The famous opera of Richard Wagner again conquered the St. Petersburg audience

ST. PETERSBURG. Petersburg audiences finally saw the long-awaited premiere - Richard Wagner’s opera Flying Dutchman returned to the Mikhailovsky Theater. Starting in 1957, The Flying Dutchman gathered spectators in the theater hall for fifteen seasons. Then the artistic director of the production was conductor Kurt Zanderling.

The premiere on July 6 and 7 showed the public a new reading of the Wagner opera. The theaters saw the work of director Vasily Barkhatov and guest music director and conductor Vasil Petrenko. Even the playbill, with the image of a girl with bright pink headphones, the background for which are surging waves, hints that there will be many surprises in the production.

Indeed, the background for the legend told in the libretto of the opera was a modern beach, and the choir was given places on sun loungers. The costumes of the choir’s singers are completely inconsistent with the era that corresponds to the description of the performance - the fluffy skirts that reach the ankles in length flash pantsuits.

According to Vasily Barkhatov, although he changed the duration of the action for the sake of the experiment, but he did it not by accident. He was interested in the question - is such a love story real in the modern world. There are many variants of this story telling about a sailor, whom the curse condemned to eternal wanderings in the stormy ocean.

However, the main idea of the plot of each story is that if he can go ashore once every seven years to find his faithful wife, then his wanderings will end. Barkhatov chose for the production an option that implies the complexity of human feelings, because the romantic composer Richard Wagner wrote his opera not about ocean storms, but about passions that rage in human hearts.

Ludmila Trautmane © Gallerix.ru