The curtain goes up for the tenor Dmytro Kuzim and goes down for the soldier Konstantin Muzychenko.
The soldier died on the Luhansk front on Monday and was buried on Thursday in Kyiv. And the tenor, who began his career with the Lugansk Philharmonic, was applauded Friday at the Kyiv Opera for his portrayal of Andrey in Cossacks beyond the Danube.
The funeral and the opera, unconnected with each other, were united by emotion. The one given off by death, common in war, and beauty, strange in combat.
Private Muzychenko was buried in his town, Zhornivka, just over half an hour's drive from the Ukrainian capital. He was fighting in the National Guard, the first presidential brigade for operational missions, and everything—the national guardsmen in dress uniform holding the coffin, the music accompanying the entourage—was a way of saying something. Even the teenagers who, lined up with Ukrainian flags, waited for the corpse: the war will be long and their bodies will feed new waves.
"The best always leave," lamented Petro, who was saying goodbye to his comrade in arms. He is 28 years old and his fingers that held his cigarette were trembling. He stuttered, they told me that it was due to the effect of the shock waves. He told that they were fighting in the city of Bakhmut and they were mobilized to a town, Bilogorivka, where Konstantin died. They thought they were going to a safer place and it was the opposite. “In Bakhmut, a city, the buildings protect you when you fight,” he said. In Bilogorivka there are almost no buildings”.
Konstantin, says Petro stammering, died from the shrapnel that hit his heart.
In the National Opera of Ukraine people laughed. Cossacks beyond the Danube is a comic opera composed in 1863 about the exile of Ukrainian Cossacks expelled by Catherine the Great from her land of Zaporizhia. It is a sad subject at first and is performed in a country at war: Kyiv buries more soldiers than ever. But people laughed.
Is enjoying the opera an act of resistance? Of escapism?
Surrounded by a splendid architecture from 1901, the opera begins each function without the certainty that it will end, that an anti-aircraft alarm will not suddenly interrupt it and change the sound of the show... But, on Friday, people laughed with humor that the script reveals. Also the two soldiers who attended the function, one of them with a number tattooed on his neck.
Small black dots dotted the dead face of Private Muzychenko, between acne and shrapnel. The funeral was in the Orthodox Church of the Ascension of the Cross, and the people were there in procession. He led the coffin lid, with a tablecloth and a loaf of bread on top. And the coffin without a lid followed, with the Ukrainian flag covering the body of the soldier and with his face exposed.
On the soldier's forehead they had placed a tape with symbols that escaped me. “These are prayers to help get him to the other side,” one woman told me.
This woman told me about a friend of hers, a nurse at the front, who takes care of the corpses of soldiers before they reach the morgue. She says that when the Ukrainian soldiers find it impossible to pick up a dead comrade, they mark him on GPS and groups of volunteers try to take him away later.
It is a war of trenches, of mud, of trees, of exhaustion, of uneventfulness at the front. Her friend, her nurse, washes and recomposes the bodies before taking them to the morgue. She looks for their personal items to identify them, sometimes by tattoos. "Look at the last message he has sent or received on his cell phone," explains the woman, "there is the letter from his father in which he expresses his pride, a love letter, the thank you letter that anonymous citizens send to be distributed among the soldiers…".
He was talking about the soldiers who take their own lives because they can't take it anymore. And she explained that the families of soldiers killed without shrapnel vests do not receive compensation from the State, and that she has placed a vest on the corpse of a soldier who was not wearing it before sending it for autopsy.
While the cemeteries are expanding, the seats occupied in the Kyiv opera are dwindling. During this year of war the public that can attend a performance has been reduced three times (and also the price of the entrance): now there are 460 people, those who fit in the anti-aircraft shelter of the theater.
But those who went to see the Cossacks beyond the Danube on Friday laughed and rejoiced. Like in Kyiv, where, despite the depression and the air raid alarms, you can still buy jackets from Zadig
This tension is called in Kyiv the cappuccino debate. Can you enjoy life while soldiers die with World War II intensity? Can you enjoy a dance show?
In the hall of the Opera there is an exhibition of photographs of a former dancer of the house, Oleksandr Shapoval, who fell last September on the Donetsk front (another dancer also fell). The stage where Shapoval had danced Swan Lake so many times hosted his funeral chapel. Now I couldn't. All Russian works have been withdrawn from the program.
The Cossacks' intermission beyond the Danube was a good moment to approach seat number 6 in the first row of the stalls, stand with the pit behind you and face the chamber. At this exact point was the Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin when, in 1911, he was fatally shot by a revolutionary. It happened during the intermission of the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltán by Rimski-Kórsakov, with Tsar Nicholas II and two of his daughters, Olga and Tatiana, watching the scene from the central box.
Looking for a reference, Vladimir Putin was fascinated ten years ago by this predecessor of his, a reformist with a hammer: during his tenure, he had so many revolutionary opponents hanged that the hanging rope was popularly known by Russians as Stolypin's tie.
Such was Putin's admiration that in 2011 he forced his ministers to give a month of their salary to erect a monument to the man murdered in this opera house, which today would have gladly invaded Ukraine: on the monument they have written a thought from Stolypin tattooable on the skin of any Wagner paramilitary: "We must unite to uphold Russia's supreme historical right to be strong."
"We have to keep fighting until these bastards leave," said a relative of soldier Muzychenko in front of the open ground in the cemetery. The mother was not holding on. The soldier had a five-year-old son. And from there flowed those orthodox choir voices, eternal memory, which transport us to a world that –unlike shrapnel– cannot be touched.
This is how the soldier Muzychenko was buried. One day before his 30th birthday.
Russian cemeteries are expanding like Ukrainian ones, but Russian opera seems more effective than its army. At the same time that Kyiv was staging Cossacks on the Danube on Friday with emergency generators at the ready, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow was staging two operas at the same time in different halls: Le nozze di Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Linda di Chamounix by Gaetano Donizzetti. With all tickets sold.
The war does not stop. The music, neither.
For this Sunday afternoon, the Bolshoi in Moscow offers two operas and a ballet at the same time in different rooms, and, in addition, its chamber orchestra plays Mozart. The title of this concert is a phrase by the Salzburger genius that the Bolshoi has freely translated into Russian: “Music is the silence that lives between sounds”.
The purest music in Europe is now the silence that lives between each projectile in the Donbass.
Today, at the same time that the Bolshoi will shoot so much music in Moscow, the Kyiv Opera orchestra will also perform Mozart. The last silence of him. Composed in D minor. Catalog number 626.
The Requiem
