A little piece of village life...
Interview with director Barrie Kosky
What distinguishes Mussorgsky from all the other Russian composers?
BARRIE KOSKY Although he comes from the Russian tradition, the radical musical exploration of his themes makes him a complete outsider. I think the composers of his time, the Borodins and Glazunovs and Rimsky-Korsakovs, sensed that he was a very special composer. But they could not admit it to themselves. They thought that Mussorgsky simply couldn't orchestrate properly. So his friends set about ‘helping him’. But in reality, Mussorgsky was a genius and knew exactly what he was doing. But apparently, only later generations could realize that. Mussorgsky's oeuvre had a great influence on composers like Stravinsky or Shostakovich. Unfortunately, it is very small, and on top of that, he left much of it unfinished. He was a complicated, manic-depressive alcoholic, his music is full of an incredibly misanthropic desolation.
But Sorochintsy Fair is not necessarily desolate ...
BARRIE KOSKY Yes and No. After Boris Godunov and parallel to Khovanshchina, Mussorgsky deliberately wanted to write a comic opera as a way out of this desolation. Something along the lines of ‘I'm going to write myself into a good mood!’ Maybe it was also a bit about childhood memories. Mussorgsky was born and raised in the country. Perhaps composing Sorochintsy Fair was also an attempt to remember his happier childhood, away from the city of Petersburg. But still, there is an incredibly dark side to the Fair. That comes from Gogol and his strange mixture of comedy and misanthropy. A few years earlier, Mussorgsky had tried his hand at Gogol's The Marriage, but this is a very different Gogol. The Gogol of Evenings on a farm near Dikanka - Sorochintsy Fair is the first of eight stories published under this title - is the Gogol of superstition, folklore, strange and grotesque. A perfect mixture!
Is this desolation problematic for you as a director?
BARRIE KOSKY No, on the contrary! There is something incredibly fascinating about it because it is a very special way of transgression. It's as if the battle was lost long ago, as if the inner demons had won. Mussorgsky’s music seems to be located somewhere between reality and non-reality. And he feels comfortable in this interstice. Not ‘comfortable’ in the sense of happy, but the battle is behind him. It is as if the apocalypse had already taken place, and we are looking at a dead landscape after the catastrophe. That's why the music often seems to me like a procession, a procession of dead souls.
What is Sorochintsy Fair about?
BARRIE KOSKY A village is terrorised by the superstition of a devil who once gave his red coat to a Jew to pay this tab in the pub. And now the devil haunts the village at the same time every year to claim his coat. That very night we meet a family that is very unhappy with their life. - That's all! It is a small piece of folklife in Ukraine. I like the simplicity of the story. It is the opposite of what we usually experience on stage. The plot is simple and straightforward, almost nothing happens. But as so often in Slavic works, the whole life is contained in it: religion, superstition, love, sex, family, food, drink, ignorance and mass hysteria... The microcosm of the village as a mirror of the whole human life!
How to deal with such an unfinished work as Sorochintsy Fair?
BARRIE KOSKY Actually, only another half-hour of music would have been needed for the two-hour opera would have been complete. But the absence of certain parts is, in my opinion, not as serious as in other works, because unlike in Boris Godunov or Khovanshchina, here Mussorgsky did not set a psychologically complex plot to music. It is a puppet theatre. Small glimpses of life, like in a photo album: here are the lovers. And here are the father and the stepmother. And there! The lovers again. Here we see the frustrated wife with her young lover. Oh, she almost gets caught. Now, where did that pig in the background come from? ... short, little snapshots, like leafing through a strange photo album. But it certainly wouldn't have hurt if Mussorgsky had composed the missing 30 minutes. The fragmentary is not part of the work itself. Starting with Vissarion Shebalin’s completion, we tried to make the evening as round and interesting as possible, and therefore added additional music: three songs arranged for choir and one song sung by Grizko.
The story then ends succinctly: after the nightmare, everyone comes together again. The lovers are allowed to marry, the mother storms off, the villagers laugh at her, everyone sings a song and the opera is over. ‘Once upon a time, there was a small village at the end of the street…’ As I said before, it is nothing but a small piece of village life that is shown here. No more, but also no less.
