A century after its premiere in 1930, coming across the caustic The Nose, by Dmitri Shostakovich, in the humorous and irreverent staging by Barrie Kosky that is now on at the Teatro Real, is a vital shock and an antidote to these existences insipid and typical of civil servant climbs like those described in the story by Nikolai Gogol on which the opera is based, people who, both in the days of the czars and in the Soviets, congratulated themselves on their small advances on the professional ladder that did not It led nowhere, peons who took special pleasure in small exercises of power and social control... Nothing that today, in times and environments of freedom, does not resonate with every son of a neighbor.
The headless story of a bureaucrat who has lost his nose –“and what is a man without his nose!” he laments– gives rise to a cabaret reading in the hands of the until now director of the Komische Oper Berlin. The lost nose takes on a life of its own in the script, becoming independent and even moving up the social ladder faster than its owner. And in this surreal situation, the society that surrounds the unfortunate Kovaliov (Martin Winkler) – from the newspaper where he goes to place an ad in order to find her, to the policeman who does not believe what the unfortunate man tells him – cannot but to chop down at his expense. And Kosky, an expert in hilarity, accentuates the debauchery with the help of the river of characters –78 in that opera– and the dancers, whom he disguises with cabaret garter belts and matryoshka scarves on their heads. Even the noses take on a human dimension and multiply and dance a tap dance number, evoking a Broadway-style chorus line.
There are many ways to stage this first opera by Shostakovich, whose courage was typical of his then twenties. That farce with which he mocked the Soviet power system itself fell like a bomb when it premiered in 1930, with Stalin sharpening his fangs. But his could only be a daring youth, since he received the influence of avant-garde composers such as Alban Berg, who had just released Wozzeck, as well as the artistic environment at the home of Vsévolod Meyerhold, the famous theater director who welcomed him: there he had opportunity to meet, for example, Sergei Eisenstein, who had already directed Battleship Potemkin and was going for October.
The musical bill at the Real, under the baton of the British Mark Wigglesworth, is noteworthy. Shostakovich was the first to introduce a percussion ensemble in the orchestra, and his score constantly intersperses each instrument... a chaos that the Real's orchestra resolves with ease.
The Madrid theater has thrown the house out the window –this is a title that is rarely carried out due to the number of artists it involves– to provide another reminder of the high degree of intelligence and artistic level that was subjected to political repression in the USSR.
By the way, the Real chose the show last Friday to become the first opera house in the world to make its debut in the metaverse. The live broadcast contemplated the connection through Uttopion, the first metaverse created in Spain, with which the surreal universe of Shostakóvich and the cinematographic rhythm of his visionary music allied in the parallel universe of the digital.
