A New "Lysistrata"

Notes on the Staging of the Opera by the Moscow Art Musical Studio

OLIN DOWNES

ONE wonders what the reaction will he next Winter when a Broadway audience observes for the first time the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio's production, of Aristophanes' Lysistrata with music by Reinhold Gliere. 'The Musical Studio, for various artistic reasons, has selected the ancient Grecian comedy, with its true, deep feeling, its frankness, joyousness, and thirst of life, as one of the media for a new conception of a rejuvenated lyric theatre. The production is not "toned down" or prettified for the benefit of the delicate souls who salve "inhibitions" with the sniggering pruriences of bed-room farces. One line, and one line only, has been eliminated from the dialogue. Certain of the quips and jests of Lysistrata and her sisters, who resolve the means by which foolish men shall be returned from the wars to the arms of their eager mates will be partly lost through text that is Russian. But the pantomime derived from the technic of the Moscow Art Studio is expressive; the play moves in a rapid tempo, with all the vividness of plastic, facial expression, and shades and sonorities of tone that these singing actors cultivate. What will be said of the scene between the importunate husband and the coquetting wife, who has taken the means that every woman knows to get what she wants— in this case the wholly creditable objective of peace in Athens? Will there be rejoicing in the wit, the charm, and, withal, the nobility of the leader who has commanded the love famine, or will there be a roar for the censor?

All this is to be seen. A matter of more importance is the artistic principles elaborated by the organization which Morris Gest, with customary restlessness and enterprise, brings this season for the first time to America. Its methods are strikingly exemplified in the Lysistrata production. The Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio has named itself and its productions carefully. It is not an art theatre; it is not, in the accepted sense, an opera company. It is a Music Studio, related to the dramatic purposes of the Art Theatre, following many of its methods, and designed to synthesize and coordinate in new ways all the arts that assemble on the musical stage. In so doing it makes a fresh attempt to reach the ideal of dramatic truth that animated the old Italian pioneers of opera, an ideal which received its last powerful impetus in the artof Richard Wagner. Vet from that art, enduring and overwhelming as it is, opera suffers. Opera is a form to which traditions cling with peculiar obstinacy. Since Wagner loomed over the high heavens there has been little, either in the interpretation or creation of music drama, that could counteract his teachings or grow in his shadow. There have been mushroom growths, such as the Italian realists whose school is already receding into the past. But revolutions in form or technique of opera, or even the occasional work of lasting importance and individuality, have been very few. Against Wagner only two men have made headway. These are Moussorgsky and Debussv. Moussorgsky's realism, harmonic originality, and dramatic vitality gave him a new musical speech which has affected virtually all contemporaneous music. Debussy, who followed Moussorgsky and drew from him, accomplished his ends in part through a process of elimination, through the selection and subtle harmonizing of a few elements, and a special esthetic of his own, in a way that sets Pelleas et Melisande apart from all other operas of the modern age. But the others? The post-Wagnerians reach their culmination in the operas of Richard Strauss; the Russians, other than Moussorgsky, write after Italian formulas, like Borodin, or, like Rimsky-Korsakoff, compose charming folk operas in forms already anticipated by certain German and Slavic composers. But these forms have not imposed a new technic or any new imaginative devices of stagecraft. They have accepted singers, regisseurs, devices of stage representation largely as they were on the European opera stage of fifty years ago. No one, up to this time, has readdressed himself to the Wagnerian proposal of a form which should unite not several but all the arts that assemble on the musical stage, in a way to raise each one to a point of new power, while all contribute to the movement and intensity of the drama. The Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio in no sense either imitates or compares its own praxis with that of Wagner, being necessarily completely at variance with much of his achievement, but it returns to his central proposition, and undertakes new methods and artistic proportions for the development of its lyric theatre. If it advances one small step in the direction that it professes it will have done an invaluable service to the modern development of an artform that has captured the imagination of creative minds ever since it made its appearance three centuries ago, and yet has proved so bafiling in its applications.

IT was not by any sudden leap that the theories of Nemorovitch-Dantchenko, the originator of this dramatic Music Studio, took form, nor did his company achieve its present artistic position by some sudden and spectacular accomplishment. Lysistrata is the third production of the Moscow Art 'Theatre Music Studio. It is like none of the other principal items of its repertory. Yet it is one of a succession of orderly steps in its development—unrelated, on a cursory glance through the repertory, though these steps might seem to be. The first experiment was Lecocq's Fille de Madame An got, an operetta, built about a revolutionary plot, a satire on French politics and society of the 70's. The music of this work was light and did not demand exceptional vocal capacities on the part of young singing actors only mastering this fundamentally important phase of their art. The score adapted itself easily to new stage treatment, and the libretto offered a brilliant and variegated succession of dramatic portraits. Perhaps, too, it was especially sympathetic, in its revolutionary and satirical tone, to young Russians of the 1920's. In point of dramatic technic it was but a small step away from much harder tasks of the Moscow Art Studio. Thus the attention of the young organization could be centred chiefly on mastery of the music, and its coordination with emotional situations. Then came the more lyrical offering of Offenbach's La Perichole, accompanied by a scries of more extended experiments in the combination of music and dramatic action, individualization of the chorus, and scenic investure. These productions laid the needed foundations, they confirmed certain technical methods by which the Music Studio was finding .itself, and they made possible the much bolder departure evidenced by the treatment of Lysistrata.

The scenic methods of the production of Lysistrata are the affair of the dramatists rather than of the musicians. But the score of Gliere is important. It is not the score of an opera. It comes rather under the head of incidental music for a drama—with a difference. The difference consists in the fact that the music is not merely accompaniment or back-ground for situations, but is designed to be an organic part of the play, after a manner apparently nearer the Greek traditions of the theatre than any modern musical form that is familiar. For this music—whatever its expressive value proves to be in performance—is designed not only to intensify situations but to blend into the speech of the actors. The instrumental score is economical. The accompaniment is not continuous. At times the back-ground is choral, or merely rhythmic, and the harmonic style is that of the old Greek modes, the Dorian and Phrygian predominating. But the music is intended to grow out of the play, when it is necessitated, to emerge from and, on occasion disappear in it. It is only heard as an inevitable artistic occurrence. When it is not motivated it is silent. But it pervades the drama and it enhances, as the old Greeks tried to make it do, the eloquence of the actors, the melodic line rising and falling with the inflections of speech, the spoken sonority passing on occasion into the sonority of song. This is the one production of the Moscow Art Theatre for which music has been especially composed, and this with a particularly significant and thoughtful intention. The other works are adaptations or interpretations of scores already in existence. What Gliere has done it is impossible to predict. What he has attempted should be worthy of careful examination.

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The stage is distinguished by the "constructionist" scenery which has recently had a special vogue in Russia and in some European theatres, a stage particularly suitable to fantasy, extravagance, or burlesque, geared to the "fast tempo" and the comedy spirit of Mr. Nemorovitch-Dantchenko's production. The setting of Rabinoff has as its prevailing colors the blue and white of Hellas, against this sunburned skins and faces, bright garments, the tumult of combating or rejoicing crowds, each member of which is an accomplished actor, capable of taking a principal part in another production. The pace set by Mr. NemorovitchDantchenko, according to report, would shortly deprive a lymphatic opera singer of wind to sing—and here is no place for them. The women take command of Athens. The dealers in eggs, seeds, onions are seen in burlesque combat, in contrast to the usual passage of comic or tender dialogue and intirpate sentiment. The water jugs of the women conquer the flaming coals carried by the old men. The crowds pour in on the stage, with cries, with abrupt gestures, with movements that are individually expressive and yet are seen en masse. This, of course, is far from the Greek chorus of antiquity. It is modern technique applied to an older subject—not, let us hope, with a destruction, but rather perpetuation of its spirit. Always there is movement and pulsing emotion, expressed not only in speech, song, concerted music, but by the play of feature and limb inseparable from the life current and the riant humanity of Aristophanes' play.

Such is the general nature of the Lysistrata performance by the Moscow Art Theatre Music Studio.

It will be remembered that it was an attempt to revive Greek drama which inspired early efforts at opera by Count Bardi and his Florentine colleagues of the Renaissance. These gentlemen set out to re-discover the musical speech and the dramatic methods of the old Greeks. So attempting, they stumbled upon the elementary forms of the modern opera. It would be amusing, and it is not impossible, if a far nearer approach to the objective of the ancestors of opera should have been made by the Russian revival of Aristophanes' Comedy, more than 2500 years after its premiere in Athens.