La Fille de neige

During the summer break, we offer our readers a retrospective glaze on Stéphane Lissner’s first season at the Paris Opera. Chorus members, Ballet dancers, painter-decorators, machinists, couturiers in the Workshops… The Paris Opera staff teams were mobilized around the great projects of the season. Throwback on the institution’s key moments and precious crafts.

The Ballet season was inaugurated, for the first time, by an exceptional Gala with a creation by Benjamin Millepied, a piece by George Balanchine and a grandiose Ballet Parade. A festive evening that brought together the Star dancers of the Company, who were immortalized during a photo shoot by photographer James Bort. The second edition of the opening Gala will take place next September, 24^th with a creation by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, Blake Works I by William Forsythe and the Ballet Parade.

Among the important events of the Company’s life, this season was marked by the nomination of Aurélie Dupont as Director of Dance to succeed Benjamin Millepied and Star dancer Benjamin Pech’s retirement from the stage on the occasion of Jérôme Bel’s latest creation at the Palais Garnier.    

Repertory company, the Paris Opera Ballet displayed its talent through major classic pieces. The revival of Giselle was an opportunity to reenact an ancestral tradition: the transportation on foot of the set’s painted canvasses while the sewing workshops were adjusting the romantic tutus using a very specific technique. Revivals offer opportunities to pass on traditional craftsmanship and know-how, as for the makeup for the Golden Idol in La Bayadère.

Alongside emblematic ballets, the dancers appropriated themselves new pieces with creations by Forsythe, McGregor or entries to the repertoire of works by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Balanchine or Justin Peck. The American choreographer, in residency at the New York City Ballet, was making his Paris Opera debut this season. He will be back next season alongside Tino Sehgal, Crystal Pite and William Forsythe.

The Paris Opera Ballet dancers and the Paris Opera Orchestra joined forces to undertake a major project, the creation of Iolanta/Casse-Noisette, directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov and choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Edouard Lock and Arthur Pita. Combining genres, opera and ballet, Tcherniakov was wary of not isolating them with an intermission: “it’s one and the same show, one and the same story where ballet takes over what has been said and heard in the opera.” The stage director, who likes reviving Russian works, will return next season for a new production of Snegourotchka by Rimski-Korsakov.

For the members of the Paris Opera Chorus, one of the season’s highpoints was undoubtedly Moses und Aron, Schönberg’s immense work, which took several months of rehearsal to prepare. Other operas such as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, La Damnation de Faust or yet again La Traviata brought together the Paris Opera Chorus and Orchestra for the audience’s delight and amazement up to the exceptional concert given for on Music Festival’s Day on June 21^st. 

Hardly ever under the spotlights, a sextet of Paris Opera Orchestra musicians had the opportunity to take part in an operatic production, partaking fully in Robert Carsen’s stage direction for Capriccio.

Season 15/16 saw the official birth of the Paris Opera Academy whose mission is to transmit, form and create by welcoming for example students and resident artists, giving them opportunities to meet professionals and learn in contact with them. Rigoletto, directed by Claus Guth, was an occasion for young musicians and singers to work with the Paris Opera Orchestra while Mireille Ordinaire, resident stage director, could work on adapting a young audience program with the French creation of The Way Back Home in a production by Katie Mitchell and participate in a new production of L’Orfeo by Monteverdi, considered to be the first opera in musical history, both shows performed by singers of the Paris Opera Academy.

Lastly, the pedagogical program “Ten Months of School and Opera” celebrated its 25^th birthday this season. Two shows marked this anniversary year: the “Petits Violons” concert on June 4^th and L’Homme qui ne savait pas mourir (The Man Who Didn’t Know How To Die) on June 17th and 18th, testifying once more of the enthusiasm with which the young participants explore the musical and choreographical world. 

Born of the union between Fairy Spring and King Winter, Snegurochka is the heroine of an opera full of love and fire. The writer Dominique Fernandez converses with the young shepherd boy Lel and reveals the secret of a world in which nature, birds and animals replace men and women to avoid the conflicts of mortals.

Even though, in appearance at least, I’m only a secondary character in the opera by my friend Nikolaï Rimsky-Korsakov, it is I, Lel, who will reveal to you the secret behind his work. What a nerve! You don’t say! Alongside Snegurochka, the eponymous heroine, not to mention the Tszar Berendey, master of the empire and the father of us all, who am I, indeed, except a poor shepherd? And yet, I’m the one that knows the secret. Little by little I shall unfold it.

To begin with, listen to the Chorus of the Blind, at the beginning of Act II:    

Our eyes are lowered to the ground,
In the endless night they are closed for ever.
But our clear-sighted spirits perceive
Around us the kingdoms of the earth.
What is this tumult that arises everywhere?    

And thus they deplore the din of trumpets and weapons, the clamour of war, the hecatombs of warriors fallen on the field of battle and the weeping of their widows. Yes, the world has been delivered up to the madness of men.
War is only the tip of the iceberg, the most spectacular expression of this madness, a folly that manifests itself in every aspect of daily life, and first and foremost in the domain most familiar to all creatures: love, the experience of which no one escapes. Well! Look at what happens. Koupava is in love with Mizguir who spurns her for Snegurochka, who prefers me, but I'm interested by her and care nothing for her feelings. A beautiful opera about love, indeed! They all run after whoever is the least attracted by their amorous designs; they all make themselves miserable by pinning their hopes wherever they have least chance of succeeding. Humanity is comprised of men and women who tear themselves and each other apart, without ever reaching an agreement. Love, which ninnies proclaim as the promise of peace and happiness, is nothing but a source of conflict; love is a calamity.
The Tsar himself is powerless to re-establish any semblance of harmony. In vain does he determine to reconcile the lovers who battle it out amid inextricable intrigues. Disillusioned, he sees that all his efforts have come to nothing. My friend Nikolaï found a marvellous way of underlining his impotence. In all Russian operas, the role of the Tsar is sung by a bass. A deep voice, that descends to the depths is, along with an abundant beard, a sign of authority and power. Could you imagine Boris Godounov without his dark, velvety basso profundo? Now, the Tsar Berendey is a tenor! Everything he sings is charming, I adore his warblings, but his high voice identifies him as a decorative character without real sovereignty.

Poor Snegurochka! Her name means “Snow Flower” or “Snow Maiden”, and she really does need help! Born of the union between Fairy Spring and King Winter, she came into the world frozen, body and soul. Incapable of feeling the slightest love, she languishes in terrible emotional solitude. Perhaps, deep down, this is just as well for, in spite of her sufferings, the Sun god, Yarilo, who leads the dance of love, would only have to cast his eyes on her and she would die from the brutal impact of the Sun god’s warmth on the cold that imprisons her. Remember this prophecy: the fire of love would be fatal for Snegurochka, she would melt in its ardent rays.
Fairy Spring, King Winter, the Snow Maiden: by his choice of characters, Nikolaï indicates that the elements play an important role in his opera and that, instead of a theatre, the real setting should be all of Nature. Listen to another chorus from the prologue at the beginning, that of the birds. What an idea to have birds sing! Its only justification, the only way in which it can be understood, is the overall philosophy of the work. Men and women are not the principle characters of the opera. “How is that possible?” you’ll ask me. Doesn’t an opera have to be sung by men and women? Tenors, baritones or basses, sopranos and mezzos, don’t we recognise beings of clearly defined gender through the timbre of their voices? Snegurochka and Kupava are sopranos, Fairy Spring a mezzo-soprano, the Tsar Berendey a tenor, Mizguir a baritone and King Winter a bass: those are the rules of the genre. What are you getting at, Lel?

What am I getting at? To myself, Lel. In principle, I am a young shepherd, so therefore a man. But, you who are listening to me, it won’t have escaped your notice that it’s a woman singing the role. A woman? What is Nicolai up to now? Certainly, it’s not the first time a composer has entrusted the role of a young man to a female voice. Mozart opened the ball, so to speak, with his immortal Cherubino. Gounod adopted the strategy with Siebel in Faust as did Verdi with the page, Oscar, in Un ballo in maschera. Apparently, Richard Strauss is planning to do likewise for the young Octavian in Rosenkavalier. However, in each case, the composer only wanted to underline the extreme youth of the character, that undecided age in which morphology hesitates between male and female. As for me, I’m very young but that’s not why Nikolaï made me a travesty role. He used the tradition of operatic travesty roles but for quite another purpose than the usual one. In my case, it signifies that I am neither man nor woman; that I do not belong to the world of humans, any more than do Fairy Spring and King Winter, or indeed the birds I was talking about, or the animals that we see wandering through the forest. I am exceptional, of neither sex; I am a pure emanation of nature, a being without being, or rather an androgynous creature that contains all creatures at once, I transcend the difference between the sexes, escaping thus from the misery of lovers’ quarrels. Light-hearted and indifferent, pursued in vain by Snegurochka who has not grasped that my essence is in flight, I bound through forests, free to run in the woods, without the fetters that bind human beings in impossible passions…
Have you taken note of my name? Lel, what an odd name, isn’t it? It has the unique particularity of being reversible. You can write it forwards and backwards, starting at the beginning or at the end. “Lel” or “Lel”. Completely the same! What does that mean? Usually, a name indicates and underlines a precise identity. Given that I am neither man nor woman, I am not any one, I am no one, my name has no more substance than a bit of rubber that one can stretch in any direction and mould to any shape. The truth is that I belong to the kingdom of nature, being one of the elements of the universe.
And my voice? I am neither soprano nor mezzo-soprano like Cherubino, Siebel and Oscar, and as they say Octavian will be: I am an alto, that is to say, I have the least feminine of the female voices, a very low voice for a woman, a voice that shows that I’m not really a woman, but a creature whose voice is barely distinguishable from the lowing of beasts in the forest, the rustle of leaves in the trees or the far off rumbling of thunder in the sky.

And I have three arias to sing, “Lel’s three songs” as they are commonly called, to show that they form the musical climax of the opera. Why three, by the way? Why not two or four? The number three was not chosen by chance. Three is a sacred number. There are three Graces, three Fates, three orders of architecture; the French writer, Alexandre Dumas entitled one of his novels The Three Musketeers even though there are four of them because four is a neutral, inexpressive number. “Three” has overtones of the Holy Trinity. This detail shows once again that I am above and beyond human dimensions. The numbers two and four, even numbers, suggest something closed, the narrow limitations of a couple, the indigent psychology of the four humours, the arbitrary divisions of the seasons.
I, however, embody nature in her unceasing movement, circular and undifferentiated. My first song is sad, it evokes the “poor orphan” growing up in shadow and grief, and the “little strawberry” that perishes “beneath the big black bush”. In the second song, the joy of living erupts.   

The forest gaily awakens
And yonder the herdsman sings;
Ah, how sweet it is to live!
The sun shines radiantly
Amid the branches;
The silver birches
Tremble in the breeze,
Ah, how sweet it is to live!    

The message is clear: the only love that does not disappoint is that which awakens nature in the spring, that draws the sap into the buds, that thaws the ice to free the running brook, that ruffles the trees with an enchanting murmur. “Ah! How sweet it is to live!
Providing one abandons human love to melt into the elements. Poor Snegurochka pays a high price for wanting to love a man. At the beginning one thinks she has more sense: she rejects the man who courts her.

Go away and leave me alone! For pity’s sake, you appal me!

Mizguir may well have offered her a “ pearl of changing reflections” found at the bottom of the sea in the waters of an enchanted island, she rejects his advances. Why didn’t he listen to my third song?

A cloud, one day, said to the thunder:
Rumble! Rumble! I sprinkle the rain
And the earth shall be refreshed;
And I shall make the flowers happy.
Little girls will gather raspberries,
And young lads will follow them.

Because of the feast days, the dances and rounds, the songs taken up by the chorus, like the beautiful scene in the last act, in which the young lads and lasses come down from the mountain through the forest, in the company of gusli players plucking the strings of their instruments and shepherds blowing their horns. But beware! It is not a matter of forming couples or of disturbing universal harmony with personal affairs that would only be ruptures in Oneness. It is a matter of celebrating Oneness in a unanimous surging of wills in the determination to be rid of their petty identity.
But Snegurochka still doesn’t understand. Finally, she lets herself be persuaded by Mizguir and asks him to take her in his arms and carry her off. ‘Well then”, you’ll say, “there’s a couple who have chosen the path to happiness.” Do you really think that Nikolai would have betrayed himself by concocting a happy few with thatched cottages? If so, you don’t know much about my friend. The moment she abandons herself to banal sentimentality, the initial prophecy, which I asked you to remember, is fulfilled. Warmed by the sun of love, Snegurochka’s body of ice begins to melt.   

I die and melt for love
And happiness. Farewell all of you,
My companions, farewell, farewell my beloved.
Oh, my friend I am yours,
In this glance receive my soul.

What does Mizguir receive?

Ah! What a strange prodigy, what a mystery!
Thus melts the snow in the fire of the bright sun,
She has perished – Snegurochka is no more.
Like a snowflake she has melted.

And now it's Mizguir's turn: out of desperation, he throws himself in the lake. And who prayed for the sun to appear and shine? Who took the initiative that was to prove fatal to the young girl and her lover? It was I, Lel, and I congratulated the sun for showing so much ardour.

Oh sun, light and strength,
Sun, splendour of the earth,
Glory be to you, god Yarilo!

Don’t accuse me of treachery; I did kill the Snow Maiden, but only to spare her the misery of human love, the withering that is the lot of all couples. She is not dead, she has dissolved, she is liquefied; in melting, she has returned to nature, she has joined Oneness. I did not kill her, I saved her.
My friend Nikolaï is the only composer to have penetrated the “great secret of Nature” as Fairy Spring sings. The only one to have written operas that can be called pantheistic. He has even admitted that, in defiance of academic censure, he willingly drew on pagan themes from Russian folklore. From composition to composition, he deepened his notion of an holistic universe, both sensual and metaphysical. After Snegurochka, there will be Sadko, the fisherman who caught three golden fish in his net and went to the bottom of the ocean to give them to the daughter of the Sea King. After Sadko there will be Kitega, the name of the town which disappeared in a golden mist and became invisible in order to escape from the invading Tartars. But Snegurochka remains without doubt the most beautiful of his operas because it recounts that fragile moment in which the temptation of individual love gives way before the vertiginous gulf of pantheism.

Dominique Fernandez

In a few weeks, The Snow Maiden by Rimsky-Korsakov, currently playing at Opera Bastille, will be succeeded by Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: two major composers among the mostly widely performed today and two of the most prolific of their generation. Although they have a number of things in common, the two men began their careers in opposite camps, representing two different currents in 19^th century Russian music: academic for Tchaikovsky and nationalist for Rimsky-Korsakov.

Tchaikovsky was one of the first students to enrol at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire after its foundation in 1862 by Anton Rubenstein, a westernised representative of Russian music who had trained in the German tradition and accorded only a relative importance to the ethnic music of his country. Rimsky-Korsakov was a member of The Five, a group of Slavophiles initiated by Balakirev, a conductor as charismatic as he was sectarian and dictatorial. Opposed to the academic teaching of music he believed that Russian music should be developed from the national legacy of Glinka, drawing only selectively on western models, (primarily Berlioz). However, Tchaikovsky, who always acknowledged his ethnic roots, was no less attached to thematic subjects and national folklore than his colleagues in the opposite camp; he widely demonstrated this in both the choice of his sources of inspiration and his use of folk melodies, which he easily combined with his Germanic, French and Italian grounding. There was no ostracism between himself and The Five. Music critic for diverse publications, he gave a favourable reception to Rimsky-Korsakov’s first symphonic works (First Symphony, Sadko, Serbian Fantasy), whilst noting, not without justification, some of their technical shortcomings: “There can be no doubt that this exceptionally talented man is destined to become one of the most admirable exponents of our art”, he concluded. On his side, Rimsky-Korsakov gradually became aware of the limits of the teaching received under the aegis of Balakirev, particularly after his appointment in 1871 as professor of composition and orchestration at the Conservatoire of Saint Petersburg, where he himself had never studied. He explained this with perfect candour in his Chronical of my Musical Life in which he enumerated the gaps in his knowledge in detail. He then undertook various exercises in counterpoint: fugues, canons and chorales with figured bass, which he sent to Tchaikovsky to correct. The latter replied to him with a beautiful letter showing his esteem: “I sincerely admire and bow down before your noble modesty as an artist and your astonishing strength of character. These countless exercises in counterpoint that you have written, the sixty fugues and the numerous other musical subtleties, all this is such an exploit for a man who, eight years ago, composed Sadko, that I would like to proclaim it before the whole world!” For the moment, the relationship between the two men seemed to be developing with perfect amity. At around the same period, Tchaikovsky seems to have become closer to his colleagues when his Second Symphony, The Little Russian, which quoted Ukrainian folk melodies, elicited their admiration. The 1870s were the years of Tchaikovsky’s period of intensely Russian inspiration: the Second Symphony was followed by the opera L’Opritchnik (1872) in which the action takes place during the reign of Ivan the Terrible (16^th century) and the incidental music for Ostrovski’s play Snegurochka (1873) which Tchaikovsky laced with twenty symphonic and vocal numbers, featuring an abundance of folk melodies, a perfect masterpiece testifying to his genuine attachment to folklore and showing another facet of the work of a composer too unilaterally labelled as “pathetic”. However, a cloud was to darken the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov when, seven years later, in 1880, the latter threw himself into a composition on the same theme and wrote an opera which he was always to consider as his most accomplished work… Whilst conserving a semblance of perfect courtesy to his colleague, Tchaikovsky vented his resentment in a letter to Jurgenson, his editor: “Is it not disagreeable to you too to know that our subject has been stolen, that Lel is to sing other music on the same text, and that something intimate and precious has been snatched from me and used in another arrangement. I am so vexed that I could cry”!

It is pointless to deny it: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka clearly reflects the influence of its Tchaikovskian predecessor, and a comparison, number by number, is not always to the advantage of the opera over the incidental music.

From this point, as was "only too human", an embryonic rivalry developed between the two men, both of whom could pretend to the accolade of leading composer in the Russian pantheon. They did not contend on entirely the same territory and each had his own trump cards. Tchaikovsky, carried along by the patronage of Madame von Meck, quickly became a “media” personality, as we would say nowadays, initially at national level, then more and more on a European scale and beyond. The 1880s were to see him triumph first in Prague, where The Maid of Orleans was a resounding success; in France, where his works were published by the editor, Félix Mackar, and performed by Edouard Colonne’s orchestra and in Germany where he met Brahms and Grieg… In 1891, he crossed the Atlantic to inaugurate the Carnegie Hall; he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge… International renown was to come much later and more gradually for Rimsky-Korsakov. Although the twelve years Tchaikovsky spent teaching at the Conservatoire in Moscow (1866-1878) brought him the esteem of certain of the musical elite, in particular Serge Taneïev, they did not make him a leading composer of the Russian school: he did not have the stature, and teaching was burdensome to him. This did not prevent him from helping, with his habitual kindness, his juniors: Anton Arenski whose work he offered to programme in a concert instead of his own Romeo and Juliet – a really exceptional example of self-abnegation in favour of a colleague; and Rachmaninov whose opera Aleko he admired. Meanwhile, Rimsky-Korsakov, who, in addition to a teaching post in Saint Petersburg, was deputy director of the Imperial Chapel, with Balakirev at the helm once more, and who was soon to be appointed conductor of the Russian Symphony Concerts, only composed intermittently although he exercised considerable influence on dozens of students, an influence which was to extend well into the 20^th century. Another difference that is far from negligible: politically, Tchaikovsky was a conservative and a monarchist and was soon to be presented at the court of the Tsar Alexander III who granted him a pension for life, and he would set poems by the Arch-Duke Konstantine Romanov to music. As for Rimsky-Korsakov, he steered clear of politics as long as his profession was not involved, but his position, however discrete it may have been, was clearly of another persuasion. It was only later, in 1905, that, taking up the defence of his students at the Conservatoire for having taken part in demonstrations, he found himself temporarily suspended from his duties before being reinstated when one of his students, Alexander Glazunov, took over as director of the establishment.

Rimsky-Korsakov must have realised how much tension the Snegurochka affair had created between himself and Tchaikovsky and he waited until after his colleague’s death before taking up a subject that he had already used for an opera: Vakula the Smith, which in 1874 Tchaikovsky had adapted from Gogol’s Ukrainian tale, Christmas Eve, for a competition organised by the Russian Musical Society, which he won. Dissatisfied with the first version, Tchaikovsky reworked it in 1885 with the title Tcherevitchki (The Slippers or The Tsarina’s Slippers) though still not producing a masterpiece. “During Tchaikovsky’s lifetime, I could not have taken up the subject without causing him pain”, wrote Rimsky-Korsakov in his Chronicle, - a phrase as laconic as it was telling in ethical terms. Composed from 1894 to 1895, his opera Christmas Eve, a masterpiece still neglected in the West, is another testimony to Rimsky-Korsakov’s osmosis with supernatural themes linked to the cult of the season and the deities of Slavic paganism, an area in which he was much more at ease than Tchaikovsky. However, setting aside Snegurochka and Christmas Eve, to oppose the two composers through a comparison of their works, to favour one against the other, would be a completely sterile position, greatly in excess of the mutual umbrage their parallel lives may have caused.