Song and Dance by Marina Harss N February, the Russian Director Dmitri Final Version” of the Opera

Books & the Arts. PERA O CORY WEAVER/METROPOLITAN WEAVER/METROPOLITAN CORY A scene from Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor, with Ildar Abdrazakov as Prince Igor Song and Dance by MARINA HARSS n February, the Russian director Dmitri final version” of the opera. It is a jumble of Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Crimea also Tcherniakov produced a new staging of unfinished ideas and marvelous music. comes to mind. Tcherniakov’s Igor is an Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor at the For his reconstruction, Tcherniakov re- antihero for our time. Metropolitan Opera. It was last per- arranged the order of scenes, cut several Borodin’s opera is the story of a Slavic formed there in 1917, sung in Italian. passages—including Glazunov’s overture— prince who goes off to fight a battle against IThe opera, which was left unfinished at and inserted music originally sketched by a “barbaric” non-Christian neighbor, a Tur- the time of the composer’s sudden death Borodin but never before integrated into the kic tribe known as the Polovtsians (or, more while attending a military ball in 1887, is opera, with orchestrations by Pavel Smelkov, often, as the Cumans), led by the cheerfully based on a twelfth-century Slavic epic, The including a major new monologue for Igor. truculent Khan Konchak. By the second Song of Igor’s Campaign, best known by the He also imagined a new, ambivalent end- act—in Tcherniakov’s staging, it’s the second English-speaking world in a translation by ing, set to a passage from the opera-ballet half of the first—Igor has suffered a brutal Vladimir Nabokov. Borodin had left several Mlada, a significant departure from the rous- defeat and is being held prisoner in a Polov- plot points unresolved: What happens to ing chorus that had previously closed the tsian encampment. His captor turns out to the young lovers, for example? Other im- opera. It is a bold reappraisal of the work: be a gracious host, offering friendship, rich portant events, including a major battle in what has traditionally been considered an cuisine and the company of wondrous, dark- which Igor suffers defeat and is taken cap- “earnestly nationalist” opera whose over- eyed beauties in return for an alliance. “Like tive, were left to the audience’s imagination. riding message was the “endorsement of two panthers, we would prowl together Because Borodin died before finishing most Russia’s militaristic expansion,” according to [and] feed on the blood of our enemies,” of the orchestrations, they were eventually the musicologist Richard Taruskin, has been he promises. Igor declines the offer, but the provided by two of his friends, the compos- recast as a more complicated piece about Khan seems unperturbed, good-naturedly ers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexan- the internal struggles of an impotent and inviting him to enjoy a brilliant spectacle by der Glazunov. As the musicologists Elena tormented hero, played here by the Russian his side: “Bring the captive girls! Let them and Tatiana Vereschagina note in the Met bass-baritone Ildar Abdrazakov. The first entertain us with their songs and dances!” program, there is no “authorized, definitive image we see in this production is a projec- So begins one of the most famous dance tion of Igor’s face wearing an anxious expres- suites—or divertissements—in opera: the “Po- Marina Harss, a freelance dance writer and trans- sion, followed by the aphorism “To unleash lovtsian Dances,” introduced by a lilting, lator based in New York City, has contributed to a war is the surest way to escape from one’s descending scale on the woodwinds, followed The Nation, The New York Times and The self.” Perhaps Tcherniakov was thinking of by the floating treble voices of women sing- New Yorker. George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq War; ing of a land beyond the Caspian Sea, where 28 The Nation. May 12, 2014 “the air is filled with languor,” the roses curves, and their arms move in limp arcs, the action, the dancing almost always fails bloom, and the nightingales sing. Borodin’s their motions imbued with lassitude and to leave much of an afterimage. But when exotic musical idiom in this scene, heavy with longing. The music quickens and a new taken seriously, as in the 2006 Met revival haunting melismas, was partly inspired by melody, filled with skittering chromatic pas- of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, these little jewels musicological sources like Alexandre Chris- sages for the clarinet, rings out. Clutching a can make quite an impact. On that occasion, tianowitsch’s Esquisse historique de la musique bow, a Polovtsian warrior launches into a se- the Met invited a rising star, Christopher arabe; but mostly, it was the product of his ries of spinning jumps, circling the women. A Wheeldon, to create a fantasy ballet set to fanciful imagination. Taruskin has described troop of men advances in waves, like soldiers the “Dance of the Hours,” made famous by the scene’s sinuous melodies as “the supreme in an assault. The orchestral texture thickens a hippo ballet in the animated movie Fan- musical expression of nega,” or “tender las- as more instruments join in and the action tasia. The dancing takes place, as is often situde,” a characteristic of the exotic East becomes frenzied, with the men enacting the case, during a party scene. Wheeldon that “emasculates, enslaves, renders passive,” a kind of war dance, kicking their legs and made a delicious little ballet full of brilliant the embodiment of “S-E-X à la russe.” In launching into barrel turns. Quite suddenly, classical steps, small, quick jumps and spins, short, nineteenth-century Orientalism in all the music becomes bombastic, bolstered by and sophisticated counterpoint between the its shimmering, titillating glory. the percussion and full chorus. “Our Khan ensemble and soloists (“Like the popping of For the opera’s premiere in 1890 at the is glorious, Khan Konchak!” the singers cry a cork,” he described it). It brought down the Mariinsky, the ten or so minutes of chore- out, as the men smack the floor with their house, and Wheeldon’s own dance company, ography that close the act were created by bows and raise their arms in praise. The Morphoses, performed it with success as a Lev Ivanov, deputy ballet master of the Im- women provide a sinuous counterpoint to stand-alone piece. perial Theater School. Ivanov was famously this onslaught of raw masculinity. There it is, But even less substantial dances can cre- musical—among other things, he was re- the essence of Orientalism: sex and violence. ate an enchanting interlude. Mark Dendy’s sponsible for the exquisite lakeside acts of “Of course, the music is a little bit silly,” dance for Monostatos’s minions in Julie Tay- Swan Lake. The suite had considerable suc- the dance historian Lynn Garafola, an expert mor’s 2004 Magic Flute is delightfully silly, cess with audiences and critics, although Iva- on the Ballets Russes, quipped recently. What full of gleeful twirling, rope-jumping and nov was hardly mentioned, an omission that was once titillating and exciting can now look acrobatic stunts. Dances have frequently was not unusual at the time. According to decidedly kitsch, like something out of a musi- served as a momentary diversion (hence the one of the company’s régisseurs, “after the act cal extravaganza or historical epic from Holly- name, divertissement) or moment of pure it was not applause, but a veritable ‘roar.’” wood’s golden age. (Indeed, among people of a pleasure. In seventeenth-century court en- certain age, the opening melody is perhaps best tertainments, they provided spectacular in- subsequent version of the dances, based known as the basis for “Stranger in Paradise,” termezzi and festive finales, meant to arouse on Ivanov’s design, has survived. This a pseudo-tropical love duet from the musi- amazement and admiration. “The province staging, created in 1909 by the Rus- cal Kismet, set in an exotic garden filled with of ballets was the more inchoate world of sian choreographer Michel Fokine, was parrots, peacocks and tacky Moorish follies le merveilleux,” explains the dance historian first performed as part of an evening of à la Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) One can see how Jennifer Homans in her book Apollo’s An- Aopera and dance presented by Serge Diaghilev’s a serious contemporary opera director, par- gels, an “expansive arena, with its pagan and Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in ticularly one as brainy as Dmitri Tcherniakov, Christian resonances and fascination with Paris. Fokine’s “Polovtsian Dances” became might want to avoid such connotations. “His miracles, magical, and supernatural events.” one of the most popular ballets in Diaghilev’s whole experience growing up was that every- In addition to arias and choruses, a spectacle repertory, performed throughout its twenty- one left after the ‘Polovtsian Dances,’ after the like Antonio Cesti’s Il Pomo d’Oro (1668) in- year history. (After the demise of the company, high point,” the musicologist Simon Morrison, cluded ballets depicting the spirits of the air it was revived by its various successors, includ- a specialist in Russian music, recently told me. and the denizens of the sea. ing the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which So “he wanted to tone it down, to de-energize But as opera developed, the dances were performed in the United States throughout the it.” Tcherniakov has done exactly that in his expected to have a deeper connection to the 1940s.) It was the model for a whole series of production by setting the entire “Polovtsian” drama’s themes or action. The final scene in exotic ballets that Diaghilev periodically served act in an enormous field of thigh-high pop- Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys (1676), a “tragédie up to Parisian audiences hungry for the frisson pies—designed, like all the operas he directs, en musique,” is a dance of mourning for the of the magical East.

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