A man wakes up one morning to find that his nose is missing. He will run all over St. Petersburg to try to win her back. He is a symbol of identity, status and virility for this vain and brash bureaucrat who uses his military rank of major to impress women and whose obsession is to rise from gray civil servant to inspector. Or Lieutenant Governor. Losing her nose, she will lead a crazed career within an even crazier story: she will end up finding his nose and discover that… she has had a much more successful career in administration than his and is already a State Councilor. It is The Nose, a story by Nikolai Gogol converted by Dimitri Shostakovich into one of the most singular operas in history, which as of today lands at the Teatro Real in Madrid in a production that he co-produces with Covent Garden, the Komische Oper and the Opera National of Australia, directed by the always dreamlike, cinematographic and full of humor Barrie Kosky.
The bass baritone Martin Winkler will give life to the unfortunate Kovaliov –and Anne Igartiburu to a television presenter who meddles to bring order to the delirium of history–, the protagonist of this piece that premiered in 1930 in Leningrad, in the midst of Stalinism, and that it was banned in the USSR for 40 years. She would be recovered by the Moscow Chamber Opera in 1974, and would take her around the world for decades. A creative and rebellious proclamation by Shostakóvich who, at a time when he is forced to put mediocre patriotic harangues to music and carry out institutional commissions, allows himself, at barely 21 years old, this piece that makes Gogol’s text good, which ironizes at the end of The Nose “how can authors choose topics like this… In the first place, there is absolutely no benefit to the homeland; and secondly… Secondly, there is no benefit either.”
Johannes Stepanek, who is in charge of staging the work again in Madrid, highlights Shostakovich’s irony towards the desire for status. “The play is about a not-so-nice man who thinks he has achieved everything. He has many flaws, but he doesn’t care, and when he loses his identity and status he has to face them. In the end the production makes us suffer and sympathize with him because we can relate to all his faults as a human being”.
And he remarks that “it is a brilliant musical theater story, a very cinematic roller coaster”. An attack on the senses that Barrie Kosky approaches from the cabaret, the magazine or the circus. Mark Wigglesworth, musical director, says that it is a piece “diabolical, a kind of delirium, the story of the work is absurd, terrifying, funny and extreme, and the music is too.” And he emphasizes that “it is about Shostakovich’s big bang, everything he wrote later in his life already appears on these pages, it is chaos and he would dedicate the rest of his life to refining that chaos, but he never found anarchy and freedom again.” of this opera.
