IL PRINCIPE IGOR

Speranza

A Perfectionist Does Opera His Way
Dmitri Tcherniakov Tackles ‘Prince Igor’ at the Met

Every once in a while, the Russian stage director Dmitri Tcherniakov has a nightmare.

He’s ready to go to the theater and run a rehearsal when he realizes he has forgotten what he is supposed to do there, what he wants to tell the performers.

Then he wakes up and remembers that the dream is impossible.

Tcherniakov — who made his Metropolitan Opera debut on Thursday with a new production of Borodin’s “Prince Igor,” the company’s first performances of the work since 1917 — never arrives unprepared, never lacks a total knowledge of the score and never is at a loss about what he wants to achieve.

His command of each detail of his psychologically charged productions is absolute.

“He knows every step, every turn, every movement that he wants,” the soprano  Opolais, one of Tcherniakov’s frequent collaborators, said in a phone interview.

“He knows every second how it has to be.

Even if it’s 10 roles

— not only four roles, but 10 characters —

it’s always exact things they have to do.

I don’t know how it’s possible.

 I don’t understand how in one head and brain, how it is possible.”



One of the most serious and successful artists of his generation,  Tcherniakov doesn’t stint the grandeur of Borodin’s opera.

But he has done a thorough renovation of the structure and themes of this semi-fictional spectacle, based on medieval Russian history.

When he died in 1887, Alessandro Borodine left a gorgeous but rough assemblage of loosely arranged parts.

Tcherniakov has shaped the shaggy material into a searching study of the proud, tortured title character, turning a broad swath of the plot into a poppy-filled dreamscape for Prince Igor.

(As always,  Tcherniakov has acted as his own set designer.)

“This is HIS story,”  Tcherniakov said of Igor, leaning heavily on the pronoun.

(His English has much improved in the past few years, but Tcherniakov still relies on translators in rehearsals and interviews.)

“From the beginning to the end, the melodramma is dedicated to IGOR, to his fate, how everything turns around in his life.

All of the other characters are characters in HIS story.”

Tcherniakov arrives in New York in the wake of his contemporary-dress production of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” which, in December, opened the season of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan to scattered boos, as well as recent re-imaginings of other classics like Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.”

His Met debut is a major step in efforts by Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, to add to the roster more adventurous directors.

“I think, really, in many ways, this is one of the most important pieces that we will have attempted to put on here,” Gelb said of “Prince Igor.”

Several of the directors the Met has in mind — among them . Tcherniakov, Stefan Herheim and Calixto Bieito — have booming careers in Europe but remain little known in America.

They tend to have in common a visual flair that sweetens the rigour of their subversion of audience assumptions.

“You have to draw the audience in,” Gelb said about . Tcherniakov’s work.

“And the way to draw the audience in, at least initially, is to be attractive, so they feel connected to it.

So he’s very savvy in spite of his reputation, maybe, for being something of a provocateur.

It’s provocation of a positive nature.”


The Met’s crisply efficient logistical apparatus is still getting used to the idiosyncratic rhythms of this new cohort of auteurs.

One recent afternoon, deep within the opera house, Tcherniakov spent several minutes sprawled out on the floor, looking intently at boots.

He was overseeing the taping of a short film, showing Igor’s fall in battle and his imprisonment by the enemy Polovtsi, which would be projected between the production’s prologue and its first act.

In the final cut, the boots sequence would last just a few seconds.

But Tcherniakov was handling the arrangement of the soldiers’ feet with the same attention he elsewhere brought to Russian history and the nuances of Igor’s melancholy mind.

The shooting already well behind schedule, minutes ticked by as  Tcherniakov redid the order in which the soldiers entered, then redid it again, then adjusted the angle of a leg by a barely noticeable couple of degrees.

“This isn’t a feature film,” one Met staffer said under his breath.

“Do it how I ask you,”
Tcherniakov instructed one of the soldiers.

The actor in question had a three-step entrance whose rhythm remained oddly stilted, and Tcherniakov had him run it again and again until it settled into naturalness.

The final soldier entered in the correct position, but his steps lacked the necessary feeling.

“You should be more brutal,” . Tcherniakov said, demonstrating the curt, cruel effect he was looking for.

They did one more take.

There was a slight, anxious pause before  Tcherniakov spoke.

“Ideal,” he said, and everyone exhaled.


Born in Moscow, Tcherniakov had a breakout production, a rethinking of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh” that the Mariinsky Theatre brought to the Lincoln Center Festival.

But it wasn’t until his version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” at the Berlin Staatsoper that his international career took off.

He made headlines when his drastically concentrated production of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” had its premiere at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and prompted the great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya to boycott the theater in disgust.

Gelb had a decidedly different reaction when he saw that “Onegin” when it toured to the Teatro alla Scala.

“I was bowled over by it,” he said.

He approached Tcherniakov, who signed on to “Prince Igor,” a project originally planned for the conductor Valery Gergiev.

In an only-in-Russia moment, Gergiev mounted a performance of the opera in St. Petersburg specifically so that Gelb would have a chance to see it.

Gergiev eventually begged off, citing scheduling conflicts, and was replaced by Gianandrea Noseda, an Italian who was the Mariinsky’s principal guest conductor from 1997 to 2007.

But the score for the Met’s production has been shaped far more by its director than its conductor.

Tcherniakov re-arranged the standard order of acts and has focused on music known to be by Borodin, cutting certain passages in the traditional version that were completed, and even wholly written, after his death by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov.

The “Igor” production is not as overtly contemporary as is much of Tcherniakov’s work — Gelb called its aesthetic “timeless medieval” — but it shares with his other productions a willingness to arrive at new conclusions about plots and characters.

His version of Janacek’s “Jenufa” at the Zurich Opera emphasized the guilt-racked Kostelnicka as much as the title character.

Amelia in Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” at the English National Opera  wasn’t the traditional innocent damsel, but a seductive emo princess.

“The libretto isn’t going anywhere,” Tcherniakov said.

 “The music and the words are there.

But sometimes an unusual path to them adds dimension to a simple story.

His  interpretation of “Il Trovatore” for the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels compressed the action into a single room, with the characters shifting back and forth between “reality” and play-acting.

He has tended to tighten relationships beyond a libretto’s indications.

In his “Don Giovanni,” which originated at the Aix Festival, the characters were reconceived as part of a single family unit.

There were sequences that mystified some in the audience, but the show was permeated by a strange, haunting sadness.

He’s working in such a deep way that, very often, you need two or three times to understand it,” said Opolais, the Donna Elvira in that “Giovanni.”

“But if you get it, it’s forever. And you’re in love with him, because he gives you something special, something that you never felt before.”

With a sly, sometimes wicked sense of humour,  Tcherniakov can seem both vibrantly present and somehow removed once work is over.

His regular assistant, Thorsten Cölle, said in an interview,

“I’m very close to him, but somehow I sometimes think there are so many things I don’t know about this man.”

The Met’s Prince Igor, the Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov, was blunter.

 “He’s crazy,” Abdrazakov said with a smile during a recent rehearsal break.

“He’s a crazy man with a lot of energy, a lot of ideas.”

The intensity of Tcherniakov’s rehearsal style — running around the room to demonstrate movements and keenly focused even when still — clearly takes a toll.

In the course of a few days in January, he canceled one afternoon rehearsal for a migraine and another because sessions earlier in the day had tired him.

“He lives through his art,” Cölle said. “It’s him.

He’s all the characters onstage.

He gives all his power to the singers, that they become something onstage.

This is incredibly exhausting.”

So exhausting that there is little time for anything else. Tcherniakov said that the difficulty of maintaining personal and romantic relationships in a jam-packed schedule of work and constant travel was one reason he was planning to take a nearly yearlong break starting in April.


“My whole life, it’s a run,” he said.

“A run with a goal.

Sometimes I’m running and I’m gasping for air.

Sometimes I run in happiness, sometimes I run in fear.

And I want an opportunity to stop and to look at things differently.”

When he returns, the Met will be waiting.

A couple of years ago, rumours circulated that  Tcherniakov had been tapped for a new version of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in a forthcoming season, a production that the company recently announced would be directed by Robert Carsen.

“It is absolutely true that he and I discussed doing it here,” Gelb said.

“And then we both decided that perhaps this was not — it was not the best thing to do.

But I’m sure there are many other things he could do here.”

He spoke highly of the “Don Giovanni” and cited other possibilities in the Russian repertory, including a return of “The Invisible City of Kitezh” to Lincoln Center as well as another Rimsky-Korsakov opera, “The Tsar’s Bride,” which Tcherniakov directed at the Berlin Staatsoper in October.


“He doesn’t believe in any kind of magic,” Cölle said.

“So an invisible city he would always translate into something.

 The Commendatore” — in “Don Giovanni” — “doesn’t appear as a ghost, because it doesn’t work in real life.

It’s something he wouldn’t believe in.”

One of opera’s most experimental thinkers, then, may also be its most radical realist.

 Tcherniakov designs alluring sets and uses video, but he insisted that those things aren’t the point: “Everything I come up with I try to express solely through the artists on the stage.”

An article last Sunday about the Russian stage director Dmitri Tcherniakov and his new production of Borodin’s “Prince Igor” at the Metropolitan Opera gave an outdated reference to the credentials of Gianandrea Noseda, who is conducting the opera. He is the former — not current — guest conductor of the Mariinsky Theater. (He held the post from 1997 to 2007.)