The bitter tears of Sergey Rachmaninov

 

Rachmaninov at the premiere of The Miserly Knight, 11 January 1906, with I. Grizunov (the Duke), G. Baklanov (the Baron) and A. Bonachich (Albert)

How glad I am Vladimir Jurowski still believes in the most haunting of Rachmaninov's three operas, The Miserly Knight, its text adapted practically word for word from Pushkin's magnificent 'little tragedy' (Skupoi Ritsar in the Russian - 'covetous' may hit the mark even better than 'miserly', especially since, as I only learnt a couple of days ago, Pushkin intended seven plays for each of the deadly sins, though he only reached four. For more on the origin of this frontispiece, see further down).

Nearly a decade on from his Glyndebourne championship, Jurowski (pictured below by Chris Christodoulou) conducted an orchestrally unsurpassable performance of The Miserly Knight in Wednesday night's London Philharmonic Orchestra programme, a fascinating double bill about gold and greed with substantial excerpts from Wagner's Das Rheingold in the first half. When he recently decided to join the pre-performance talk originally to have been given by director Annabel Arden alone, I was privileged to be asked to chair the chat. That meant handing over the review to my Arts Desk colleague Matthew Wright; he got it, I think.

Talk and performance were absolutely fascinating and challenging. VJ never views things from a conventional angle, and the way he manipulates the English language to express complicated thoughts simply is a marvel. Besides, who else would have pulled off this programme? The Rheingold sequence was infinitely more satisfying than Dudamel's disastrously paced and ineptly snippeted 'Entry of the Gods into Valhalla' the other week. It had been advertised as orchestral music only, but then Jurowski realised there wasn't enough to stand by itself. He found out that Sergey Leiferkus, his Baron, towering protagonist of The Miserly Knight, had sung Alberich and it all flowed from there. Thus we got the whole of the introduction, first scene and interlude up to the Valhalla theme, with the Rhinemaidens, in Arden's semi-staging, undulating above and below the front row of choir stalls. The Woglinde, recent Guildhall graduate Natalya Romaniw, took a minute to settle, but what a voice this is - I hear a potential Sieglinde in there.

Jurowski made the score gleam and undulate, as if we were in a finer acoustic that the RFH's (when I returned in the talk to his question of doing a whole Ring with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which he'd brought up at an earlier meeting, he said they'd need a whole new construction to house it). There was perhaps a touch too much care for the descent to and ascent from Nibelheim, and the patching felt a bit conspicuous from here up to the final sequence, but the anvils - 8, said the programme; 18, said VJ; 10 came on for a bow - resonated marvellously. Nor were the gods very Wagnerian-divine, but it was good to have the Rhinemaidens at the back rather than offstage, chilling the blood. And yes, we got six harps.

The Rachmaninov was, by contrast, impassioned, absolutely sure in every gesture - having played for the Glyndebourne 2004 production, the LPO still seems to have the music in its blood - and enshrined the most magnificent monologue in the operatic world from a still-untiring Leiferkus (there was a point a couple of years ago where I thought the voice was worn out, but little sign of that here). Annabel's finest touch was to find, unforced, a second role for the singer-actresses portraying Wagner's Rhinemaidens, as young Norns hovering above the Baron - especially valid since, as she pointed out, Russian abstractions like Death and Fate are feminine. The three made it work chillingly well.

We also spoke of how Rachmaninov takes a leaf out of Wagner in his slow-burn crescendos. There are two, the biggest, which seems to go on for ever before imploding, when the Baron, Bluebeard-like, lights candles and opens his six jewel-caskets. But the one with the more poetry to go with it is perhaps the more haunting in both music and text. Thus James E Falen's translation, preserving the Shakespearean iambic pentameters of Pushkin's original:

Ah yes! If all the tears, the blood and sweat
That men have shed for such a hoard as this
Should suddenly gush forth from out the earth,
There'd be a second flood - and I'd be drowned
Inside my trusty vaults.

As luck would have it, the fourth instalment of the Glyndebourne film downloaded to YouTube - I don't know for how long (and I'd urge you to buy the DVD, which is beautifully presented) - starts at exactly this point. So you can hear how Rachmaninov develops the extraordinary four-note ostinato of the third movement from his Suite No. 1 for two pianos, 'Tears' ('Slyozi'). This in turn derives from the bells of Novgorod, which haunted Rachmaninov from childhood. So that comes first here in the partnership of Nikolay Lugansky and Vadim Rudenko - my CD benchmark is Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch - and is followed by Leiferkus in the middle of Scene 2. Arden's production has the masterstroke of an aerialist, Matilda Leyser (now married to Phelim McDermott, Annabel told me), who scared the life out of me with her big eyes, as the fateful spirit of avarice.

Pushkin's monologue is great in itself: I've determined to learn it in Russian, as I started to learn Pimen's speech from Boris Godunov; let's see if I can get further this time  (Russians always appreciate you quoting some Pushkin - J can impress with 'Shto dyen gryadushy mne gotovit' since Tchaikovsky set Lensky's lines very faithfully). I'd also like to do my own translation and I've just discovered these illustrations for the Little Tragedies by a talented young artist, Ievgen Kharuk - very much in the tradition of Russian book illustration (though Ievgen is from Kiev, more power to his pen). Note the key motif from The Miserly Knight on the cover for all four works.

Look at more of his work here. It should, of course, be published. On which note, it saddens but doesn't surprise me to learn of the latest philistinism to dog the better part of Putin's Russia: the great publications known as 'thick' journals, a glory of the Russian intelligentsia even in Soviet times, are in danger of extinction and the dangerous fraud who's supposed to be the Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky (the one who said Tchaikovsky wasn't gay - see the footnote here - and who went on to even greater glories), won't lift a finger to help. 

 In the meantime, the staff of Moskva, the journal which first published Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, are ploughing on this month and the next unsalaried to try and save their great institution. The Interpreter has its rigorous finger on the pulse of this as of so much else. I know, pace David Damant's comment to a recent post, that it's partial as an instrument of opposition, but it does its best to provide chapter and verse against the scandalously nebulous propaganda pouring out of Russia at the moment.

A final, not unconnected, point: a far more incriminating photo than the above from 2004, along with detailed facts, here point to why there should be an immediate end to Anna Netrebko's hit-and-miss career in the west. If she was naive to think that giving money to a Donetsk opera and theatre company to carry on had nothing to do with separatist propaganda, then she should definitely have stopped when they asked her to hold the flag. Simple equation: if you pay to see Anna Netrebko, you're funding the daily murder of civilians in a war within Ukraine's legal borders - no doubt by both sides -  which the Ukrainians did nothing to start. And as a general principle, applicable to Gergiev too, the author of the article, Julia Khodor Beloborodov of Arts Against Aggression, is surely right:

Artists and their art can stand apart from politics. However, artists who use their artistic reputations to further a political cause cannot then be allowed to hide behind that reputation and claim to not be political actors.

Anyway, Netrebko's Iolanta and Four Last Songs discs are poor. That may be beside the point, but at least I wrote about those before I knew anything about this. 

Onegin as tool?

Updating last week's argument, which began with hero Desmond Tutu and ended up at the Met,  I draw your attention to a petition set up by 75 year old composer (Charles) Andrew Rudin. Its title quickly clarifies: 'The Metropolitan Opera: Dedicate 9/23 Opening Gala to support of LGTB [don't we usually say LGBT?] people.'

The reason? The deep irony that the opera is Eugene Onegin by that not exactly closeted, but hardly 'out and proud' composer Tchaikovsky*, due to feature Anna Netrebko as Tatyana and Valery Gergiev as conductor, two artists who have explicitly lent their support to Putin's campaign.

Should they be forced into the position of decrying their leader now that he has unquestionably gone too far and taken a leaf out of Hitler's rulebook? That's a difficult one, but asserting their support for the LGBT community worldwide might release them from explicitly condemning their friend and supporter. Should they be dis-engaged if they don't speak up? No, of course not. But in that instance it would be up to the individual whether to go to their performances or buy their CDs if they carry on remaining silent. Each person must make his or her choice, but imperatives - as I wrote, paraphrasing QE2 in Gloriana, 'the word MUST is never to be used to Princes' - won't get us anywhere. Come to think of it, Deborah Warner, whose oddly anodyne production this is, might be in a better position to say something.

Working on an article for Kasper Holten's much more vivid (to me, at any rate) Royal Opera production of Eugene Onegin earlier this year (scene above with Krasimira Stoyanova, Peter Rose, Simon Keenlyside and a recumbent Pavol Breslik by Bill Cooper), I came across an essay in the annual Bard publication, in this instance devoted to Tchaikovsky and his world - I think it might have been by Alexander Poznansky, whose refutation of suspicions about the composer's sudden end I don't entirely buy - giving me more chapter and verse on Tchaikovsky's attitude to his gayness than I'd seen before. I'm indebted it to it for these lines following the usual report on the composer's decision to marry Antonina Milyukova:

Pyotr Ilyich certainly had no intentions of fighting his nature. Of Modest’s charge, the eight year old deaf mute Kolya Konradi, he would no doubt have gone no further than to admit that he ‘adore[d] him passionately’ and to write to the boy ‘ I kiss you warmly 1,000, 000, 000 times’. But he continued to have (buy?) sex with the likes of a high-school student in Vienna and a coachman on a friend’s country estate which he described as ‘nothing but a homosexual bordello’. He told Modest that he could not think of his loyal manservant Alyosha Sofronov ‘without being sexually aroused…[his] boots I would feel happy to clean all my life long’. In January 1877 he fell in love – admittedly without the wish or the hope for consummation - with the coquettish 21 year old violinist Josef Kotek [pictured with the composer up top] and remained so during the whole affaire Milyukova; Kotek was even one of the two witnesses at the wedding [official photo below].

Amazing how much we have come to know. Of course the whole confusion over Kolya and later over his nephew Vladimir 'Bob' Davydov brings in the horrid equation of homosexuality with pederasty: exactly the sort of grim muddying of the waters in which Putin's laws are currently revelling. But then, as Stephen Fry points out in a passionate polemic I've already eulogised, if you were to even bring up any of the above in the Russia of today, you could find yourself in jail. Enough; I feel my blood pressure rising even as I think about it. Action is what we need, and quickly.

I must note one funny thing that's happened since I started blogging about all this: the number of weekly Russian pageviews which had hovered for ages between the 200-300 mark has dropped to about 20. Now I only noticed the original figures because they seemed rather high - bots, possibly, thought I - but now it's the sudden drop which seems weird. But it's easy to get paranoid about these things.

Let's end, though, with the consolation of Tchaikovsky. The story behind the performer gets us into muddy waters again, I'm afraid; if I understand aright, Russian law helped Pletnev get out of a sticky situation when rape charges were brought against him by the family of a teenage boy in Thailand, where he was living at the time. As a performer, he stopped being welcome in the UK, though not in France, where I heard him conduct a typically inconsistent performance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. His pianism has always been on a higher, if still sometimes maddening level; I'm sorry to hear he's stopped playing. Anyway, here he is in the Kremlin with the 12 miniatures that make up Tchaikovsky's The Seasons (properly The Months). If you want to indulge in elegy, try the June Barcarolle at 15m40s or the October 'Autumn Song'  at 27m20s.

(9/8) I've just read here on the Limelight site that Gidon Kremer has enlisted his great long-term collaborator Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim, inter alia, to give a concert in Berlin on 7 October in support of Russia's jailed or persecuted opposition.

Kremer, too, has made his own observation on Netrebko's and Gergiev's support, which you can read in the link, but no harm in reduplicating it here as it rounds off everything so eloquently:

I don't want to point the finger, but it always upsets me to see talented colleagues more interested in self-promotion than in their art form becoming state delegates rather than artists. I'm highly suspicious of patriotism that identifies itself with the government. An artist, in my opinion, and historically, should be independent.

6/9  Mr Rudin's petition waxes stronger - over 8,000 signatures and 10,000 likely by the time of the Met gala. He also drew my attention to the isolated but magnificent voice, among singers, of Joyce DiDonato, great artist and clearly true Mensch (I guess you can use that word about both sexes). She has written an eloquent blogpost here, telling us that she'll be dedicating her Last Night of the Proms performance of 'Over the rainbow' to 'to all of those brave, valorous gay and lesbian souls whose voices are currently being silenced – either by family, friends, or by their government'. What a woman.

12/9 In response to the Arts Desk piece ('When artists could speak out') and my statement that if only to square my own conscience I wouldn't be attending a Gergiev concert until he says something, a reader responded: 'I’m afraid Mr. Nice is unlikely to be found at one of Gergiev’s concerts anytime soon. Gergiev was asked about it by a Dutch newspaper. Today there was an article about his festival in Rotterdam. He said the law was misunderstood abroad: “In Russia we do everything we can to protect children from paedophiles. This law is not about homosexuality, it targets paedophilia. But I have too busy a schedule to explore this matter in detail.” ' So the heinous confusion between the greatest of crimes and a natural human instinctcontinues here. Nice.

*8/9 Not according to Putin's Russia. Just read this in Private Eye: 'a new state-sponsored film by the director Yuri Arabov presents him [Tchaikovsky], ludicrously but in line with what seems to be official policy, as heterosexual. Attacked for this deception, Arabov has said it's "absolutely not the case" that the composer fancied men, adding: "I am opposed to the discussion of such things, particularly in the arts." Who said the old ways of the Soviet Union were gone?'

And - 18/9 - Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky has jumped on the revisionist bandwagon, commenting on the film: 'There is no evidence that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual'. How many explicit references in the diaries and letters - faked, no doubt - does he want?  

Tom Service has the right idea of how to answer this in today's Guardian: Beethoven made up his deafness to bolster his reputation! Brahms wore fake beards! Britten kept secret his marriages to several women! And so the game goes on. My own contribution: Mahler concocted his Jewishness because as the bored son of a perfect Viennese Catholic bourgeois banker, he wanted to kick against the grain.

A hero of our times

 
Breaking a self-imposed rule not to pile up posts - as well as a vow to get on with 'proper' work - I have to give vent to this. Out of the heart of a continent where gays are being executed, imprisoned or just driven underground - 'there is no homosexuality in Mali', even our liberal-minded Sophie once said - and unspeakable state-directed barbarism in Russia comes this voice of consistent sanity and courage. Retired 81-year-old forrmer archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu does not mince his words like the Pope - though his were welcome too after Ratzinger's hypocrisy - or our own Archbishop(s) of Canterbury.  Here is exactly what he said according to The Independent.

I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place.

I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this.

I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.

Predictably he was lambasted by Bob 'Hanging's too good for 'em' Mugabe, who suggested he might want to take a husband rather than a wife. But you might have expected that, and Tutu's words, too, are exactly what I would have hoped for from the man who wrote such an eloquent introduction to Bishop Gene Robinson's In the Eye of the Storm back in 2009. Mostly praising Robinson's courage, he included another unequivocal statement.

For me, the question of human sexuality is really a matter of human justice; of course I would be willing to show that my beliefs are not inconsistent with how we have come to understand the scriptures. It is not enough to say 'the Bible says...,' for the Bible says many things that I find totally unacceptable and indeed abhorrent. I accept the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, but I remember that the Bible has been used to justify racism, slavery and the humiliation of women...Apartheid was supported by the white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, which claimed that there was biblical sanction for that vicious system.

...May I wholly inadequately apologise to my sisters and brothers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered for the cruelty and injustice that you have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of us, your fellow Anglicans; I am sorry.

He doesn't need to apologise to me; I can't imagine why anyone would want to be a member of a church whose head only welcomes gay people so long as they don't express their love in sexual terms - as one wise American nun put it, like saying 'you're a bird, but you can't fly' - but I do want to see change there. It will come, sooner or later. The enormous Wiki entry on Tutu details on just how many fronts he has fought, and keeps fighting, not least support for Bradley Manning. Perhaps the greatest figure of our times, even while Mandela still lives?

Meanwhile there is much that is good elsewhere in carrying on the fight. Even Cameron impressed me with his words on why the Gay Marriage Bill, deeply flawed as it is, needed to happen. But I'm thinking mainly of  excellent articles in the papers like Hugo Rifkind's light-of-touch comment on Putin's Russia in the Times, which sadly can't be read unless you contribute to the Murdoch coffers (though I would, in passing, recommend you do read Tanya Gold in The Guardian on the pathological outburst of vilest Tweeted rape threats against the woman who wanted Jane Austen on the £10 note and her defender, MP Stella Creasy).

Rifkind begins by listing the edicts that have so horrified the liberal corners of the world: 'one law prohibits the adoption of Russian children not only by gay people but also by single people living in countries that allow gay marriage, presumably just in case they ever get the urge.' [A recent extension of this logic has been to legislate for the removal of children from gay couples, or even from couples where one partner or the other is suspected of being gay]. 'Another allows for the two-week detention of gay or even "pro-gay" tourists' . That also means 'suspected of being gay', so it puts the khybosh on travel to Russia by concerned would-be visitors. My blog pals Will and Laurent have already cancelled their 2014 Volga trip; good for them.

Meanwhile violence and injustice against gays in Russia escalate daily. Perhaps the lesson embodied in Berlusconi's conviction - che gioia -  is to tell us that Putin, like Mugabe, is only lashing out in his decadence and will end his career ignominiously - but when?

We can all do something in this case, even if it's as seemingly pathetic as not drinking Russian vodka, not buying Anna Netrebko CDs (perish the thought) or not going to Gergiev concerts. Does that sound weird to you? Well, let me explain. Both are among the 500 artists who lent their signature to the Putin campaign. Both have got themselves embroiled in politics, so are not performers living entirely within the musical sphere who should just be left in peace. Gergiev, as we all know, is as deeply implicated as he could possibly be. Netrebko - who, heaven knows, can't be anti-gay, and was snapped above by Manfred Werner at Vienna's Life Ball earlier this year - was told by one American activist she MUST make a stance on her attitude to the gay persecution. Well, the word 'must' is not to be used to divas, as La Cieca rather over-insistently made clear in an intriguing debate on Parterre dominated by the admirable 'M Croche'.

But it would be good if she did. It would also be good if out, proud and absolutely fabulous Marius Kwiecien  - pictured above, photo from the Teatr Wieki website, though not sure what the message on the T shirt is trying to say and yes, he IS top barihunk as far as I'm concerned - could make a statement as he sings alongside Trebs and under the baton of Gergiev in the Met Onegin. But that, again, is very much a matter for his own conscience, and we won't condemn him for not doing so. Worth pointing, out, though, that even the opera's composer lived a freer life under the repressive tsarist regime, at least until his questionable end, than those who can only benefit from his example across Russia do now.

Update (7/8): Stephen Fry has just covered all we could wish and more about Putin's Nazi rulebook tactics in this superlative 'open letter' to Cameron and Co about the Sochi Winter Olympics. I'd give him a knighthood for this.