Wagnerian Passions

A Wagnerian opera is hardly something one would expect to inspire a Siberian protest. Yet that’s what happened this spring in Novosibirsk. Thousands came out to express their dismay after the director of the city’s opera house, Boris Mezdrich, was unceremoniously sacked over what was considered by a small percentage of the Orthodox community to be an offensive production of the German composer’s Tannhäuser.

Mezdrich and the production’s director, Timofey Kulyabin, were sued by a group of Orthodox believers for “defaming an object of religious worship” after they used a crucifix as an element of stage design in the opera (notably, set between the legs of a naked woman). The opera had received good reviews and was popular with the public, but Orthodox activists harassed theatergoers on show nights, standing outside and crying “Shame!”

The trial had the arts community on edge, with echoes of the 2012 prosecution of Pussy Riot: priests summoned as expert witnesses conceded they had not actually seen the opera, they had only been given clips of it to watch later, by undisclosed well-wishers.

The intelligentsia breathed a collective sigh of relief when the court ruled in favor of the opera, saying there was no evidence of “injury to a religious symbol.” But then Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky stepped into the fray, announcing that he wouldn’t let the matter drop and demanding an apology from the producers to “all those whose religious feelings had been injured.” Mezdrich refused and was promptly fired and replaced by a fruit importer, Vladimir Kekhman, who had testified against him at the trial. Kekhman immediately dropped Tannhäuser from the theater’s schedule.

Top actors, directors, and conductors have since spoken out in support of the opera, decrying the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of censorship and the seemingly unrestrained harassment by religious groups (in April, Orthodox activists placed a pig’s head on the doorstep of Moscow’s Chekhov Theater, shouting “Russia without blasphemy” in an apparent protest of the theater’s production of The Ideal Husband). But the government did not back down, and some officials argue that they have the right to decide what’s appropriate for public consumption when content is being produced with public funds. Magomedsalam Magomedov, the president’s deputy chief of staff for inter-ethnic relations, even suggested that new productions produced with state funds should be “previewed” by an “expert community” to avoid similar situations in the future. “At some stage we need to examine the repertoire,” he said, “especially at state theaters.”

“People who steal from the artist his right not only to experiment and think, but also to make mistakes, steal his profession. Perhaps these people would like Russia to replace all living culture and art with remote-controlled puppets? I think Minister Medinsky and some deputies were born taxidermists, they don’t want to deal with living, unpredictable birds. They would rather kill them, make them mute objects, and then properly position them in the fields and woods where they will look pretty.”

Novosibirsk actor
Vladimir Lemeshonok
(tayga.info)

“We are witnessing a situation where declarations by radical and uneducated persons are valued above the opinions of experts and audience feedback. Illiteracy and strong-armed methods are being encouraged, starting with anonymous tips to higher-ups and reports to prosecutors.

“What will I tell people around the world, whom I have assured that Russia is a country of high culture, spirituality, with the freedom to create, rather than the evil empire they imagine thanks to the exaggerations of Western propaganda?”

Conductor Teodor Currentzis,
music director
at the Perm Opera and
Ballet Theater (colta.ru)