Search - Zhanna Dombrovskaya, Tatiana Kravtsova, Elena Vitman :: Shostakovich: The Nose

A nose sniffing and sneezing his snuff in public

Jacques COULARDEAU | OLLIERGUES France | 03/04/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"From the very start we are in the kingdom of smells, of the nose. The barber has stinking hands, which is embarrassing for a barber. Right after this short prologue the first scene leads us to discovering a cut nose in the loaf of bread of the barber's breakfast. He is at once accused of having cut it off the face of a customer. But how can he get rid of it. In the river? He is caught by a policeman and he lies to him but this one is persistent. The music at this moment is very expressive of an oppressive situation from which you can only hope to wiggle out. But wiggling may seem suspicious to a copper. Percussions then are multiplying this paranoid sensation of being a rat in a rat trap. Waking up is difficult for Kovalev and he is led to opening his eyes and finding out, in a mirror that his nose is gone. The gallop to the Police station is quite light and ominous in its music and it becomes the gallop of a whole army, an army of accusations. And we end up in Kazan Cathedral. And he meets his own nose in there, dressed as a state councillor and tries to explain, but fails and the nose escapes. The music is both sombre and seems to be flowing away into the background leaving just some rhythmic pulsating sound as if the poor Kovalev were running scared and impotent in his rat trap. The chase for the nose leads Kovalev to the Chief of Police's place, but he is gone. So he decides to go to the newspaper office. There the clerk refuses an announcement about a run-away nose because the press would lose all its reputation and credibility. Kovalev is even suggested to go see a doctor. But after seeing the damage the clerk advises finding a journalist who could write an article on the strange functioning of nature and during that conversation he is taking some snuff and stuffs it up his nose. The scene is ending in a completely crazy parade of porters' announcements that sound like a seesawing dirge, as if they were burying the hope of poor Kovalev about finding his nose again. The musical intermission is just expressing that absurdity of life when everything sounds like barriers, palisades, prison walls and you are reduced to running like a frantic man entirely overwhelmed by the frenzy of the situation. In Kovalev's apartment we discover Ivan, Kovalev's valet and a popular song taken from the Brothers Karamazov. And the knocking at the door sounds like some kind of banging by God on the vast drum of the sky. Kovalev, after getting rid of Ivan, enters a long lamentation about his noseless lot. And the music goes on having some light harmonious background on which the singing sounds heavy, rusty, like mourning the death of a whole family, though it is nothing but a missing nose. That very serious music on such a trite subject creates a complete contradiction, a hiatus, an oxymoron in a way that you feel more than see, hear more than think. In the third act, at night, outside the city a crazy situation is created with a coach and its driver and then ten policemen who are supposed to arrest some miscreant and the scene brings on the stage all kinds of people who depict a multifarious and absurd social situation with travellers, and old lady, and the best is of course the bagel seller from the market. She is the one taken away by the cops though she is a completely inoffensive bagel seller. The strident whistle of the cops resounds from time to time and after that pugilistic arrest the nose finally appears on some light notes and then a satirical trumpet that makes fun of these policemen and people. After the fear of Satan expressed by the coppers at the beginning of the scene, this surprise visit of something surrealistic creates disarray and impotence among these guardians of peace and quiet. The policeman brings the nose to Kovalev but he lengthens the presentation of it so that Kovalev becomes anxious about his nose and starts paying and even overpaying the copper, but he is in for a surprise. The nose does not want to go back in its proper place. A doctor is called in but he refuses to do it because it would not be strong enough and he would prefer buying it for his own medical display. Then Kovalev believes it is a vengeance from the staff-officer's widow who wanted him to marry her daughter. He is suggested to write her a letter and starts when the scene shifts to the widow and her daughter. The letter brought by Ivan tells them the problem but the answer the widow makes reveals she is not to blame. The conclusion is the devil did it. So the hunting of the nose starts again and is quite similar to the hunting of the snark of Lewis Carroll. All kinds of bands of people are brought into the picture to sound as frantic and crazy as possible, gentlemen, dandies, students and even eunuchs. But the nose is still running. Kovalev wakes up in his bed with his nose in place. So it was all a nightmare. He greets the barber who gives him a shave and we are back to the stinking hands of the barber. Let's go strut on the Nevsky Prospect where Kovalev meets many acquaintances and finally the widow and her daughter and he gives a final answer to her repeated suggestion about marrying her daughter and that final answer is no. The best part about this opera is definitely the music because it is systematically built around musical oxymora that sound even funnier than the story itself, especially when that music is in full contrast with the story. It amplifies the irony and the sarcastic tone. This particular recording from Saint Petersburg is brilliantly explosive and that's just what we need: a good sneeze every so often to clear up the sinuses of this perambulating nose.



Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, University of Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID Boulogne Billancourt

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