“We want to break the stereotype”

Wagner’s operas can be called a hard nut to crack and a great exam for any creative team. The Donetsk residents took a certain risk. Their Flying Dutchman will become an international creative Ukrainian-German-Austrian project. Staging namely this Wagner’s opera in the Donbas capital was a brainchild of the chief conductor of the Donetsk National Solovianenko Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet Vasyl VASYLENKO. He told The Day how dreams gradually acquire concrete forms and who helps in realization of the ambitious plan (to present the gem of classical music to the Donetsk admirers of operatic art). Recently the foreign set designers together with director Mara Kurochka (Germany) have presented in Donetsk the scale model of the set, and the premiere of the play is scheduled for early December. At what stage is this large-scale work now?

NEW GENERATIONS DON’T KNOW THIS MUSIC AT ALL

“Our team is in perfect artistic form and we are able to overcome creative ‘Everests,’ to which the operatic ouevre of Wilhelm Richard Wagner belongs. We want to break the stereotype that Donetsk is only a miner’s and industrial city,” Vasyl Vasylenko underlined, “The world should know us not only as a football capital, but also as a city of high culture. The Donetsk Theater has long ago been ready for staging the works by Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, great canvases by Sergey Prokofiev and other composers of classical music. Next year the whole world will celebrate the 200th birth anniversaries of such opera giants as Wagner and Verdi. Therefore a decision was made to stage along with The Flying Dutchman, Verdi’s opera A Masked Ball. Coming back to Wagner, we have plunged into his ouevre which counts for 13 works, but we stopped namely on The Flying Dutchman. This is a symbolical work, which was wrote in the early period of the romantic composer’s creative work. Owing to his music dramas, Wagner made a great contribution to the European culture as an opera reformer. Only theaters in Galicia in the pre-war time, and then Lviv and Kyiv opera houses in the Soviet period turned to Wagner’s ouevre. It is regrettable that generations of audience have grown, who do not know this music at all. That is why our theater can be called a discoverer of Wagner’s creative work and The Flying Dutchman for the residents of Donetsk.

“Germany’s General Consul in Donetsk Claus Zillikens gave us the note material of the opera: the score, the claviers, and orchestra voices for the symphony orchestra of the Breitkopf Publishing House. We have managed to get in touch with the administration of the Bayreuth Festival. Our producer from Switzerland Oleksandr Yankov offered a cooperation with the famous German director Mara Kurochka, who involved in the production the set designers from Austria and Germany, Momme Hinrichs und Torge Moller, who are experienced in staging Wagner’s works.

“I will admit, when I saw for the first time the scale model of the set presented by our guests, I felt somewhat allerted. The offered aesthetics with its rich palette of theater symbolism, metaphors, and allegory, envisages a totally different approach in revealing the opera dramaturgy. However, this will be no daring modern experiment, rather quite a tolerant and well-grounded attitude to classical music. At the same time, namely owing to usage of modern technologies, we hope to intrigue the audience with interesting special effects in recreation of indomitable storm, sudden emergence of the ghost ship and the Dutschman, a wandering captain, revealing the aura of the romantic fantasies and feelings of Senta, the daughter of Norwegian sailor Daland. Our task is to show the spirit of the epoch, which serves the background for the development of the romantic drama of human relationships with its final tragic chord, which is a kind of apotheosis of eternal love.”

It is planned that foreign soloists will take part in the December premiere. Which Donetsk singers or singers from other Ukrainian opera houses will perform on the Donetsk stage?

“We have already held three castings. We have heard many potential singers from several Ukrainian theaters who voluntered to take part in our production, as well as singers from abroad who performed in Wagner’s operas. It will be reminded that the auditioning is underway. We are looking for talents. We want to invite famous singers from Germany to take part in the premiere scheduled for December 8 this year.”

PLACING ACCENTS

The opera will be performed in the language of the original, in German. Coach Malte Kroidl has worked with the performers. What are his impressions from the capabilities of your team?

“Before the coach came to Donetsk, we had held a great preparatory work with the soloists and the choir. Since September we have been actively learning German with four pedagogues from Goethe Institute. At my request the employees of the General Consulate of Germany in Donetsk invited one of the best specialists in Wagner’s creative work – Malte Kroidl, a coach (an accompanying pianist), who by the way has taken part in two productions of the Mariinsky Theater. It turned out that Malte was closely aquainted with Wolfgang Wagner, the great composer’s grandson, who for 60 years have been curator of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival. For 10 days Kroidl conducted a titanic work with the singers and choir performers, making every note of the music texture of The Flying Dutchman, which was an invaluable workshop for our team. In this period we practically built the whole music architectonic of the opera dramaturgy of the work.”

Mara Kurochka is a well-known director. What new things has she offered?

“This is an intrigue. I think Mara’s concept as a director will be revealed gradually in the process of work with vocalists and choir performers. The presentation of the director’s idea, presented in photos, linecuts, engravings which depict the folkways, atributes, and costumes of correpesponding epoch, demonstration of a scale model of the set, according to Mara Kurochka, are only a tip of an iceberg.”

HOW TO PASS MUSIC “REEFS”

There are three author’s music versions of The Dutchman. You’ve chosen the last vergion of the work. Tell us about the “reefs” the maestro sets in this opera and whether you will be able to overcome them?

“The legend about a wandering sailor reaches back to the 16th century, an epoch of geographic discoveries. It is known that in 1839, when Wagner was traveling on a sail boat from Riga to London, he got into a terrible storm and felt the fear of death hazard. This astounding event gave an impetus to writing a libretto to the plot of Henrich Heine’s short story The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski (Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski). It is true, Wagner made several music editions of the opera, improving the orchestra sounding of the work. It will be reminded that the maestro established his own opera theater in Bayreuth (he also designed its architecture). A technical peculiarity of the theater was that the orchestra was for the first time located under the stage and because of too heavy facture of the brass instruments, its sounding was overstrained. Considering his every music drama as a vocal symphony, Wagner was the first composer who left the traditions of the Italian opera, entitling the orchestra with the rights of a full-fledged character, for previously in his words, ‘the orchestra was a harmonious and rythmical supplement of the opera melody.’ The composer’s harmony impresses with its rich and refined versatility of sound colors and at the same time painful and intense sound. In the whole history of opera before Wagner no composer had used such a large-scale opera. When Wagner’s operas were performed beyond Bayreuth in theaters with traditional orchestra pits, the composer had to correct the number of musicians, mainly by reducing the number of brass instruments. We took as the groundwork the third version of the opera which is the most acceptable for realization on Donetsk stage.”

Wagner viewed his art as a synthesis and means of expression of philosophical concept. In his article “Art work of the future,” the composer writes that the “highest form of art is music drama which should be udnerstood as organic unity of word and sound.”

“Wagner drew attention of many composers of the 19th century with his music. It is a known fact that the famous Italian Guiseppe Verdi was astounded with the creative work of his German colleague. Having heard Wagner’s works, Verdi stopped composing music for many years, and after a 15-year-long break he wrote his most dramatic opera Otello. If you compare La traviata and Otello, you will have an impression that two different composers wrote them. And what a bright final chord makes the matchless Falstaff by Verdi. Actually, it was Wagner who caused the transformation in the last period of Verdi’s creative work.

“Wagner writes, ‘Like man won’t be free until he accepts with joy the ties which connect him with nature, the art won’t be free unless the reasons that make it feel ashamed of the ties with life, vanish.’ This concept gives way to two founding ideas: art should be created by a community of people and belong to this community; a music drama, in the understanding of organic unity of word and sound, is the highest form of art. Bayreuth was the realization of the first idea, as it was there that opera theater for the first time was considered a temple of art, not an entertainment establishment. And the realization of the second idea was the new opera form, music drama, founded by Wagner. Namely its creation was the aim of the maestro’s creative life. ‘I live not for earning money, but to create,’ Wagner stated proudly. In spite of the harsh idealistic mistakes and breakdowns, based on the progressive traditions of German music, the composer achieved exclusive artistic results: he follwed Beethoven in glorifying the heroism of people’s suffering; like Bach, with an impressive richness of tones, he revealed the world of man’s feelings; following Weber, he implemented in music the images from German folk legends and tales and created wonderful pictures of nature. Such versatility of idea-artistic decisions and perfect masterfulness are typical of the best works of Richard Wagner.

“I am sure that the opera Flying Dutchman will become a new word not only for our theater, but a discovery for the broad audience of the opera admirers. For the present day we have received proposals concerning the presentations of our Flying Dutchman in Europe. We also dream to show this Wagner’s masterpiece on the capital’s opera stage. Incidentally, in the next season dedicated to Verdi’s 200th anniversary, we plan together with the Bulgarian director Nina Naidenova to stage The Masked Ball, because her La bohemia on Donetsk stage was met with a really positive response. As you can see, we have means to surprise and please the real connoisseurs of classic art.”