The Nose is a short-lived opera with an apparently light theme, and if it had to fit into a category it would undoubtedly be a comedy, a modernist revision of the comic genre with a delicious sprinkling of absurd situations. With this starting point -it is the story of a man who loses his nose after going to the barber, and who wanders around a bustling city in search of his beloved anatomical protuberance-, one might think that the first -and penultimate – Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera should be an expert in sweets for the theaters, a comical bombshell that causes uproar and laughter in the audience.
However, it is quite the opposite: The nose is rarely replaced, and theater managers prefer to sneak past it. As Barrie Kosky, the warper of the best productions of the Komische Oper in Berlin, rightly says, this is a piece that turns the life of a stage director into a perfect nightmare. It even seems like a miracle that one day the administration of the Royal Opera House in London agreed to finance a production for him, which is what is now coming to the Teatro Real, another house that, from time to time, is not afraid to step into the puddle of what we would call them “impossible operas”, as he did with Schoennberg’s Moses und Aaron or Zimmermann’s Die soldaten.
The logistical problem of the seven performances of The Nose (which will be musically directed by Mark Wigglesworth between March 13 and 30) lies in the number of characters and the vertigo of the action. It has a total of 89 roles, which makes it necessary to hire casts that, in the best of cases, can be reduced to about thirty singers capable of assuming three or four roles per head. Next to it, other titles with a long cast, such as Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, seem like a simple child’s game. And then there is the editing: The nose takes place in some twenty locations that the script presents at full speed, without giving time for the scenery to change drastically. How do you go from a private space to the buzz of the city at rush hour when the score barely allows a few bars of respite?
When Shostakovich undertook the composition of The Nose, in 1927, he was a 22-year-old young man who had recently completed his composition studies, and who already had some works signed and premiered with firm applause in the recently founded Soviet Union, including they a piano sonata and the first two symphonies. But to raise his level, and measure forces with his contemporaries, Shostakovich wanted to plunge into the abyss of contemporary opera and dialogue with the modernity of his time.
His biographers say that he had been impressed by performances of Berg’s Wozzeck and Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges at the Mariinsky Theater in Moscow, and, in fact, he was completely inspired by the former for the structure of The Nose, which is divided in 16 individual segments, adding scenes, interludes, a prologue, an epilogue and even a galop composed exclusively for percussion instruments, and with which the Russian maestro was several years ahead of Edgar Varése’s fundamental Iónisation.
But while Wozzeck is a cruel and anti-militarist nightmare about the destructive action that society exerts on the dignity of men, The Nose is a satire on the uses and customs of the bourgeoisie that the October Revolution had taken care of laminating. In reality, Shostakovich had no propaganda objective -after searching many texts he decided on a story by Nikolai Gogol, being a writer with whom he was familiar-, and yet the USSR’s own power structure was in charge of sabotaging his This first opera, which, although it ridicules the sad life of a petty-bourgeois concerned about his appearance and the opinion of others, has a musical language that ventures into avant-garde territory, rich in atonal friction, dissonances, and a conning of lyrical singing for the benefit of the spoken voice, what the Germans call Sprechtimm. In the USSR, such a groundbreaking proposal was going to have little impact.
Barrie Kosky is a stage director without limits: his arc ranges from Wagner -he was the first Jew to premiere at Bayreuth- to operetta, and silent cinema is one of his great influences. The production of The Magic Flute, a hybrid between opera and animation, is his most applauded milestone.
If The Nose today seems difficult to do, it was even more so for the composer himself in his own time: Shostakovich could not premiere it until 1930, in Leningrad, after two years of postponement in Moscow. After the premiere it was quietly withdrawn and was not restored in the USSR until 1974, a year before the composer’s death. Undoubtedly, the equally terrible fortune of his second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) -indicated as undesirable by, supposedly, Stalin himself in that famous anonymous article in the newspaper Pravda- finished off the disastrous fate of his youthful opera. . Shostakovich had to hide his adherence to modernism from then on – the alternative was a distant gulag in Siberia – and his operatic dream turned into a nightmare.
That is why Barrie Kosky’s production is so splendid, because it restores Shostakovich’s dream and amplifies the comic side of the libretto, the first draft of which was written by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the famous author of We (1920), one of the classics of science- russian fiction. Kosky starts from the comic core of the play -Kavalyov, the protagonist, who will be sung by Martin Winkler on bass, is a ridiculous show-off who in this production has a small, red nose, which contrasts violently with the ostentatious big noses of the cast, molded from the profile of the diva Barbra Streisand-, and from there he builds a brilliant sitcom.
Shostakovich, in fact, conceived the opera as a movie -with quick scene cuts, inspired by Eisenstein’s production-, and Kosky offers on stage a mixture between Harold Lloyd and the musical of the 30s. There is even a tap number -a chorus line of noses stuck to legs, like the ones Quevedo versified, in the purest Busby Berkeley style- and a frenetic racket that, paradoxical as it may be, organizes the chaos of the plot and maximizes the comic effect. In the end, The Nose was not an impossible opera, you just had to find a genius in comic scene direction to find the exact point where the difficult turns into pure delight.
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