The eighth deadly sin. “The Seven Deadly Sins” in “Helikon” as a mind game Kurt Weill 7 Deadly Sins

The premiere of Kurt Weill's opera-ballet "The Seven Deadly Sins" was presented on the small stage of the Helikon Opera Theater. The topic is intriguing. In Russia, this work is staged very rarely, although it is considered one of the master’s best creations. Almost thirty years ago, Boris Pokrovsky staged “The Seven Deadly Sins” on the stage of the Chamber Musical Theater, where the legendary Pina Bausch brought her version to Moscow in 1989.

Edward James asked Weil to write a work about pride, gluttony, greed, envy, anger, despondency and lust. It was the height of the Great Depression in the United States, 1932. The composer set the music to Bertolt Brecht's zongs. The production premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1933. “The Seven Deadly Sins” is a short work, only 35 minutes, but in Helikon Opera it lasts an hour.

We wanted to diversify our evening, so the first part will feature seven zongs from different periods of Weil’s work, and the second part will be an opera-ballet itself,” director Ilya Ilyin revealed the secrets of the production.

According to the plan of set designer Rostislav Protasov, the space of the Shakhovskaya hall was turned into a cabaret during the Great Depression - tables, waiters. The heroes are dressed in the Art Deco style: hats, frock coats, feathers, veils, velvet, and a discreet shine of gold. The symphony orchestra is located at the back of the stage. The musicians are separated from the participants in the action by the plywood silhouette of the house, which became the reason for the misadventures of the main characters.

The Seven Deadly Sins tells the story of two sisters, Anna I and Anna II. But in fact, this is one girl who suffers from a split personality, which is why she appears in two images: one Anna singing, the second dancing. According to the plot, the sisters go on a trip to America. They were pushed into the unknown by their farmer parents and older brothers. They need money to build a house on the banks of the Mississippi in Louisiana. The sisters must earn it. The only thing the relatives pray to God for, knocking on plates with spoons: “Lord, instruct our children so that they find the way to money.”

For seven years Anna wanders from city to city and learns all seven sins. They either work as extras, or as dancers, or even engage in the oldest profession. The sisters are completely different from each other. The eldest is smart and practical. The youngest is beautiful and has her own mind.

The performer of the role of Anna II is Ksenia Lisanskaya. She is also the choreographer of the play.

It seems to me that there is no sin in this story,” says Ksenia. - We very often have a substitution of concepts; everyone interprets sin in their own way. The sinful life of my heroine is absolutely sacrificial. And the house that is being built in Louisiana with Anna’s money is the path that my heroine built for herself.

Anna I (Ksenia Vyaznikova) lectures her sister, calling her a little crazy girl. And while she is dancing, he takes away her beloved. What the youngest thinks about this, the audience can only guess, because Anna I is a dumb character.

As Ksenia Lisanskaya says, it is very difficult to fit seven years of the heroine’s life into an hour-long performance. Therefore, it was decided to build the image on emotions. “I didn’t want to make unnecessary movements on stage, despite the fact that this is ballet,” says the choreographer.

It is unlikely that the viewer will think about the eternal, it is unlikely that he will delve deeper into the search for his own sins, but he will certainly enjoy Weill’s music. As conductor Valery Kiryanov says, it acts as a contrast shower that cleanses the soul.

Extravagant hat with feathers, black dress, tables and glasses. The spirit of cabaret with energetic zongs and jazz rhythms, along with a light fog, penetrated into the aristocratic White Column Hall of Princess Shakhovskaya at the Helikon Opera. Conductor Valery Kiryanov and director Ilya Ilyin staged “The Seven Deadly Sins” - a biblical story in a “Brechto-Weillian” shell.

Balancing between external shockingness and current semantic concepts is the essence of the theater on Bolshaya Nikitskaya itself,

and the choice in favor of the story of learning the seven sins accompanied by dance steps is quite logical.

The eventual point for the repertoire of Moscow theaters is noticeable: you won’t hear Weill’s music anywhere, but here is a whole “ballet with singing”, where there is a foxtrot, and a shimmy, and a Dixieland, and a waltz, and in addition there is a prologue of seven zongs. The illusion of simplicity is just an illusion, and the music, with an almost band composition of performers (among them drums, clarinet, accordion), does not let you get bored.

The team of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is familiar to everyone from The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny, and the half-hour story about two sisters/doubles is terra incognita for most. The performance at the Pokrovsky Theater in the early 80s is unlikely to be remembered by many, and in 2004 such pilgrimages to Perm as they are now have not yet been made.

Therefore, a brief summary would be appropriate. The plot comes from the 30s of the twentieth century, Anna and her sister, also Anna (one of them is an alter ego?), leave Louisiana to earn money in order to send money to their parents and brothers. For seven years they travel through seven American cities, where each time they learn a new sin - laziness, pride, anger, gluttony, adultery, greed and envy. And in the end, they all return to the same house again.

In Pina Bausch’s 1976 performance with fiery dance, freed from feigned “beauties,” only one vice reigned supreme - debauchery and lust,

taking over the consumer society. German critics took up arms against the director and awarded her the title of creator of “ballet orgies in Wuppertal.” (By the way, in 2009 these “atrocities” could be seen in Moscow as part of the Chekhov Festival.)

But Pina and “The Seven Deadly Sins” are not an accidental and even special pairing, mainly because of the “ballet with singing” genre itself. In the 1930s, the idea of combining voice and dance appeared almost by accident: Kurt Weill's wife, actress and singer Lotte Lenya turned out to be incredibly similar to a dancer Tilly Losch- the wife of a rich Englishman Edward James. And since he financed the project, he had the right to add a clause to the contract, and the vocalist had a plastic “double.”

The controversial mix prophesied the troublemaker from Wuppertal her own genre of “dance opera,” where the character exists in operatic and ballet guise at the same time.

So it is in “Sins”: while one Anna sings, the other dances.

And yet, are they sisters or doubles? Brecht left the question open, as well as other plot points. It is not entirely clear what is hidden behind these sins? Everything is very conditional, so the hands of interpreters are untied.

In the “Helikonites” version, the performance appeared to be in response to the question: why, in fact, should a young girl go to earn money for her parents and brothers? Are they really that pious and kind to send her there? Relatives, like an obsession, haunt the heroine: either they, like children in the dining room, wave their spoons and seem to demand food, or laugh at her, or look at her through a magnifying glass. Of course: they are in shabby rags, and she is in an elegant dress in the Art Nouveau style.

Yes, by the way, the mother performed by a strong bass is a real Cook from S. Prokofiev’s “Oranges”!

Grotesque, of course, is a sharp, prickly grotesque; It’s not for nothing that director Ilya Ilyin dreams of staging “The Nose” by D. Shostakovich.

The family quartet is in every sense the most successful discovery of the performance:

owners of bright, char A tern tones Dmitry Ovchinnikov, Anton Fadeev, Eduard Schnurr, Ivan Volkov cheerfully and clearly, half-comically and half-assertive, they played the role of the annoying family from the memories.

But the image of Anna raises questions. The idea of external similarity dissolved: Anna I (in the second composition - Larisa Kostyuk) was completely different from Anna II ( Ksenia Lisanskaya). The only hint of their “duplicity” is the luminous frame in the center of the stage, reminiscent of the rim of a dressing room mirror. Place them on two sides - there will be a kind of “distorted” image.

Perhaps the idea behind this is to look at the past: Anna I, already a respectable lady, finds herself again on her journey, when she wandered from city to city, and what she experienced; Anna II is, accordingly, her double, although rather not a ballet one, but a pantomimic one.

I remember exactly the same technique of self-reflection in the opera production of Eugene Onegin. Kasper Holten: Tatiana and Onegin seem to remember their past, and their doubles from the past are played by the same plastic dancers. True, there is a psychological opera, but here, after all, Brecht and Weill.

The “Brechtian” beginning in the play generally works in a special way:

External techniques are preserved, but they lead to “anti-Brechtian” results, with increased lyricism and sensuality.

First of all, we are talking about the zongs themselves - the whole performance consists of them.

If a composer writes a stage composition that does not reach at least an hour of action, then he dooms it to eternal proximity, because otherwise the audience will feel deceived: what, the performance lasts half an hour? All directors have to somehow get out.

Just like Pina Bausch once did, the directors at the Helikon Opera turned to other zongs by Kurt Weill, accompanying him with action. Bausch, naturally, choreographed the dances, and Ilyin offered a short sketch about the story of Anna’s love for Fernando ( Mikhail Davydov) - and showed how it was before, in the “present”, even before all these memories and doubles.

They decided not to translate Anna and Fernando’s songs in three languages into Russian, apparently so as not to distract the audience.

But the action is in its purest form a love story, and how does this fit in with Brecht?

More reminiscent of a scene from an opera or operetta, especially considering Larisa Kostyuk’s voice. She has a powerful, “meaty” mezzo-soprano timbre, and the low register sounds downright ominous, but why such a threatening pressure, and most importantly, why so much vibrato in the zongs? After all, there is a recording of the same Lotte Lenya on Youtube, and you can see that the aesthetics are completely different.

Another example is the words on stage. In the production, Anna writes “money”, “Fernando”, “love”, etc. on the wall with chalk - again, the sentimental connotation obviously predominates. In the “epic theatre,” words also appeared on stage as part of the scenography, but for the opposite effect of “detachment.”

Maybe music with a clear jazz flavor provokes lyrical messages?

Hard to tell. The “Band”, led by Valery Kiryanov, played with drive, energy and real fire, and at the same time came to a tragic result.

How does the whole story end? In the finale, a small structure of scenery is folded into a house, and its shape resembles nothing more than a coffin, with a luminous cross in the middle. Inside it, a white rag doll is nailed to the wall - the same one that the girl so reverently and naively took with her at the very beginning of the action. Both Annas enter this terrible house, bringing a disappointing line to their story.

The issue of morality in the relationship between parents and children was revealed in “The Seven Deadly Sins” from an unexpected side and not at all trivial; this line was drawn quite convincingly. But in the end, the play tries to make us empathize and sympathize with the heroine, which Brecht tried to avoid.

Each listener has his own barometer of perception of such transformations - and the main part of the hall applauded briskly. What can I say, if such a decision is pleasing to the public - does it have a right to exist?

Photos by Irina Shymchak

Prologue. Ksenia Vyaznikova. Photo by Sergei Biryukov

If we apply the classic “must-see” stamp to today’s capital opera premieres, then first of all I would put it on this performance: “The Seven Deadly Sins” at the Helikon Opera. And for the sake of the worthy work of the famous theater, but most importantly - for the sake of the work itself of two great lovers of truth, Bertolt Brecht and his inseparable co-author, the writer of fiery zongs, Kurt Weill. For the sake of that desperate authenticity of thoughts and feelings, which in the atmosphere of falsehood reigning all around, both in their time and in ours, is perceived as a burning but cleansing breath of honesty.

Prologue. Larisa Kostyuk. Photo by Sergei Biryukov

They defined their 1933 production of The Seven Deadly Sins as a ballet with singing. And most often this musical parable about the temptations of man in the modern world is staged by choreographers. Suffice it to say that the director and producer of that world premiere in Paris was. Many of today's viewers remember the luxurious performance of 2009, which became her swan song for us: the legendary Pina died a few days before she was supposed to come to us at the Chekhov Festival, and the troupe showed a production full of spring-like passion without its creator.

The novel didn't work out. Larisa Kostyuk and Mikhail Davydov in the prologue. Photo by Sergei Biryukov

But there were also experiments in approaching the work from the operatic side. Unfortunately, the author of these lines did not see the performance in his Chamber Musical Theater with Elena Kushchina in the main vocal role, and the filming, they say, has not been preserved...

The current young director Ilya Ilyin and his team, in my opinion, coped with the task.

Like all directors of this work, they were faced with the question of what to connect it with. Because 35 minutes is too short a running time for an independent theatrical evening. You can, of course, simply make it part of a program of one-act plays. At Helikon they took a different path: they prefaced the opera with a prologue section of Weil’s zongs taken from his other works. More precisely, even like this: first, a little over a year ago, a program appeared in the theater with these zongs and much more - a solo concert by one of the leading actresses of the theater, Ksenia Vyaznikova. And then, falling more and more under the spell of Brecht and Weill, the Helikonites decided to stage an opera. They simply removed everything from the solo program except Weill - and were surprised to discover that there were exactly seven zongs left. Pure chance? Or a sign of fate?

Anna the Second (Ksenia Lisanskaya) is at first a real angel. Photo by Sergei Biryukov

...There is almost no scenery. There are only two cafe tables, at which a woman and a man take turns singing thoughtful, sarcastic, dashing foxtrots, tangos, waltzes, milongas. Following the mood of the music, they suddenly decide to overcome their loneliness, she is the first, he is responding to her movement - but they immediately part, he with annoyed relief that he came to his senses in time and paid off, she with the bitter consciousness of disappointed hope.

This is the prologue. It almost imperceptibly moves into the opera itself: only the small orchestra (conductor Valery Kiryanov) pauses for half a minute, with exaggerated diligence checking the tuning of its violins and flutes to the accordion - where would the music of the 1930s be without this instrument.

And this is what happens to this angel then. Ksenia Lisanskaya and Ksenia Vyaznikova. Photo by Sergei Biryukov

The singer's story begins, commented on from time to time by the male quartet, about two sisters, both named Anna (!), who have one goal in life: to build themselves a house in their native Louisiana. For her sake, they set off on a journey through big cities - Memphis, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, etc. - where they are tempted by laziness, greed, gluttony, adultery... the list goes on. The restrained and gloomy monologues of the singer - the sensible and serious Anna - are set off by the appearance of a smiling, infantile dancer, first a modest girl with a doll in her hands, then an increasingly cheeky heroine of cafes, earning money not only by dancing, but also by more intimate arts. The third shot is an ironically old-fashioned chorale of a male quartet: these are peasant relatives who remain at home and sarcastically comment on Ann’s urban adventures. The climax is an episode where a heartbreaking story is told and sung: while one of the Annas with gloomy dedication sleeps for money with an unloved rich man, the other frivolously spends this money on a dear friend. The opera ends with a fanatical march performed by the “serious” Anna, who finally subjugates her fragile namesake sister. The mortal sins of the second are condemned by the first - who, however, is no less a sinner. There are no winners here at all. Having finally finished their journey, the sisters approach with admiration the house they have built, hide in it - and we see that it is a grave crypt. Betrayal of yourself, the murder of that good thing that you crushed in your own soul for the sake of external well-being - this is the most important, truly mortal sin, according to Brecht and Weil.

Such a clash of characters cannot bring anything good. Ksenia Lisanskaya and Larisa Kostyuk. Photo by Sergei Biryukov

The press was uniquely lucky. Taking advantage of the fact that the opera is short, both casts were specially shown for us in one evening. Both are worthy. Ksenia Vyaznikova may be a little too VOCAL, but she is also bright as an actor, a sort of Marlene Dietrich type who became an opera soloist. Larisa Kostyuk is more restrained in demonstrating her vocals, and this is appropriate in almost cabaret music. It is interesting that both soloists are mezzo-soprano, but of the two existing editions of the score, soprano and mezzo-soprano, they decisively chose the first. And even in the fact that the tessitura is not very comfortable, they found a meaning - in this opera the singer should not be comfortable, her voice should sound with special tension...

But Mikhail Davydov’s baritone is exactly as smug and confident as is needed in this monochromatic role of the polished macho Fernando. Ballerina (also choreographer) Ksenia Lisanskaya literally achieves with a few strokes what other troupes require a large ballet ensemble to do: not so much with dance, but with sketches of it, she draws out a plastic counterpoint to the main musical content of the opera - the vocal story.

An interesting detail: one of the members of the quartet, the thickest bass, Dmitry Ovchinnikov, is dressed up as the mother of the patriarchal family - a corpulent matron with a large soup spoon (costume designer, who is also set designer - Rostislav Protasov). It’s not exactly an original move, but the audience’s smile is guaranteed, and the reception is quite in the spirit of Brechtian theater, which grew out of a folk booth.

And this is, perhaps, the most important thing in the Helikonites’ performance: its simplicity and graphic nature leave both Weill’s music and the evangelical power of Brecht’s text completely clear. The effect is as if in a stuffy room they let you inhale ammonia and opened the window wide.

The music of Kurt Weill, which not only became part of the radical aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht's social theater, but also itself opened up a new stylistic option for the stage of the twentieth century - a synthesis of folk melodies, expressionism, musicals, revues, eccentricities, jazz and chanson traditions, is extremely rarely staged in Russia. Meanwhile, in Europe and America, Weill is not only staged, but also new arrangements of his music are created, as, for example, two years ago the Salzburg Festival commissioned a new orchestral version of “The Threepenny Opera” (“Macky Knife”) from the British Martin Lowe.

The very fact of staging Weill's "Seven Deadly Sins" in Moscow is included in the category of musical events. Ilya Ilyin’s performance, on the one hand, returned to the Moscow playbill a title that had been absent from it for 36 years - since the premiere at the Pokrovsky Chamber Theater (by the way, in 2009, the Chekhov Theater Festival showed Pina Bausch’s play), on the other hand, presented the score in an updated stage format: not a “ballet with singing,” as conceived by Weill and canonized by the world premiere staged by George Balanchine, but a mono-opera with a plastic part.

The heroine of the mono-opera is Anna, whose story begins not with “Sins”, but with a prologue - a chance meeting in a cafe of long-separated lovers. A man and a woman leading a passionate and hopeless duet in the three languages of Weil's zongs. Here Ksenia Vyaznikova (Anna) appears in chic brocade and a hat with feathers, starting the dialogue with the zong Berlin im Licht. Her partner is Mikhail Davydov, with whom last season they already made a program of songs by Weill, Legrand, Gardel, accompanied by the Siestango Quartet ensemble. And already in the prologue, Ksenia Vyaznikova pulls the thread of hard expressionism, demonstrating her enormous artistic and vocal range, effectively using the dynamic and register contrasts of Weill’s music. Her abandoned Anna, left in the existential emptiness of the black space of the stage with the luminous outline of the opening into the invisible world - past or future, sensual or subconscious, shouts into space: Meine Schwester! (My sister!), recalling herself from memory - the Anna she once was and who went through the circles of all the sins and temptations of life and now remains completely devastated. “Sister” (Ksenia Lisanskaya) becomes her plastic double, illustrating the action, “Deadly Sins,” for which Anna writes notes on the wall with chalk. And these inscriptions are not about sins, but about the main evil of the world - Geld (money). Anna was sent by her family - a grotesque quartet of her father, two brothers and a colorful mother with a soup spoon in their hands (Dmitry Ovchinnikov), shouting in chorus the absurdly comic phrases of Brecht's text.

Anna Vyaznikova quietly exhorts, explodes frantically, looking at her double, at her “former” self, rushing around the stage in front of her. Words scattered along the wall like chalk - not “pride”, “fornication” or “laziness”, but Anna’s life - “beginning”, “inexperience”, “Fernando”, that is, “love”. She must renounce love, because love is not the path to the coveted money. At the end of her passionate narrative, Anna Vyaznikova screams at the limit of expression to her former Anna - “give up joys!”, “conquer yourself!”, locking herself with her behind the doors of a black crypt house, mysteriously glowing with an electric cross. The hymn to this sad victory over a living human being, over his mistakes and sins, flows with a totalitarian “march” of an orchestral tutti (Valery Kiryanov). And the least of all in this performance is the moralizing and “didactics” of the sins themselves. The question here is about the essence of life.

In 1927, the German composer Kurt Weill met the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who at that time was thinking about extending his ideas of “epic theater” not only to drama, but also to musical theater. In Weill, Brecht found a like-minded person; the playwright and composer created the zong opera “Mahogany,” which was later reworked into the full-fledged opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” This was the beginning of a collaboration, the fruits of which were such works as “Berlin Requiem” and “The Threepenny Opera”. Their latest joint creation, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” became especially unusual.

This work was born outside of Germany. In 1933, after the Reichstag fire and the appearance of the decree “On the Protection of the People and the State,” which abolished many rights and freedoms, it became clear to the poet and playwright that Berlin was now not the most suitable place for creative individuals (as for Kurt Weill, he had more reasons to leave his native country when the Nazis came to power - after all, he was Jewish by nationality). Both of them go to Paris, Weil stayed there, Brecht visited several European cities, in particular Prague, Vienna, Lugano, and he also visited Denmark. He returned to Paris for a while when Weil contacted him.

It was then that the plan that arose during Kurt Weill’s visit to Paris in 1932 was realized. Then he met in the French capital with Edward James, a wealthy man from Great Britain. He commissioned the composer to create a work in which his wife, Tilly Losch, could play the main role. The composer was struck by the external resemblance of this ballerina to his wife, actress and singer Lotte Lenya. It was decided (and even reflected in the contract) that she would also take part in the play - and also in the main role... but how to do this? This is how the idea of a unique performance was born - “ballet with singing”.

In creating the libretto, Brecht uses this “doubleness” of the central image. The work features two girls - sisters who have one common name - Anna (more precisely, Anna I and Anna II). Considering that it is extremely rare for sisters to be given the same names, this makes one wonder - are we really talking about two different people, perhaps two sides of the same personality? This question remains open in the work, but a certain hint is contained in the words of one Anna about the other: “She is only an appearance, I am real... We have one past, one future, one heart and one savings account.” Two Annas (or is it one “forked” Anna?) become the center of a plot quite typical of the Great Depression era in the United States: a large poor family dreaming of their own home in Louisiana, “where the light of the moon is reflected in Mississippi.” Both for the fulfillment of a dream and for the life of a family, money is needed - and in an effort to earn it, Anna leaves her home. Over the course of seven years, she moves from city to city, spending a year in each of them. In each city, the heroine goes through the temptation of one of the deadly sins - lust, pride, gluttony, etc. The heroine, it would seem, overcomes temptation, but indulges in the most terrible sin - from mercantile images, she refuses love and, in fact, renounces herself. And Anna’s efforts turn out to be fruitless - having achieved nothing, the heroine returns to her parents’ house.

Such a plot was embodied in a unique work, entirely consisting of zongs and combining the features of opera and ballet, and the music of “The Seven Deadly Sins” - expressive, full of deep psychologism - cannot be definitely called either academic or pop. The first performance of this unusual work took place in June 1933, staged at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The reaction of the public was ambiguous: the performance caused bewilderment among the French (one of the reasons was that the work was performed not in French, but in German), but the German emigrants living in the French capital were delighted. In the same year, the London premiere took place under a different title - “Anna-Anna”. In the 1950s The performance was resumed by Lotte Lenya, the composer’s widow. In 1976, “The Seven Deadly Sins” was interpreted in her own way by Pina Bausch, and her creation was called “the most destructive spectacle ever to appear on the German stage” - in this performance the theme was revealed very cruelly and truthfully (in a truly Brechtian way!) women's defenselessness in a society where no one is interested in the soul, where nothing is sacred, where absolutely everything - even the human body - easily becomes an object of purchase and sale. This performance was performed by the Wuppertal Dance Theater as part of the Chekhov Festival, held in the Russian capital in 2009.

In Russia, the unique creation of Weill and Brecht is rarely performed. One of the most famous interpretations was carried out in 1981 by Boris Aleksandrovich Pokrovsky at the Chamber Musical Theater, which he founded. In 2017, the work entered the repertoire of the Moscow Helikon Opera Theater.