News

05.07.2012

The Master and Margarita: twenty-three years on

Vladimir Yurovsky prepares for a performance of The Master and Margarita.

— Your father, Mikhail Yurovsky, conducted and produced The Master and Margarita almost a quarter of a century ago. Do you remember the circumstances in which this production took place?

— The Moscow première of Sergey Slonimsky’s The Master and Margarita took place at the end of May 1989, but the score, bound in its brown leather cover, was lying around at home a long time before the première. My father had received it from Leningrad and started rehearsing well in advance with the soloists. One after another, the singers started appearing at our house, along with several members of the orchestra. This was unusual. Of course, it was not the first time that my father had worked with vocalists and piano accompanists at home on opera parts, but he only invited instrumental soloists to the house when they were preparing together for, say, a Brahms or Tchaikovsky violin concert, or something of that sort. But here we were, with orchestra musicians and vocalists both being invited, and right there in the study, at home, the two strands were brought together. That, for me, was completely new. So, that is how I first encountered this unusual score, where one or several instruments is attached to each character, and somehow the instruments recount the fate of the character, without the use of words.

— Is this something which is rare in opera?

— In The Master and Margarita, Slonimsky tries to return to the roots of the operatic genre. The whole fabric of the work is woven out of dialogues between the singing voices and the musical instruments. As in the Florentine Camerata, where the history of opera in Europe began, and in the operas of Monteverdi, we find here monologues and dialogues instead of arias and duets, and psalmody and intricate recitative instead of melodies. The concept of the orchestral tutti is almost entirely absent. Even the term ‘orchestra’ is not very suitable for the type of chamber ensemble that is used here. Where there is more than one instrument playing at the same time, the harmonization of voices is not homophony or even counterpoint, but something more akin to heterophony, based on the principle of free polyphony. I remember that, at first, the music seemed very unusual to me. It was difficult to define stylistically. But gradually it came to me, each time instilling itself deeper and more persistently in my ears and in my heart.

— Did the broader cultural context of the perestroika era have an influence on the development of the première?

— It all happened as part of my father’s wave of enthusiasm for the concept of the independent or, as they usually said back then, ‘cooperative’ Forum Theatre. At that point in time, it became the first opera theatre to be completely independent of the state. In fact, it was a theatre without a theatre — the premises were leased, the musicians assembled from across Moscow. My father was friends with Stanislav Suleimanov, a well-known artist of the Bolshoi Theatre, and their friendship was the basis for the undertaking; they envisioned every imaginable kind of artistic community. I remember that very heated meetings on this topic were held at our house. These meetings involved a wide variety of people, for example Gennady Khazanov and Yuri Norstein; they were serious about wanting to bring all their muses together under a single roof. The first signs of this union appeared in 1987, with a production of Dmitry Bortniansky’s opera Quinto Fabio, which up to that point had never been heard in Russia in its entirety. The production was put together by Dmitry Bertman, then still a young student. Later, at home, I began to hear The Master and Margarita mentioned more and more often; then the score appeared, and then, at some point, Sergey Slonimsky himself. I never asked my father if they had known each other before. Of Leningrad composers, my father had performed works by Yuri Falik. I remember that, and also that Falik had been to our house, but I don’t remember Sergey Slonimsky before The Master and Margarita. It’s possible that they met at the composers’ retreat in Ruza. I recalled my own much later meeting with Slonimsky in Moscow, not long before the premiere of The aster, when we bumped into him in the foyer of the Tchaikovsky Hall at a concert in which Valery Polansky directed Alfred Schnittke’s Historia von D. Johann Fausten. I remember Slonimsky’s comments, his remarks on Schnittke’s score, which were, as usual, quite reserved and ironic, but surprisingly extensive and, as they say, ‘hit the nail on the head’.

— There was no discussion about a full-scale production?

— The decision to put on a concert performance of The Master and Margarita had been taken; the dates had been fixed for the end of spring 1989, first in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and then in the Tchaikovsky Hall. Rehearsals went on for almost six months. During rehearsals, my father began to use me as a piano accompanist, entrusting to me work with individual singers. Although the principal accompanist for the production was Alla Basargina, an outstanding musician and an accompanist at the Bolshoi Theatre, she did not have enough time to do everything, so my father gradually got me, a 17-year-old student, involved.

In the end, full-scale rehearsals lasted about a week, but the preparatory work at home went on for a very long time. Then there was a need to find people to play members of the Moscow Association of Writers (MASSOLIT) in the scene depicting the madness of Ivan Bezdomny. Slonimsky’s initial idea was that these roles would be given to members of the choir, but since, for a variety of reasons, the choir could not be mobilized, the idea came to my father to entrust the roles to students from the Moscow Conservatory school on Merzlyakovsky Pereulok. And so it came about that I and my classmates (we were in second year at the time) ended up in the production and were entrusted with one or two lines. I remember that my father gathered us together in his study and put us through quite long and detailed rehearsals, and then we were summoned for orchestral rehearsals. I recently listened to this performance again, as it has been made available on the Internet with Sergey Slonimsky’s permission, and I recognized my voice as well as the voices of my classmates. I was entrusted with the indignant line, «No, you hear!» and then something like «What did he say?» and «Who killed him?» I was very nervous. Like many at that age, my voice had broken, and my main concern during the concert was that it wouldn’t come out as a squeak. It is true that for that Moscow performance, I was entrusted with another ‘very important and very responsible’ task, that of inserting the cassette tape with the recording of the approaching tram in the first act, and the nightingales’ warbling in the second act, in the scene where Judas of Kerioth is killed. I remember that we brought the cassette recorder from home, because neither the Conservatory’s Great Hall nor the Tchaikovsky Hall had any technical equipment. And so it was me, sitting on the stage, in my ‘MASSOLIT’ seat, who had to press the button on the tape recorder. And I pressed it — almost always on time. Having said that, at the première in the Conservatory Great Hall, I almost missed my cue in the MASSOLIT meeting scene, as I was so enthralled by the sight, directly in front of me, of Ivan Kozlovsky. He was, probably, about 90, if not older, he was sitting in his... no, it wasn’t a tyubeteyka cap, more like a small Ghandi cap, like Jawaharlal Nehru used to wear; he was sitting, he didn’t move a muscle and his eyes didn’t blink, and he was looking straight in our direction. I think that he was just listening very attentively. That was the first performance in the Great Hall of the Conservatory. Then Kozlovsky came backstage, blessed Tanya Monogarova, made the sign of the cross and kissed her forehead — it was like something had ‘descended from heaven’. My second strong recollection relating to the public’s reception of the work was something that occurred in Leningrad, six months later, in late autumn of 1989. In the Great Hall of the Philharmonia, Professor Isaak Glikman was sitting in one of the front rows. Then he came backstage, with his perpetual cigarette in its holder, and started to smoke. You could still smoke there then. I remember that Glikman grabbed everyone’s attention and said some very interesting things about the production. I remember now that, for Leningraders in those days, this production was a much bigger event than for Muscovites, since for Muscovites, Slonimsky was simply a well-known Soviet composer, while for Leningraders, he was a great composer they could call one of their own. And what had been born here and then more or less strangled at birth, we had brought back 17 years later.

— Did this turn out to be a real artistic event?

— It was incredibly interesting simply to follow all the processes involved in creating the production. Some absolutely brilliant artists were involved in it. Stanislav Suleimanov created a remarkable Pilate. The role of Margarita was played by a fairly young Tatiana Monogarova, who at the time had only just embarked on her professional career — everyone simply went crazy about her. I remember that when Slonimsky first heard her he was completely captivated, he recognized that this was the Margarita he had written for. Igor Morozov was wonderful in the role of the Master, while Vyacheslav Pochapsky and Vyacheslav Voynarovsky did a fantastic job in the roles of Woland and Berlioz — and they will both be taking part in the forthcoming production at the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Leonid Zimenko, one of the Stanislavsky Theatre’s leading bass soloists, sang the role of Ivan Bezdomny... Overall for us, then just 17-year-old students, it was an initiation into a different, previously unknown world of modern opera. We were all in complete raptures over the score — I don’t remember there being a single one of us who didn’t like it. And this despite the fact that we were then, as students of theory (and today’s students are just the same), inclined to be very critical and even bellicose towards the majority of modern composers, particularly Russian ones, and always looking for intellectual battles.

The names Schnittke, Denisov, and Gubaidulina — then at the forefront of the Russian avant-garde — were at that time on everyone’s lips. It seemed strange to us that Sergey Slonimsky was not also ranked among those names, since by 1972 he had already written such an astonishing, fresh piece of experimental music — but of course, there was an awful lot that we did not yet know then. We didn’t really know about Bernd Zimmerman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, or Krzysztof Penderecki. All of this music would undoubtedly have already been fairly well understood even back in the 1960s and 70s by the Russian composers mentioned above. It is now clear that they all, to a large extent, benefitted from the experience that came from the West. At the same time though, they all completely retained their artistic individuality. As for Slonimsky, you could immediately identify music he had composed from just a few bars.

— Has The Master and Margarita been performed in the West?

— I have wanted to return to Slonimsky’s The Master and conduct it myself for a very long time. Several times, I tried to put it on in the West, but each time I came up against the issue that it was impossible for the work to be done in anything other than its original language. In opera today, surtitles are widely used, but in my view, this is impossible for The Master and Margarita. The relationship between the text and the music is such a fundamental part of the work that the viewer and the listener must take in everything directly, not through a translation. There is an authorized German translation (my father produced this work in Rostock and Hannover in 2000), but there are not yet any other translations. And of course, the creation of a new translation requires cooperation with the composer in order to achieve an ideal combination of emphasis in both language and music.

— What will be the particular features of the forthcoming production at the Mikhailovsky Theatre?

— I am very pleased that, for the forthcoming performance at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, in addition to several performers who were part of the previous production in Moscow, we have been able to secure Sergey Leiferkus for the role of Pilate. I believe that he is more suited to this role than anyone else. It is also great news that Vitaly Fialkovsky, one of the authors of the libretto, has agreed to take part in our undertaking as director. We want to create a kind of half-concert, half-theatrical adaptation format. The work is such that it does not easily lend itself to a traditional stage presentation. It is not really an opera, but a dramatic oratorio, akin to Bach’s ‘Passions’. The production that followed the concert performance at the Forum Theatre in Moscow was unfortunately not very successful. In my opinion, its main failing was that it was very illustrative. The result was Bulgakov’s book as it is known by everyone, but with pictures and music. It seems to me that Slonimsky’s unusual method of musical narrative, its reflexive nature and lack of narrative (he does not tell the story, it is like he is commenting on something which is already complete, or action which is only anticipated, and we exist in several time dimensions simultaneously), the counterpoint and multi-layered temporal and narrative development — these aspects all require a special, non-standard theatrical format. I could be wrong, but I think that the format of a semi-concert performance is the best approach for staging this particular opera, because it is not quite an opera, and not quite an oratorio. The certain detachment, or distance, which is created by the artists acting without real costumes or scenery, together with their complete emotional involvement in the ‘internal’, spiritual action of the novel, could offer the most suitable approach to providing a soundtrack to Bulgakov’s ephemeral world.

The very nature of Slonimsky’s music is such that it can be incredibly lyrical, and alongside this lyricism there is also a tragic sarcasm which is absolutely in the avant-garde OBERIU tradition, in the spirit of Daniil Kharms or Alexander Vvedensky. This, of course, comes first and foremost from Bulgakov himself and his book, but for me it is, at the same time, the aspect of Bulgakov’s book that makes it very difficult to translate into a dramatic theatrical production, and that has caused it to be done badly on film. It is always very difficult. When we are talking about such a famous book, everyone has his own notion of the voices of the Master, Pilate, or Woland, or of what Margarita sounds like; it is impossible to please everyone. But Bulgakov’s semitones and nuances, I think, are much easier to recreate with the help of music.

— Is this a performance for seasoned music lovers? Would the concert be enjoyed by admirers of Bulgakov’s prose? It is no secret that many people get lost and even feel timid around modern classical music.

— To those who love Bulgakov’s prose, but know little of modern opera, I cannot guarantee that they will hear in Slonimsky’s music that which they have been familiar with since childhood (Bulgakov’s text is not used in its entirety in the opera, locations have been altered slightly, and most of all, the order of events has been completely changed from how they are laid out in the novel). However, Bulgakov himself rewrote his book nearly seven times, every time adding something, cutting something out, changing the wording, and shifting certain episodes around! I think that themain contribution of the creators of this opera lies in the fact that they have succeeded in creating, on the basis of Bulgakov’s novel, a single, inviolable dramatic whole of music and text, where one cannot be separated from the other. And so I would recommend to those who are not very well versed in modern music to try not to separate the strands of text and music while listening to the opera, but to experience the continuation of the character’s speech in the instrumental solos as a move from the real monologue to the internal monologue. Bulgakov also often alternates real, direct speech and the unheard thoughts of his characters, often in the same paragraph! It is also best not to analyse this music on the basis of ‘clearly recognizable melodies and rhythms’, but to try to hear it as an extremely personal and original interpretation of Bulgakov’s text. Anyone who wishes to truly penetrate this music may want to re-examine Bulgakov’s familiar text.

OpenSpace.ru (in Russian)