Rodion Shchedrin, The Left-Hander (2013)

Shchedrin!  Who also wrote an opera based on Dead Souls.  Which I wasn't overly enthused about, but for whatever reason, I decided to see this one anyway.  So I did!  I'm pretty sure this is my first twenty-first-century Russian opera, so there's that.  I suppose.

The plot of this sounds Gogol-esque, but maybe that's just if you don't have a large enough frame of reference of Russian literature.  It's actually based on a nineteenth-century story by a writer named Nikolai Leskov.  The idea is that the czar goes to the UK, where, to show off English ingenuity, he is presented with a tiny clockwork flea that sings when wound up (yes, the flea is a singing role).  Ro the Russians are all, SHIT, we need something to compete with this so we can show how Russians are also rad.  They find a guy known only as the Left-Hander and he manages to, I dunno, fix up the flea to make it more Russian.  Everyone is impressed, and they take him back up the UK, where everyone likewise makes much of him.  They try to get him to marry an Englishwoman and stay, but he wants to go home.  There's a big ol' storm, and he presumably exacerbate the situation by getting shitfaced with the English captain.  At home, drunk, he's accosted by the cops and then dies.  Just of, like, general stuff, apparently.  The flea sings a requiem.  And there you have it.

I was kind of getting into this: the music is, well, all right; sort of clanking, sort of unobtrusive, more or less as I vaguely remember Dead Souls, but I certainly liked it more.  The absurdist story is fun, and the Mariinsky production is predictably great.  How they created that storm effect, I'll never know.  But man, it really bummed be out that they killed off the protagonist.  You might say, "if that's the kind of thing that upsets you, opera might not be your thing."  But it just feels unmotivated.  To me.  There's obviously some sort of political valence here, but it's pretty opaque.  It's not only from a culture I don't know super-well, but it's from a culture I don't know super-well a hundred forty years ago.  Wak!

Oh well.  Maybe part of the reason I'm bummed is that the title character is played by Andrei Popov, who brings a lot of humanity to the role.  This is only (I think) the fourth time I've seen him, but I've always liked him: as the Holy Fool in Boris, the Astrologer in The Golden Cockerel (which this reminded me of in some ways), the Police Inspector in The Nose,  and now here (funny that I've never seen him play a named character).  At any rate, this is certainly worth seeing, and not for him alone.