravings, moments of tranquillity, the painful process of dying and, finally, to a state of readiness to be reborn. Don Giovanni will be guided on this journey by the Commendatore \u2013 in the dual form of the spirit of the murdered man (the actor Norbert St\u00f6\u00df) and one of his past or future incarnations (the singer Tijl Faveyts, made to look like a Buddhist emperor, as if taken straight from Robert Wilson\u2019s theatrical visions). He will be accompanied by Leporello, who soon turns out to be himself, or, more precisely, the doubting aspect of his dissociated self (which Serebrennikov, somewhat in the style of early Castorf, emphasises by means of two neon props with the words \u201cSI\u201d and \u201cNO\u201d); the pregnant nurse Zerlina and her wimpish partner Masetto, a work colleague (the only reasonably real characters from Don Giovanni\u2019s ravings); and phantoms of the past \u2013 the demonic Donna Anna, torn between her hatred of the assassin and her own father, the helpless Don Ottavio, the genuinely heartbroken Don Elviro, and his mute friend Donna Barbara (the actress Varvara Shmykova), who at some point will also become the object of the Great Rake\u2019s designs. Everything culminates in perhaps the most spectacular \u201chellscension\u201d scene I have ever seen in the theatre \u2013 in a convention reminiscent of both the great ball at Satan\u2019s from Bulgakov\u2019s The Master and Margarita <\/em>(with Don Giovanni having a bit of Woland or Wotan in him) and naive plebeian theatre created by the simplest of means.<\/p>\n And then silence will fall for a while, followed, instead of the final sextet, by the first notes of the Requiem.\u00a0<\/em>An aging Don Giovanni, portrayed by the phenomenal dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, will embark on the final leg of the journey and reach its end \u2013 and, at the same time, a new beginning \u2013 gradually regaining his balance and climbing up a vertical wall of pinewood.<\/p>\n There was too much of everything. There were questionable ideas \u2013 such as adding Ilya Shagalov\u2019s projections that contributed little to the plot, or interrupting the musical narrative with excerpts from the Book of the Dead<\/em> recited by St\u00f6\u00df. There were superfluous, though irresistibly funny, elements, including those in the feast scene, when Donna Anna, Don Elviro and Don Ottavio sneaked into the palace in ceremonial Masonic attire. There were moments that dragged on and too many symbols in the fragments of the Requiem<\/em> crowning the whole. There were gestures that were too journalistic \u2013 when a banner appeared on stage stating that the aria \u201cIl mio tesoro\u201d would not be performed due to the cuts in Berlin\u2019s culture budget. In fact, it was not performed because the creative team opted for the so-called Viennese version of the opera \u2013 with all the consequences of that decision, including the inclusion of Leporello and Zerlina\u2019s duet \u201cPer queste tue manine\u201d in Act II.<\/p>\n Tommaso Barea (Leporello) and Bruno de S\u00e1 (Don Elviro). Photo: Frol Podlesnyi<\/p>\n It certainly was not a Don Giovanni <\/em>for beginners, but neither were we dealing with a fashionable but inept Regietheater<\/em>, in which the production team members treat music only as an excuse to pursue their own vision, detached from the work. Musically, it was a performance of surprisingly high quality \u2013 also taking into account the difficult acoustics of the Schiller Theater, where the Komische Oper company has moved while its home is being renovated. James Gaffigan conducted the whole in tempi that were very brisk, but corresponded to the concept formulated by Serebrennikov, a director with great sensitivity to the nuances of the score, which he demonstrated in, for example, the perfectly acted out recitatives. The most publicised soloist of the evening, Bruno de S\u00e1, handled the part entrusted to him stylistically and technically better than many women singing Donna Elvira today: only at times did his beautiful soprano fail to sufficiently cut through the sound of the orchestra. I have more reservations about Adela Zaharia (Donna Anna), who has a powerful soprano with a decidedly dramatic tone, but one that is too wide for the part and too often overwhelming the singer\u2019s stage partners. Penny Sofroniadou, who sang Zerlina, was much better when it came to controlling the surprisingly large volume of her voice. Among the male cast I was a little disappointed with Tijl Faveyts, whose bass was not expressive enough for the role of the Commendatore. Philipp Meierh\u00f6fer, on the other hand, was very convincing, also in terms of acting, in the role of Masetto. August\u00edn G\u00f3mez, who has a fairly small, but agile and handsome tenor, presented a rather stereotypical figure of a weak and passive Don Ottavio \u2013 I continue to dream of a staging in which the director would put enough emphasis on the second of the essential aspects of Mozart\u2019s masterpiece: faithfulness against all odds. In the solo parts of the Requiem<\/em> the voices of Sofroniadou, G\u00f3mez and Faveyts were joined by the alto of Virginie Verrez, thick but with a bit too much vibrato.<\/p>\n Perhaps the greatest asset of the production was the superbly matched duo of Don Giovanni and Leporello \u2013 Hubert Zapi\u00f3r and Tommaso Barea, respectively, singers bursting with youthful energy, bravely tackling their excessive, at times acrobatic acting tasks. Most importantly, singers with a similar type of voice, a very masculine, deep and yet colourful baritone, in Zapi\u00f3r\u2019s case lightened up by a distinctive \u201cgrain\u201d. Mozart and Da Ponte would have been over the moon: if the whole thing had been for real, only this minor detail would have made it possible to distinguish the master from the servant in the general confusion of the identity-swapping episode.<\/p>\n This was the closure of the Berlin Da Ponte Trilogy, which, in fact, is not a trilogy. At the Komische Oper it was brought together not only by the librettist and the director\u2019s controversial, fiercely debated vision, but also by the vocal talent \u2013 backed by excellent acting skills \u2013 of Hubert Zapi\u00f3r, the performer of the main roles in all three productions. He is a young and very promising artist. If we want to enjoy his performances in Poland, it is time to look around for a musical stage director, a suitable theatre and a conductor sensitive to singing.<\/p>\n Translated by: Anna Kijak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some say that Kirill Serebrennikov is a Meyerhold for our times. He is certainly the most recognisable dissident among Russian artists: after spending nearly two years under house arrest for allegedly embezzling public funds, after a truly Kafkaesque trial that ended with a fine, a three-year suspended prison sentence and a ban on leaving the … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-8838","6":"format-standard","7":"category-posts-in-english","8":"category-wedrowki-operowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8842,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8838\/revisions\/8842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/8q6a2521.jpg\")
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