One of the many virtues of Henri-Louis de La Grange's monumental—and in its revised English edition, as yet unfinished—biography of Mahler is that in his detailed account of the composer's work as the director of the Vienna Opera, he reminds us of his importance to the history of operatic performance. Mahler was director of the Vienna Opera from 1897 to 1907, but the crucial period of his achievement was from 1903 when he enlisted the painter Alfred Roller to collaborate with him as his set designer. For both men, the goal of operatic production was to achieve the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk: the total work of art that integrated all of opera's different elements. Mahler himself was responsible for both musical and stage direction. "Because Mahler was dealing with musical works, he of course staged the music, not the libretto," recalled Roller after the composer's death. "Not in the sense of translating it, measure by measure, into images, gestures and movement, but in seeking to express the musical essence of the work in question through the totality of the visual presentation… Mahler spared no effort to communicate this musical essence to his collaborators on the stage. Each warm-hearted explanation ended with a plea to listen closely to the orchestra: 'Everything is in the score.'"
The era of the conductor-director is long gone, and Roller's description of Mahler's method stands as an implicit rebuke to all too many productions where it is indeed the libretto that is staged and not the music. Even when a stage director is musically sensitive, however, and can respond to the demands of the score as well as of the text, there are inevitable difficulties in dividing up responsibility for the music and the action. How, for instance, can a director decide how a particular character is to come across without knowing the tempi that the conductor will set for the music or the kinds of orchestral textures he will obtain? Listen to Karajan's recording of Don Giovanni and you find a quite different emotional world from that of Abbado's or Gardiner's. Unless a director is able to go through the score with the conductor in advance of rehearsals, and preferably in advance of casting, the chances of achieving the ideal of the operatic Gesamtkunstwerk are pretty minimal.
So when the Kirov Opera came to the Royal Opera House in August, it was a cause of some excitement to find that Valery Gergiev was making a return to that lost era of the conductor-director. Although they were to give Khovanshchina in a production so traditional that its painted flats might have done justice to The Yeoman of the Guard, their production of Boris Godunov had a "stage conception" for which Gergiev himself was partially responsible. If, in the event, he did not succeed in integrating his musical with his dramatic vision, this was perhaps a matter for gratitude rather than regret. I had been warned a few weeks earlier by one of the company's principal singers that Gergiev had developed a taste for what she called "silly productions," but I was not prepared for the sheer unspeakable naffness of his conceivings. There was a great deal of symbolic encasing: in the prologue, when Boris is crowned, he is put into a mobile jewelled cage; the Boyars in the final scene are enclosed in ranks of what seem to be giant urns (though their ability to get out of these at will rather undercut the symbolic value here). What dominated the staging, however, were translucent onions that were raised and lowered threateningly from the ceiling, with one turning into a triffid to chase Boris during his first signs of madness and another lowering steel pincers over him at his death. Rarely can a production have had the tsar die to such striking comic effect. This was a shame, since the production offered a rare chance to see the opera in its original 1869 version of seven scenes rather than the usual 1872 version with its five acts. There is a view that the terser original is the more dramatically effective, but this was not the production to advance the case for that.
The main loss in the original version are the Polish scenes, and these were indeed a real loss, since with them went the role of Marina—a part that is often taken by the Kirov's star mezzo, Olga Borodina. Borodina did sing the role of Marfa in the two performances they gave of Khovanshchina, and hers was the only voice of real distinction in either production. The orchestra still had a tonal richness and variety that was striking coming from the pit of the Royal Opera, and instrumental solos had a confidence that we are certainly not used to from that location. Co-ordination between the stage and pit was not always perfect, however, and, despite his years at the Mariinsky, I was not convinced that Gergiev has the true opera conductor's ability to accompany a singer. There were certainly moments at which Borodina seemed to want a greater freedom and flexibility than he was able to give her.
Gergiev's appointment to succeed Colin Davis as principal conductor of the LSO in 2007 has generally been greeted with enthusiasm, and it is unlikely that the orchestra could have appointed anyone with greater international presence. Of late, however, it has played most powerfully for conductors—Haitink, Boulez, Gardiner—with a meticulous ear for detail rather than a keen sense of gesture. It will be interesting to see whether Gergiev can get them to buck that trend.
