Artistic integrity is the subject of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Portrait, as it is of Gogol’s short story from which it is adapted.
Artistic integrity is the subject of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Portrait, as it is of Gogol’s short story from which it is adapted. And whatever one might feel about the work — and I enjoyed it a lot more than most of my colleagues seem to have — Opera North is unquestionably demonstrating artistic integrity by staging relatively or very unknown operas in productions which don’t have as their main selling point that the director has never seen, let alone directed, an opera before.
On the contrary, Opera North goes for the most experienced directors they can get, in this case David Pountney, who is not only responsible for the production, but is also doing all he can for Weinberg’s work, and, together with Anastasia Koshkina, translated the libretto into English (the opera is also surtitled much of the time, which seems to indicate that Pountney is a late convert to the practice of which he was the leading opponent for many years; or that Opera North did it over his prostrate body).
Gogol has been the inspiration for a prodigious number of Slav composers, which is not surprising in one way, since his tales often include highly colourful characters and episodes, which seem to be crying out for extravagant theatrical treatment. On the other hand, Gogol’s tone is one that it is almost impossible to catch in an operatic treatment, so that his stories often come across more vividly on the page than on the stage, even when set by Tchaikovsky or Rimsky or Shostakovich.
And The Portrait, one of his masterworks, though less famous than many of his tales, has a complexity and subtlety of approach to its subject which is simply untranslatable into another medium.
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