Organization

Conductor

Vladimir Agronsky

Stage director

Boris Pokrovsky

Costume designer

Vladimir Talalaj

Set designer

Choreographer

Lilija Talankina

I Teatri di Reggio Emilia

Teatro Regio di Parma

The Nose, op. 15

Reggio Emilia

Italy

Teatro Municipale Valli

Private

Public

Approved

Nos Shostakovich

“A chamber work does not mean a small room, a small number of artists and few means. It is a specific form of lyric art with its own particular aesthetic and another type of contact with the public. " This statement by Boris Pokrovsky could be the manifesto that inspired the creation of the Moscow Chamber Theater. In the seventies Boris Pokrovsky already has a long and brilliant career as a director behind him in Nizhny-Novgorod, Minsk and at the Bolshoi Theater where he will hold the role of artistic director for 25 years. He aspires to a more intimate form of show in which the audience can have a closer relationship with the stage. Boris Pokrovsky began by staging operas with the students of the Luna? Arski school of theater and created a real opera company in 1972: the Moscow Chamber Theater. Not only love by R. Š? Edrin is the first production staged by the company on the stage of the Stanislavskij dramatic theater: success was immediate. The novelty of the scenic language and the refinement of the interpretation contribute to the success of the young company. Since 1972, the Moscow chamber theater has presented more than 60 productions by various Soviet composers (35) or the contemporary repertoire (16) and a dozen works by European composers. Indeed, twentieth-century musicians are the privileged ones in the repertoire of the Moscow Chamber Theater. L'histoire du soldat and above The rake's progress constitute the event of the Muscovite artistic life of 1978. Let's make an opera (1979) represents one of Britten's first encounters with the Russian public. The nose has been one of the company's greatest hits since 1974. At the beginning, the company had a 200-seat cinema hall in Moscow which was not very suitable for opera performances and which forced them to find a new approach to staging. Each show became a kind of challenge: “we have to know how to do everything!”. Since 1995 the chamber theater has had a new theater in the center of Moscow, a superb place where the company can shine through its new creations.

If in general it may be a questionable method to introduce preliminary considerations of a historical-political nature to the exhibition of an artistic work, in the case of a work like The nose it is almost indispensable, to understand its aesthetic genesis itself, to take into account the specific situation in which Shostakovich's first opera was born, lived briefly and then fell into oblivion. The first decade following the October Revolution was a period of great creative ferment for the young Soviet state, which emerged victorious but exhausted by the terrible civil war. These are the years of the new economic policy (NEP) and the management of the Ministry of Culture by Anatolij Lunacarskij, in favor of the development of avant-garde movements. In the short span of the few years, in which a more liberal climate accompanied the construction of the structures of the new state, a considerable flowering of creativity and experimentation developed in practically every artistic and literary sphere: from the constructivism of Mayakovsky's word and image Rodcenko, Malevich's suprematism, Mejerchol'd's bio-mechanical theater, Eizenstein's young film school, to name only the best known. However, for this generation of artists every formal or thematic project took shape and meaning within a more general ideological discussion on the meaning of art and its meaning in society. In the great debate in which Russia was immersed in those few years, of course, there was also much discussion about the creation of a new music, and in particular of a new musical theater. Although the operatic genre was extremely popular, it struggled to find convincing representatives of the 'Soviet' style. There was a certain effort on the part of the main theaters to stimulate its development by making known the most innovative works of 'bourgeois' musicians, such as Berg's Wozzeck, Schreker's Der ferne Klang, Prokof'ev's L'amore delle tre melarance. Despite this, the public continued to prefer the classics of the repertoire and the works imbued with the so-called 'vampukism', that is to say that mixture of sentimentality, spirit of adventure and fabulous plots made famous by the opera Vampuka, the African bride of the unknown today. Vladimir Erenberg. In this context Shostakovich set out, in 1927, to compose his first opera, apart from the previous attempt just sketched as a student to set Pushkin's Gypsies to music. The very young pianist and composer had already signaled the year before with the extraordinary result of his First Symphony, a licensing essay from the conservatory, which had amazed and thrilled the Leningrad audience. Thanks to the interest of friends, Shostakovich met the director Vsevolod E. Mejerchol'd, who soon entrusted him with the musical direction of Gostim, his Moscow theater. Under the affectionate stimulus of the director's personality and in direct contact with the life of the theater, Shostakovic completed the score of the Nose in 1928, and the following year he composed the incidental music for the famous staging of Mayakovsky's Bug. In the dramaturgical elaboration The nose is undoubtedly affected by the influence of Mejerchol'd, who attributed great importance to music in his conception of theater (once he affirmed: "everything I learned about the violin I then transferred to my theater »). Shostakovich explained why he decided to take a cue from Gogol's famous short story of the same name, contained in the collection of St Petersburg Stories: "Soviet authors have created a large number of large and highly significant works, but since I am not a writer it was difficult for me to draw a booklet from one of them. No author wanted to help me: some did not have time or were too busy, still others were not interested in the development of Soviet work. It would have been much easier to have recourse to a few short texts, but I have not found in our contemporary literature anything suitable for a work. There was nothing left but to turn to the classics. I thought that a work with a classical subject would have been more acceptable in our day if it had been satirical (…). In the end I chose Gogol's Nose '».
As can be understood from the justificatory tone of these words, one of the most recurrent criticisms of Shostakovich's work was that he had not chosen a revolutionary and Soviet subject. The explanation provided, however, seems more suitable for dodging the attack than for motivating a choice that, at a historical distance, appears absolutely coherent, if only for that marked grotesque humor, tinged with tragedy, which manifests itself in Shostakovich's manner since the First symphony. Another observation by the composer is much more convincing from this point of view: «The subject of the Nose attracted me for its fantastic and absurd content, presented by Gogol 'in a strictly realistic tone». On this particular stylistic trait Shostakovic evidently reflected a lot also for the dramaturgy of his work, in which the humor often arises from the ironic gap between the absurdity of the situation and the seriousness of the musical treatment.
But the climate in which The Nose was created had already irremediably changed at the time of its first performance in 1930. The signs of a change in the direction of Soviet cultural policy were increasingly evident. The opponents of the experimental and avant-garde style, accused of submitting to 'bourgeois formalism', and the proponents of a 'socialist realism', based on a language more immediately accessible to the 'popular masses', asserted themselves more and more forcefully. The effect, therefore, of Shostakovich's provocative and reckless work was somewhat out of time, and was similar, as an adverse reviewer wrote, "to a hand grenade thrown by an anarchist." The work that was supposed to represent a stronghold of the new Soviet style ran aground after 13 performances, which were followed by only two more the following year. Nonetheless, Shostakovich was still regarded as one of the most promising talents of the new era, and only paid for his youthful sins in 1936, with the famous sentence on 'Pravda' of his second work A Lady Macbeth of the Mcensk District. Censored by implicit association, del Naso never spoke again in Russia until the memorable revival of the title at the Moscow Chamber Theater under the direction of Boris Pokrovski in 1974, preceded by an art-house balloon staging in East Berlin ( 1969), in which, however, everything was done to recover as much as possible the satirical and grotesque aspects of social criticism, read through the lenses of an 'alienating' and Brechtian dramaturgy. In Italy the opera arrived in 1964 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino under the direction of Eduardo De Filippo.
The story, set at the time of Nicholas I, follows the path of the story, from which the dialogues are taken almost verbatim, restoring the scene of the cathedral that Gogol 'had had to set in a market due to censorship problems. Instead, additional scenes were included, notably the nose hunt in the post station, for which other texts by Gogol 'were used (Dead souls, Taras Bul'ba, Owners of yesteryear, Diary of a madman, Marriage, Christmas Eve, Sorocincy Fair For the song of the servant of Kovaliov Ivan (II, 6) the librettists have instead taken some words of Smerdiakov, a character of the Karamazov Brothers.
Act One . In Petersburg. Barber Ivan Yakovlevic is shaving college councilor Platon Kovaliov, who scolds him for the bad smell on his hands. As soon as he wakes up, Yakovlevic cuts a slice of bread baked a moment earlier by his wife, Praskova Ossipovna. With bewilderment, he realizes that there is a nose in the dough. His wife accuses him of cutting someone off while he was drunk, and she throws him out of the house for her to get rid of. Believing to be unnoticed, the barber tries to get rid of it by throwing it into the Neva, but a sergeant stops the poor man to ask for an explanation. Meanwhile, Kovaliov, who likes to be called Major, discovers on awakening that he is inexplicably devoid of a nose and runs out of his mind to the police station. Passing in front of the Kazan Cathedral, Kovaliov sees his nose among the faithful, dressed as a Councilor of State. Embarrassed, Kovaliov makes a timid complaint to the superior, who turns his back on him and scornfully addresses him.
Atto secondo . Dal momento che il commissario di polizia è assente, Kovaliov si risolve a pubblicare un annuncio sul giornale. Nella redazione l’impiegato, malgrado l’evidente assenza del naso, rifiuta di inserire la richiesta per non compromettere la serietà del giornale. Tornato al suo appartamento, Kovaliov è abbattuto per la sua miserabile situazione, che lo specchio gli conferma per l’ennesima volta.
Third act. The police are mobilized to prevent the nose from leaving the city. At the post station the inspector observes the comings and goings of the crowd. While the postillion gives the signal, the nose, in the guise of the councilor of state, rushes to take the departing carriage. Having given the alarm, the sergeant tries to grab him. The nose-gentleman runs away, hunted by a swarm of pursuers. At the end of the turmoil, of all the unusual gentleman nothing remains but a nose in the hands of an old lady. The next scene is split on the stage: on one side you can see the apartment of Kovaliov, on the other that of the widow Pelagia Podotcina. Kovaliov thanks the sergeant for having brought his nose back, but he is unable to put it back in his place, nor is the intervention of a doctor swollen with prosopopoeia. Kovaliov suspects the widow Podotchina of having cursed him for not agreeing to marry her daughter. He begs her friend Jaryškin to write her a letter in which he tells her to make him look like he was before. The lady replies with another letter in which, misunderstanding every meaning contained in the previous one, she is surprised by the unjust reproaches, but she confirms, however, that she likes Kovaliov as her son-in-law. The whole city is now talking about the extraordinary story, and the curious peek everywhere to see the famous nose, which is said to go around alone. But the nose inexplicably returns to its place on Kovaliov's face, who resumes his usual life, shaved by the barber whose hands stink. During a walk, Major Kovaliov meets Mrs Podotcina, who never misses an opportunity to try to marry her daughter. But Kovaliov, as usual, refuses and prefers to court a pretty peddler, while he continues his walk proudly touching his recovered nose.

English

The Nose, op. 15 by Shostakovich, From (2011/2011), Directed by Boris Pokrovsky,, Conductor Vladimir Agronsky, Teatro Municipale Valli, Reggio Emilia, Italy

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