Robert Sturua, a famous Georgian producer, showed Moscow public his new work - opera version of “Mazeppa”, which was staged at the Bolshoi. As it’s known, the main character of this Tchaikovsky’s opera is a Ukrainian hetman – whose glory harks back to the time of Peter I – the glory of a political adventurer, traitor and intriguer. The Bolshoi theatre executives reckoned that Mazepa’s plot would sound most contemporary now that the current international conflicts in today’s Russia which have reached their apogee, certainly, prove the triumph of Mazeppa’s principles and ideas. Mr. Sturua, who was invited to mount the opera, has a deep comprehension of this ambiguous problem and in his latest performances he persistently maintains the idea of criminality of any political gambling.

It’s but natural that the producer made use of the occasion in order to develop his monologue contra politics, to speak of what “Mefisto” price is to be paid for the longed-for power and what huge losses in human virtues are to accompany the person on his way to the political Olympus. With this in focus, Sturua, however, never fails to show that the historical image of the Ukrainian hetman cannot be perceived unequivocally: Mazeppa was no trivial dirty politician. Brought up at the Royal Court of Poland, an admirer of ancient Latin culture, he was also aware of the depths of refined Jesuitical secrets. Probably, it’s the key to the magic charm of his character, which drew to him the best minds of those times, the Russian emperor and European kings being no exception. It is obvious that banal political plotting wasn’t his scale. He was a true and inspired genius of a large political game. Sturua’s idiosyncrasy towards any purely ideological intrigue makes him consider Mazeppa as a fatal, ill-starred figure, who acts outside any definite time, actually a symbolic figure. The White horse in the performance, which motionlessly stiffens on the stage in thick goldish rye is a symbol of Mazeppa’s destiny, a symbol of fate. It is the same symbol that pursued Pushkin who had been told by a Gipsy about his future death from a “white man”, a man on a white horse. Pushkin transformed that horror of fate into his “Song about Oleg, the Prophet”, where Prince Oleg perished on the wind-whitened bones of his own horse skeleton from a sting of the snake which crept out of the dead skull. That was the way the prophesied destiny finished.

Even if Sturua wasn’t at all touched by the mysticism as it is, the stage designer of the production George Alexi-Meskhishvily included this symbol in the scenery, with the implication that a horse had played a mystical role in Mazeppa’s life. According to a legend, he was fastened to a horse’s tail and the horse rushed him throughout the steppes of Eastern Europe. But he remained alive and found himself in Malorossia. After that sort of experience the life of an ordinary human being hardly seemed to him to be of any value at all, as to his own life, it acquired a different meaning.

Everything is at the will of fate, there is no flying from it. Tchaikovsky felt it the same way, when in depressive spells he thought that there is no stopping the time, the time is implacable. The time which drags the human being to his inevitable end, once he stepped into its infinite stream flow. In Tchaikovsky’s "Mazepa" there is a boat, rocking on the Dnieper waves in which Maria and Аndrey used to float in their childhood, and the image of which appears in the lullaby, Maria sings to her dying friend.

Tchaikovsky’s Maria is very much like Pushkin’s Tatiana – both of them chose the same sorrowful path of sacrificing love. Therefore, it is small wonder that in Sturua’s performance this ingenuous village girl with her fair-hair braids and a red necklace around her neck is to be dramatically changed by her "inexplicable", fatal love and the producer’s will makes her look Тatiana in a ball dress of Pushkin’s time. There is the same "forever" fidelity and obedience to the destiny in her. But Sturua’s Mazeppa is not a noble general, a hero, but a cynical murderer, who chopped off her father’s head. And Maria’s pure soul cannot stand it. Mad, she appears in the finale, like Undina, out of the Dnieper, from a trampled down, burnt down rye-field and wanders around the stage, as a spectre belonging to the other world, and turns up either in front of Mazeppa, or Аndrey, unable to change anyone’s destiny.

Tchaikovsky in his opera emphasised the theme of Maria’s love, her disastrous passion for Mazepa dominates in it, and this mysterious love for an elderly man becomes the climax to the tragedy, creating a terrible tangle where ambition, revenge, feeling and murder are mixed up. In his version Sturua has shifted the accents so that the fatal love is not practically shown in the performance, it is apparently subdued. This, however, just develops the tendency, conceived in his earlier productions, where the theme of love of other famous pairs - Hamleth and Оphelia, Portia and Shylock fades to give room to other lines of the plot. Obviously, it is more important for Sturua today to convey absolutely different ideas, the essence of which is connected with the experience of the real life of his nation and the destiny of his people. These ideas appear to be much closer to the historic destiny of Mazeppa than refined centuries-old poetic fictions. For Sturua it is completely clear, that in all times – as well as in Mazeppa’s time and a hundred or two hundred years ago, and nowadays the way to power is not the way of love, but the way of slaughter, in which whole nations are exterminated both physically and spiritually. That is the reason why Sturua depicted the hero of this Tchaikovsky’s love story not as a charismatic dark-eyed old lover, but a political cynic. Informer Cochubey is as perennial as zealous, komsomolish Аndrey. The essence of politics has never changed in the course of history it’s always the same : denunciation, crazy bullets, chopped off heads, destroyed lives. Mazeppa is eternal, his cause is perennial. Leaving the stage he takes his saddle with him. The implication of this simple gesture is that he is an eternal horseman on a white horse.

Sturua in his attempt to highlight several lines of the plot in one piece, actually, overloads the performance. The truth is that the actors fail to plumb the depths of their complicated roles, the roles which call for extremely experienced drama actors. But Sturua doesn’t even try to make his opera singers produce convincingly motivated onstage behaviour. He lets them feel at large and they, separated by laconic stagings, get involved in their personal, vocal "inside". Neither the producer nor the singers win, with the latter demonstrating a rare for modern theatre actors feebleness and hopelessness.

Some names of the singers who took part in the premiers, are worth mentioning – Valeriy Alexeyev as Mazeppa, who showed a clever, rational singing manner and sounding from time to time a bit non-emotional, Marina Poplavskaya as Maria, whose soprano sounded more flexible and exact compared with that of Lolita Semenina, as well as the drama nuances of her role. As well as Мichail Gubsky performing the part of Andrey, who, but for his stilted movements and gestures, would have made a highly favourable impression by his "ardent" manner of singing and beautiful, resonant timbre of voice.

It’ is obvious, the mastering of “Mazeppa” score hasn’t been completed. The statement can be referred to all the participants of the production - the soloists, many of whom are still to polish their intonation and articulation, and the choire, conducted by Alexandr Tytov, whose singing now and again needs synchronising with the orchestra, and the orchestra players who don’t cope with the tempo of the passages successfully and who take into account quantity rather than quality of the sound. To conclude, the above mentioned has more to do with "Mazeppa” scenic life rather than with Robert Sturua’s vision of the production.