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Dmitri Shostakovich composed his first opera, "The Nose," more than 80 years ago and based it on a short story written nearly a century before that.
Yet few works in the repertory seem more modern or musically challenging than this absurdist masterpiece that came to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time Friday night.
Written when the composer was just 22, the opera is adapted from a story by Nikolai Gogol about a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg named Kovalyov who wakes up to discover his nose is missing. With the logic of a nightmare, he pursues it through the town, allowing Gogol — and Shostakovich — to satirize just about every institution of Russian life: the bureaucracy, the church, the press, the police, the medical profession.
At one point, the nose takes human form and appears as a bureaucrat who outranks the befuddled Kovalyov and haughtily snubs him.
Shostakovich set this bizarre tale to a score that is brimming with energy, a riot of atonal exuberance, filled with percussion seemingly run amok, brassy vulgarity and vocal lines that punish the singers mercilessly — punctuated by a few beautiful snatches of melody. The opera, performed without intermission, is less than two hours long, but its demands on the listener are intense.
To stage this daunting work, the Met found the perfect match for Shostakovich's sensibility in William Kentridge, the esteemed South African artist known for his collages and animated drawings.
Even before the opera begins, the audience is greeted by a giant collage in place of the curtain. It's teeming with a jumble of images, including political slogans and nonsense phrases in both English and Russian ("Another Kheppi Ending!" is one), street maps of St. Petersburg, a large red dot and pictures of historical figures.
Yet few works in the repertory seem more modern or musically challenging than this absurdist masterpiece that came to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time Friday night.
Written when the composer was just 22, the opera is adapted from a story by Nikolai Gogol about a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg named Kovalyov who wakes up to discover his nose is missing. With the logic of a nightmare, he pursues it through the town, allowing Gogol — and Shostakovich — to satirize just about every institution of Russian life: the bureaucracy, the church, the press, the police, the medical profession.
At one point, the nose takes human form and appears as a bureaucrat who outranks the befuddled Kovalyov and haughtily snubs him.
Shostakovich set this bizarre tale to a score that is brimming with energy, a riot of atonal exuberance, filled with percussion seemingly run amok, brassy vulgarity and vocal lines that punish the singers mercilessly — punctuated by a few beautiful snatches of melody. The opera, performed without intermission, is less than two hours long, but its demands on the listener are intense.
To stage this daunting work, the Met found the perfect match for Shostakovich's sensibility in William Kentridge, the esteemed South African artist known for his collages and animated drawings.
Even before the opera begins, the audience is greeted by a giant collage in place of the curtain. It's teeming with a jumble of images, including political slogans and nonsense phrases in both English and Russian ("Another Kheppi Ending!" is one), street maps of St. Petersburg, a large red dot and pictures of historical figures.
