There are not many Russian composers who, commissioned by a German theater, premiere an opera twice in the space of seven years.
One such case is the 36-year-old Anton Lubchenko, whose catalog raisonné already includes nine symphonies, half a dozen ballets and diverse festival and film music, and who even conducted his bombastic music drama “Doktor Schiwago” at the Regensburg Theater in 2015.
Lubchenko, then a darling of the cultural scene close to the Kremlin, who the year before signed a letter supporting Putin's takeover of Donbass in eastern Ukraine, today denounces totalitarianism.
His new work, a setting of motifs from Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel "We",
who anticipated Aldous Huxley and George Orwell in many ways as early as 1920 and was only able to appear during perestroika in Russia, is a beacon against the tyrannical state that degrades people and could not be more topical.
It is due to two corona-related postponements that the premiere took place during Russia's war against Ukraine.
For this reason, Lubchenko's co-author of the libretto, Darya Panteleeva, had to stay away from the performance.
The musician said that she had demonstrated against the war and is now awaiting trial in a Russian prison.
For this reason, Lubchenko's co-author of the libretto, Darya Panteleeva, had to stay away from the performance.
The musician said that she had demonstrated against the war and is now awaiting trial in a Russian prison.
For this reason, Lubchenko's co-author of the libretto, Darja Panteleyeva, had to stay away from the performance.
The musician said that she had demonstrated against the war and is now awaiting trial in a Russian prison.
Kerstin Holm
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Zamyatin's material extrapolates a system of digital and biopolitical surveillance striving for world domination.
The directing duo Maximilian Eisenacher and Christina Schmidt, who had to take over the production at short notice, staged it congenially as a sophisticated data prison with clear references to Putin's war emblems.
Lubchenko declared that the war in Ukraine was instigated by insane criminals, not by the Russian people. At the press conference he emphasized that he loves and speaks the Ukrainian language and also has a Ukrainian passport.
At the same time, he speaks out emphatically against a blanket embargo on Russian culture and recalls Russian composers' opposition to war.
And in fact, soloists from both Ukraine and Russia take part in the production,
He toils like a galley slave
The stage design by Michael Lindner is a dome structure that arches over laboratories and human boxes and is played with streams of numbers and dancing nets of light by video artist Jonas Dahl.
Here the Great Benefactor reigns supreme, whose head is presented as a giant virtual sculpture like Big Brother, and who, like Putin, is said to toil away like a galley slave.
People have numbers instead of names, individual feelings and thoughts have been eliminated.
But an attractive agent from the world of freedom opposes the robotization.
Lubchenko, whose tonal language is characterized by strong motor skills, crashing percussion and booming orchestral tutti, calls his work a "musical farce".
At the beginning, the male soprano voice of the benefactor (triumphal: Onur Abaci) announces from the off the great fortune of the united state - a rogue, who thinks of the powerful party United Russia -, whereupon the numbers wrapped in identical overalls with a martial-enthusiastic reply to a marching song, whose brass-heavy background betrays the Shostakovich school.