Donizetti - Maria Stuarda (Salzburg, 2025)

Gaetano Donizetti - Maria Stuarda

Salzburger Festspiele, 2025

Antonello Manacorda, Ulrich Rasche, Kate Lindsey, Lisette Oropesa, Bekhzod Davronov, Aleksei Kulagin, Thomas Lehman, Nino Gotoshia

ORF2 broadcast - August 2025

For the little that they reflect reality, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to stage a historical opera in period setting and costume. There may be something in the drama that can be spun out to reflect the world we see around us today and the direction of contemporary politics, as in 2024 Vienna production of Don Carlo directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, but not all operas are suited to such treatment. Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, based on Friedrich Schiller's drama of the jealous female rivalry that exists between two English queens, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I for the heart of one man, is probably no more significant than feuding contemporary British Royals and as such likely to be something of deep indifference to most. What it does have to offer however is plenty of high operatic drama that is open to grand gestures and dramatic stylisation. We certainly get that in the 2025 Salzburg Festival production directed by Ulrich Rasche.

In fact it's an ultra-stylised production that has little of naturalism, much less historical accuracy. The stage bears two horizontally tilted spinning circular lightbox discs, each with a counter rotating centre, with no other props of any kind other than a third vertically tilted disc for lighting and occasionally projecting moody cinematic black and white closeups. The queens at the centre of the drama stand on each of the two horizontal discs, pacing against the rotation in stylised movements, Elizabeth and her court all dressed in black clothing, while on Mary Stuart's side they all dress in glowing white.

With its minimalist sets, bold swathes of lighting and stylised movements it's somewhat Robert Wilson like, but the gestures here are more operatic, slightly exaggerated, the intent different. There is scarcely a moment in the opera when they aren't pacing slowly, methodically, deliberately. It's perhaps an attempt to reflect determination of purpose, or you can the figures on a wheel of fate, where, as Elizabeth notes at one point on reading Mary's letter of supplication "Al ruota della fortuna tant’orgoglio impallida” ("On the wheel of fortune, even pride disappears"). Personal feelings and choices are not wholly determined by fate, but there seems to be some effort made to reflect their inner impulses in the male figures that pace the stage alongside Mary and Elizabeth. They aren't merely courtiers, not even chorus (the chorus remains off-stage), but as dancers (from SEAD, the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) making minimal movements and pacing perhaps in some way extensions of their emotional state.

There isn't exactly much in terms of real dramatic action in the first Act anyway to necessitate anything more in the way of props or movement. Essentially Mary, Queen of Scots, having been imprisoned for an attempt to overthrow Elizabeth and make her claim for the throne, sends the queen a letter via Talbot to the Count of Leicester asking for a meeting. Elizabeth contrives to bring this about during a royal hunt on the grounds where Mary is imprisoned, where emotions run high and verbal assaults are unleashed. It's all characters in deep personal conflict with their duty to the court and their own personal desires, with Leicester caught up between them. It's not much to go on, but Donizetti makes something great of it with huge dramatic swirls of orchestration that captures the personal torment and conflicted emotions of the characters. Even the jaunty rhythms seem to capture the furious beating of hearts. This staging doesn't try to make anything more of it than finding a way to express that on a physical level, personifying and bringing to the surface all the underlying explosiveness of the encounter.

Kate Lindsey as Elizabeth and Bekhzod Davronov as Leicester go a long way to bringing that circumstance to a head, Lindsey striding imperiously, extending hand gestures forbidding approach or entreaty, her furious glances towards Leicester and powered delivery alone capable of striking anyone down. If the white robed soprano is going to win hearts and minds over the black costumed mezzo-soprano in this quasi-historical situation she's got a real battle on her hands, but you wouldn't rule it out with Lisette Oropesa as Mary. Which of course is really what Maria Stuarda is all about. As I suggested earlier, battling opera divas is not much more interesting than battling jealous royals (of any era), but Donizetti's musical development and pacing has you gripped, not least because you know the Act descends into bitter recrimination and accusation that results in one of the most famous insults in all opera. As Mary delivers the killer punchline ‘Vil bastarda', even I felt trepidation at how Kate Lindsey's Elizabeth was going to take it.

Not terribly well obviously, history at least recording Mary's fate on the executioner's block, but Donzetti's intention is rightly to focus on depicting this as pure operatic entertainment and that is exactly what we get here from the fine singing and the musical direction of Antonello Manacorda, leading up to that showstopping confrontation and its delivery as a sextet. Yes, it's the centrepiece of a great work, a thrilling outpouring of a fictional dramatisation of naked anger that you could not imagine playing out this this way in reality in private or in public (yes, that's sarcasm), but it's the masterful way it is played out in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda and in the effective staging here that reveals it for the brilliant work it is.

The second Act has much to deliver as well, even though it's just a long build-up to the inevitable execution. And even though there is again little to differentiate the dramatic stage presentation and lack of props established in the first Act, the production (and singing of course) still manages to draw all the internal emotional intensity that underlies the scene. The wheel indeed seems just as appropriate here, the relentless march of history, the enmity and rivalry between the two queens setting them on a path towards an inevitable conclusion. It perhaps lacks the fire that was lit in the first Act, a consequence of how the drama is written rather than any flaw in the presentation, but the second Act has a compelling purposeful drive in Mary’s acceptance and in Elizabeth’s unwavering determination to carry though on her decision to execute her rival.

Despite Mary delivering the decisive blow in Act I for a standing count rather than a knockout one, personally I thought Kate Lindsey was winning this first round on points. (No, I'm no more a fan of boxing than battling opera divas). More accustomed to seeing her in trouser roles, Kate Lindsey is now a formidable mezzo-soprano leading voice, her delivery - under difficult stage directions where she never stops pacing - powerful and controlled, bringing real depth to the character despite all the stylisation of movement. Lisette Oropesa however commands the audience's sympathy for Mary in the Second Act, delivering all the passion of the prayer (preghiera) and aria del supplizio ('D'un cor che muore reca il perdono'), ensuring that both women have the opportunity to show the challenges of their respective political and personal positions, in dramatic terms at least, if not in terms of historical reality. There were superb performances also here from Bekhzod Davronov as Leicester and Aleksei Kulagin as Talbot, and from Thomas Lehman and Nino Gotoshia in supporting roles as Cecil and Anna.

External links: Salzburger Festspiele

Prokofiev - War and Peace (Munich, 2023)

Sergei Prokofiev - War and Peace

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2023

Andrei Zhilikhovsky, Olga Kulchynska, Alexandra Yangel, Kevin Conners, Alexander Fedin, Violeta Urmana, Olga Guryakova, Mischa Schelomianski, Arsen Soghomonyan, Victoria Karkacheva, Bekhzod Davronov, Alexei Botnarciuc, Christian Rieger, Emily Sierra, Martin Snell, Christina Bock, Sergei Leiferkus, Alexander Roslavets, Oksana Volkova, Elmira Karakhanova, Roman Chabaranok, Stanislav Kuflyuk, Maxim Paster, Dmitry Cheblykov, Nikita Volkov, Alexander Fedorov, Xenia Vyaznikova

ARTE Concert - March 2023

Neither the Bavarian State Opera nor director Dmitri Tcherniakov really knew what they were letting themselves in for when they chose to present Prokofiev's War and Peace on the 5th March 2023, on the 70th anniversary of the death of Prokofiev (not to mention the 70th anniversary of the death of Stalin). They evidently knew about the challenges of putting on a complex Russian opera with huge orchestral and choral forces and a large number of principal roles, but at the time it was planned they hadn't really counted on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th February 2022. By the time it came to put stage the opera in 2023, it was even more of a challenge in a climate where some Russian artists were being cancelled and there were second thoughts about programming works by Russian composers. Serge Dorny however believed that the production they had envisioned for this epic work could stand on its own merits and make its own points. The reception it received justified that decision, but looking at it more critically now away from the heat of March 2023, while it's still a powerful piece, it's just a little less impressive.

Lately there have been two sides to the operas directed by Dmitri Tchernaikov, or maybe just two sides of the same coin. On one side is the psychoanalytical, taking a distanced perspective and exploring the undercurrents to familiar stories from a kind of laboratory experiment (Les Troyens, Pelléas et Mélisande, Carmen, Das Rheingold) and on the other a kind of deflating of grand myths and legends (Der Freischütz, Parsifal, most of his Wagner actually) reducing them down into human terms. You could see them both as the same approach, finding the human element within grand sweeps of history and legend. His approach to Russian giants of Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Borodin and Prokofiev has been a little different, seeing in them something of the history, character and nature of ordinary Russian people, something that perhaps comes more from the original literary sources. There is no greater Russian literary source than Tolstoy's 'War and Peace', but how is a director of Russian origin supposed to approach a Russian opera when there is war in Ukraine?

Well, as it happens, almost exactly the same way as Tcherniakov has done before. If 'War and Peace' tells us anything, it's how ordinary lives are disrupted by war, how our stories and loves are coloured by war, how our view on life and history is irrevocably transformed by war. That goes for the lives of the high society aristocracy that Tolstoy grew up in and primarily writes about in the novel, and it perhaps brings them down to the same level as everyone else and reminds them of their essential humanity. So, it's a given that there is going to be no glamour in Tchernikov's production of Prokofiev's opera version of War and Peace, but a reminder, as if anyone needed it at the moment, of the nature of life in a time of war.

The director chooses to set the opera not in the grand mansions an ballrooms of Russian high society, nor on the battlefields of Ostrovno or Berezina (and indeed avoids the burning down of Moscow altogether), but instead locates the whole opera in the Hall of Unions in Moscow (which actually survived the burning), where in the past Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev have all lain in state. Here it's become something of a refugee centre, even before the war has started in the opera timeline. The room is filled with camp beds, mattresses, where masses of civilians are dressed in everyday clothes that they have presumably been wearing for days. The whole scope of the high society engagement of Natasha Rostova and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky takes place among this mess of humanity in peacetime, but even as that relationship is thrown into turmoil by the playboy Khuragin's attempt to elope with Natasha, the very real threat of war looms nonetheless.

The love lives of the aristocracy may seems trivial however when compared to the upheaval that is to take place when Napoleon Bonaparte invades, but it's far from trivial in Tolstoy's eyes. He, like Pierre, who although married loves Natasha deeply himself, comes to despise the trappings of wealth and privilege, society, but nonetheless in his search for meaning and value in life, finds the essence of humanity lies at the heart of it. It may be torn apart by war, but love and family are the essence of society or a nation and it is what keeps people going and enduring the hardships they face. Tcherniakov, while not quite going as far as Graham Vick in explicitly reversing the idea of 'War' and 'Peace' in his Mariinsky production, nonetheless similarly opens his production with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky contemplating suicide, and gives more or less equal weight to both sides of the equation.

The second half when war breaks out is however more of a challenge to accept within the limitations of the House of Unions setting that the director has set for himself and the progress of the opera. It's understandable that you would want to downplay any sense of wartime heroics - not that there is much of that in Tolstoy's vision of the horror of Napoleon's 1812 invasion - but it's harder to work it into the context of a room of refugees who indulge in a "Military-patriotic game ‘Battle of Boprodino' ". It risks downplaying the horror of the reality of the war - and by extension the unavoidable comparison to Ukraine. It's a tough balance to strike, but I would like to think he could have done more with this. Even Les Troyens, while succumbing to it being a play-acting of traumatised victims of war, was able to find a way around the traditional and humanise it without trivialising it. It might have had impact in the theatre, but looking at it now, it seems faintly ridiculous and ill-judged alongside a Russia currently at war in Ukraine.

There's certainly a case for ridiculing the world leaders and warmongers, but the scene of Napoleon played out like a comedy act for the entertainment of the assembled, prancing around throwing wine and food around, chewing his tie to hoots and howls of laughter, doesn't really get across the greater loss of life his ambitions and actions cause for ordinary soldiers and citizens. For all those irritating tropes of it looking like a madhouse, there is however more to direction than scene setting, and the fact that it takes place entirely within Moscow does allude to the fact that the war is within and that figures arise out of this mass and horror begins. This is at least borne out fully in the stage directions and acting performances, which do delve into those deep emotional and life upheavals, particularly on the part of Pierre who is central to the whole work. Its also there evidently in the music, which depicts all the inhumanity that war visits on the ordinary people. 

Given Tcherniakov's previous explorations of the nature of the Russian people through their legends, their literature and their composers, his take on Prokofiev's War and Peace could be seen a lament for the state of Russia perhaps, or the Russian people, or their victims. Which is another way to look at war, but hardly insightful either in the light of war in Ukraine or indeed in the depth to which Tolstoy explores the subject. Bearing in mind the challenges that had to be faced at the time of the production however, and the delicate balance that had to be maintained, it's about as much as you could expect, and it certainly hit the mark with the audience in Munich. Tcherniakov, who is more accustomed to facing boos and howls of derision at a curtain-call, is met here with roars of approval from an audience who clearly have been deeply emotionally engaged with what has been shown on the stage.

That may have been partly due to the highly charged atmosphere in a time of war - opera should be 'of the moment' and meaningful to a modern audience and Tcherniakov undoubtedly succeeded in striking a chord with his audience - but the director also did it on his own terms, finding the essential human quality within the work and also finding a way to explore the essential idea of Russian character and nature facing the upheaval of life that lies at the heart of the work ('Russian' in spite of the fact that many of singers are also from former soviet states), taking nothing away from the challenge of striking a balance and finding a universal character to the work. The highest praise in that regard however has to be reserved for the central singing performances: Moldovan Andrei Zhilikhovsky as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Ukrainian Olga Kulchynska as Natasha Rostova as Armenian Arsen Soghomonyan as Count Pierre Besukhov all never anything less than impressive.

The success of how that is put across is also testament to the power of Prokofiev's musical "reduction" of War and Peace, but reduction is hardly the appropriate term for this opera. With its huge cast required for the principal roles, its huge chorus and huge orchestral forces required to play Prokofiev's complex score, no undertaking of War and Peace is taken lightly. Vladimir Jurowski took a measured approach to the score, including some significant cuts, but only in terms of managing sensitivities which could not be ignored or taken lightly in the present climate. It's clear however that he takes on such challenges without losing any of the impact or intent of the score. The decision to go ahead with some judicious cuts was clearly the right one, Tcherniakov's production might not look now like it really addresses the complexities of the work, but it was the right one for the time, the power of the work and its importance enhanced by the reality of current events.

External Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, ARTE Concert