Repression is hardly an apt operatic subject: singing requires a full heart and an open throat. But Tchaikovsky's two best-known operas are about a love that hardly dares speak its name, let alone sing the loved one's praises.
Eugene Onegin concerns the bruising encounter between a shy young woman and a man who coolly disparages emotion; in Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades), an ardent, incautious woman finds that the man on whom she develops a fixation is a mercenary brute. One heroine takes refuge in a formal, sexless marriage, while the other guiltily drowns herself. The orchestra here, as in Tchaikovsky's symphonies, is convulsed by erotic anguish. The characters on stage, however, sentence themselves to mortified silence, and lock the closet doors behind them.
Between Onegin and Pique Dame, Tchaikovsky composed another grander, crazier opera that confidentially examines the predicament of his stifled society, and also hints at his own frustration as a guilt-ridden homosexual (who, according to some biographers, fatally infected himself with cholera when threatened with exposure). The Enchantress was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1887, then promptly forgotten. The libretto - a medieval farrago, stuffed with lumbering folk dances, wild-eyed monks, woodland magicians and a ruthless princess who poisons the heroine - took the blame for its failure. At last a revaluation is under way. David Pountney's bold new production of The Enchantress at the Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos in Lisbon uses singers borrowed from the Kirov Opera, and will return in triumph to the Mariinsky during this summer's White Nights Festival.
Pountney has saved The Enchantress from itself by refusing to apologise for its melodramatic flailings. The heroine Kuma - a free spirit, like Carmen transplanted to the vicinity of the Volga - enchants a local princeling. When her suitor's jealous wife incites their son to murder her, the young man finds himself equally enchanted. His mother, purchasing poison from a wizard, does the job herself. Kuma is innocent of any fault except being desirable, but that, in Tchaikovsky's fearful world, counts as a crime punishable by death. A stern deacon is outraged by his treatment when he visits Kuma and her companions. "They made me dance!" he complains in a fury. To dance is to succumb, as singers also do, to the body's promptings: the protest, relayed by the composer of three great symphonic ballets, reveals a dread of self-betrayal. These people are terrified by their own sexual susceptibility, but the more they try to control their behaviour, the more bizarre and irrational their antics become.
Banishing the work's medievalism, which was never more than a camouflage, Pountney updates The Enchantress to an aristocratic household in the late-19th century. In a neoclassical salon as icily white as St Petersburg in winter (or as the city during those summer nights when the glaring sun refuses to set), a stiff-backed family sits down to dinner. The opening resembles one of those leisurely patrician rites that Visconti choreographed in films like The Leopard, though by the end of the opera we are closer to the surreal mania of the disintegrating clan in Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The white room, designed by Robert Innes-Hopkins, is invaded by drunken roisterers paying court to Kuma. Not belonging in this self-disgusted, self-destructive society, she floats down from midair lolling on a chaise longue like a baroque goddess, and retires to that same firmament. The walls are later split apart by a deputation of Bolsheviks - arriving three decades early - who, brandishing spades, axes and mallets, up-end the prim furniture and demand economic justice.
Along with these spectacular social explosions, Pountney contrives a series of abrasive personal encounters, duets that never match the heterosexual norm upheld by most operas. The young prince, Yuri, fawns on his adamantine mother, who sings him a perverse lullaby when emboldening him to kill Kuma. Having failed to shoot Kuma, he defends his own virtue with the gun when she begins to beguile him. Disarmed, he grips the lapels of his frock coat as if trying to hold him-self upright. She despairs of enticing him into an embrace, and instead consolingly wraps herself in a bedspread.
The last scene is a masterpiece of over-wrought psychosis. Having disposed of Kuma, the family resumes its dinner. But Yuri's unbending posture at the table derives from rigor mortis: his father has killed him, though a distraught sister tries to tempt the corpse with morsels from her plate. Overcome by remorse, the paterfamilias tugs off the tablecloth and, like Macbeth going berserk at his banquet, uses it as a ghost's white sheet, while another wan and damaged daughter rides a wooden horse around the collapsing room. A thunderstorm, meanwhile, is sparked off in the orchestra pit.
Zoltan Pesko conducted with the right sort of mad abandon, helped by the fact that the Portuguese orchestra contains so many economic refugees from Russia. Olga Sergeeva valiantly delivered Kuma's volleys of B-flats; Viktor Chernomor-stev, Olga Savova and Vladimir Grichko were equally fine as the members of the deranged nuclear family. Nikolai Gassiev, playing the monk they recruit to do their dirty work, looked and sounded as devilish as Rasputin. The audience, my-self included, roared its own chorus of acclaim. As a matter of urgency, those entries in the reference books that disparage and dismiss The Enchantress must now be rewritten.
