Director Dmitry Chernyakov turns three Rachmaninoff operas into one story of Pushkin’s Miserly Knight at the Zurich Opera

Dmitry Chernyakov’s production “Rachmaninoff: The Three Operas” has opened at the Zurich Opera House. The composer never conceived of “Aleko,” “The Miserly Knight,” and “Francesca da Rimini” as a trilogy; Chernyakov and conductor Gianandrea Noseda are the first to bring them together in a single production. Known for his unexpected interpretations of classic operas, the director has devised a narrative thread linking three entirely unrelated stories: In his production, they are all about the Miserly Knight. Anton Dolin reports on the premiere.Staging Rachmaninoff’s one-act operas is no straightforward task. Even many admirers of the composer consider them less than his finest work. Each is a little short for a full evening, and it is unclear what, beyond a purely formal rationale, would justify combining them. Each of the three runs about an hour, and apart from their composer, their only common ground is the Russian language. Rachmaninoff wrote the first, “Aleko,” at 19, with a libretto by Nemirovich-Danchenko based on Pushkin’s Romantic poem “The Gypsies.” In the second, the more mature “The Miserly Knight,” again based on Pushkin, the text of the “little tragedy” remains almost unchanged. “Francesca da Rimini,” composed in the same year, 1904, is based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” with a libretto by Modest Tchaikovsky. Here, the composer’s musical language becomes more unified and expressive.Only a particularly daring director would attempt to combine them into a single production with such a paradoxical, experimental concept. That describes Dmitry Chernyakov perfectly: an acknowledged master of staging Russian opera whose revisionist readings of the classics never fail to intrigue and provoke.The three operas follow one another in the order they were composed. Critics have hailed the musical interpretation by Gianandrea Noseda, the Zurich Opera’s general music director, as exemplary: dynamic, impassioned, and emotional. Every singer in the cast is superb. What happens onstage, however, could well shock an unprepared audience.Opera audiences are accustomed to a singer’s appearance being secondary: A distinguished, balding gentleman can play a passionate knight, while an older woman can play a young novice at a convent. Director-led opera productions delight in playing with these incongruities, but Chernyakov’s reversal is still a rarity. All three stories are set in an upscale retirement home, and the young singers in the central roles have been made up with fiendish skill to look like its residents.Beneath the wrinkles, glasses, gray curls, and baggy clothes, it is impossible to recognize 39-year-old soprano Elena Stikhina, a frequent Chernyakov collaborator who sang Joan of Arc brilliantly in his Amsterdam production of “The Maid of Orleans” last year. Equally unrecognizable is her romantic counterpart in “Aleko” and “Francesca da Rimini,” 32-year-old Uzbek tenor Bekhzod Davronov. Chernyakov has deliberately created the familiar mismatch between a performer’s appearance and voice. Audiences instinctively balk at the effect, even as they laugh — a response hard to reconcile with conventional ideas about either Rachmaninoff’s music or the tragic grandeur of his operas’ plots.Chernyakov punctures the material’s romanticism at every turn. The fatal love triangle in “Aleko,” reprised in “Francesca da Rimini” by the same performers, becomes a harmless role-playing game — a familiar Chernyakov device — in which love and death are make-believe. The merciless director transforms the folk-dance interlude in “Aleko” into a conga line hobbling along with canes and walkers — a sort of danse macabre. Elena Zaitseva, who worked on films by Aleksei German Sr., gives the production a strikingly realistic look through her makeup and costumes, recalling the hyperrealism of Ulrich Seidl’s documentaries, which are liberally seasoned with similar black humor.As always with Chernyakov, the farce conceals the makings of a tragedy, if only a “little” one. At the heart of the production is “The Miserly Knight,” where the characters are no longer pretending: Their lives and deaths are real within the world of the production. Its source may be the most mysterious of Pushkin’s miniature dramas. Pushkin gave serious thought to miserliness, from Molière’s Harpagon to Shakespeare’s Shylock. The very phrase “miserly knight” is an oxymoron: Knights are usually known for their nobility and generosity, yet the Baron is stingier than even Solomon the moneylender. Chernyakov makes Pushkin’s nameless miser the central character throughout the production. He plays the jealous Aleko, who kills his unfaithful wife and her lover; in the third opera, he is the villain Lanciotto Malatesta, who kills the unfaithful Francesca and his handsome brother Paolo.The Baron is played by Belarusian baritone Vladislav Sulimsky, who carries the entire production with astonishing stamina and a remarkable gift for comedy. At 50, he could easily pass for a man of the miser’s age, but Chernyakov and Zaitseva have deliberately aged him beyond recognition: disheveled gray hair, a goatee, glasses, an old-fashioned plaid jacket and bow tie, and a cane in place of a sword. No one wants anything to do with this overbearing eccentric. His son Albert, played by Ukrainian tenor Dmytro Popov, has his eye on the inheritance. The head physician, who doubles as the Duke sitting in judgment (Belarusian baritone Pavel Yankovsky), humiliates him in public. Instead of gold, the Baron’s prized treasure chests hold archival papers and old photographs. What the Miserly Knight treasures is a past that matters to no one else. Pulling on paper armor and a helmet, he slips back into bygone days — and, wrapping himself in a string of Christmas lights, looks alternately like Don Quixote or King Ubu.Chernyakov divides Rachmaninoff’s three operas into two parts, interrupting “The Miserly Knight” midway with an intermission that gives added weight to the Baron’s half-hour monologue. This whole story is about him. More precisely, it is about aging, loneliness, and death. Playing at romantic love and sifting through fading memories are merely ways to hold on a little longer to a life slipping away.A spoiler is warranted here: In the Duke’s office, the Baron — as in the original — breathes his last and goes straight to hell. Naturally, since that is where “Francesca da Rimini” takes place. In Chernyakov’s version, it becomes another reprise of the romantic drama, repeatedly emphasizing how unloved, misunderstood, and isolated the protagonist is. Even the voices of Dante and Virgil come from offstage, leaving the Baron alone onstage. Only the chorus of demons howls wordlessly from somewhere in the upper balcony: The production’s creators have ingeniously placed two groups of choristers there, creating something like a Dolby surround-sound effect.Before reliving a trauma from his past, the Baron spends a long time wandering helplessly through an afterlife that faintly recalls the labyrinth of David Lynch’s Black Lodge. Chernyakov designed the magnificent set himself: two additional rotating rings (of hell?) surrounding the main revolving stage. Walls, doors, and corridors with flickering lights rotate in different sequences to dizzying effect. The structure resembles the workings of a Swiss watch or a mesmerizing mechanical ballet in which a sinful soul is doomed to lose all sense of direction. Humor finally gives way to a profoundly unsettling experience — one that may be deeply personal for the director, whether it concerns the loss of someone close or the fear of aging and death.Among Rachmaninoff’s cuts to the play’s original text is the Duke’s final line: “A terrible age, terrible hearts!” It is as though the director agrees with the composer. After a succession of productions that directly or indirectly reflected current events — “The Ring of the Nibelung” in Berlin, “War and Peace” in Munich, “Iphigenia in Aulis” and “Iphigenia in Tauris” in Aix-en-Provence, and “The Maid of Orleans” in Amsterdam — Chernyakov has returned to universal, timeless themes. Yet even if it was never his intention, it is hard not to think of today’s world, ruled by greedy members of the older generation, trapped in their own illusions and seeing enemies in their own children.Losing touch with reality, the Baron is funny, touching, and pitiful as he struggles to climb onto an armchair and sings the praises of his own illusory power: “I reign! What magical splendor! My realm obeys me; mighty is my dominion; within it lie my happiness, my honor, and my glory!” Several real-life counterparts inevitably spring to mind.There is another way to interpret the protagonist’s journey. Handing musical scores and monologue scripts to near-strangers to play his unfaithful lovers and the men who betrayed him, the Baron suffers the familiar torments of a director trying to interpret a work while trapped in the source material’s infernal labyrinth. Rather than a cautionary tale about destructive passions, Chernyakov’s production becomes a kind of ironic autofiction. It explores how difficult, yet tempting, it is to see ourselves in familiar characters from the classics.At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.Anton Dolin