Meyerhold

On the evening of May 30 1918, opera lovers in Petrograd gathered at the Mariinsky Theatre to attend the Russian premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Nightingale” (Le Rossignol/Solovei').[1] The audience dodged gunfire in the streets to make their way into this jewel box of Russia’s former Imperial Theatres, and what they witnessed on its stage that night was a painful reminder of their own collapsing social world: a satiric fairytale about a dying emperor, surrounded by fawning, buffoonish courtiers and an agitated populace. That Stravinsky’s emperor is saved, at the eleventh hour, by the healing power of art - metaphorized as the song of a nightingale - must have served only to underscore the destabilizing dread of their own recently deposed emperor’s uncertain future: imprisoned at the time of the opera’s Russian premiere, the Imperial family would be executed just six weeks later. It wasn’t merely an unfortunate play of resemblances that jarred. The highly experimental production, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and designed by Alexander Golovin, featuring an enormous cast which included the 14-year-old dancer Georgi Balanchivadze (George Balanchine), seemed to play deliberately on tensions between a fading past and an uncertain future, and between fiction and reality.

Abram Efros's brilliant essay on the great artist contains the following disappointingly unfair lines. "It can now be said that Chagall made us pay a high price for his Jewish form of stage imagery. The theatre is simply not in his blood."1 These words reflect the conflict that arose in 1921 in the Jewish Chamber Theatre between Marc Chagall, on the one hand, and director Alexei Granovsky and Efros himself, in charge of design, on the other. Today this distant conflict and Efros's assessment of it merely serve to illustrate how stupendous, how overwhelming was the Vitebsk master's work in the theatre. For the best part of a century Marc Chagall showed on many occasions that there was a rich vein of theatre in his blood.

THE TRETYAKOV GALLERY HAS OPENED THE EXHIBITION 'ALEXANDER GOLOVIN. FANTASIES OF THE SILVER AGE", DEVOTED TO THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARTIST'S BIRTH. GOLOVIN'S OEUVRE, WHICH IS DISTINGUISHED BY THE INIMITABLE "GOLOVIN STYLE", ELEGANT DECORATIVENESS, INEXHAUSTIBLE IMAGINATION AND GREAT ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT, REFLECTS THE ESSENTIAL ICONOGRAPHIC AND STYLISTIC FEATURES OF THE ERA OF SYMBOLISM AND ART NOUVEAU IN RUSSIA, AND BECAME ONE OF THE LANDMARKS OF ITS PERIOD.