What You Like Will Rule a Sentence

Lessons from Ukrainian class and the Lviv National Opera.

Something I still haven’t fully managed to wrap my head around in studying Ukrainian are the language’s reflexive verb endings. This confusion is highlighted in the past tense, where verb endings are based on the gender of their subjects, rather than the typical six-part structure of first, second, and third person singular and plural. Reflexive verbs, too, take after their subject, but the translation into English muddies what the subject of these sentences actually are.

Exhibit A is the verb podobayet’sya, “to like.” On an assignment last week, where I was meant to write “she liked this dessert,” I wrote: Yiy podobalacya tsey dessert, conjugating the verb for “to like” in the feminine singular for “she.” This was, my teacher pointed out, incorrect, since the Ukrainian word for dessert is masculine and this is the real subject of the sentence, meaning the correct conjugation would be podobavcya. The more literal translation of this would be: “The dessert pleased her.”

“What you like will rule a sentence,” she explained. I loved that phrasing, both as a pedagogical device and for the larger implication contained within it. What we like will rule not only a single sentence, but many (if not most) of the sentences that make up our worldview and our life.

I started taking Ukrainian lessons after spending two weeks in Lviv last June, a reporting trip that resulted (as I’ve written about before) in a feature on the Lviv National Opera for the Financial Times. There was a lot I had to cut from that piece, even though some of the elements were among my favorites, and moments I’ve returned to through much of the last year, especially now given the three-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion and the ongoing talks of peace deals and land ownership.

For that piece, I saw two operas, Yuliy Meitus’s Stolen Happiness, and Verdi’s Nabucco, both staged with paint-by-numbers precision and tradition. I found this approach less effective for Nabucco, which felt stuck in the 1960s. Most of this played out like come-to-life versions of old Babylonian reliefs, while heroine Fenena’s dress — a long, caped chiffon number that was the same shade of powder blue as the mezzo-soprano’s eyeshadow — felt like something sketched by Oleg Cassini for Jacqueline Kennedy. As I wrote in November, I had expected the performance of “Va pensiero” to resonate with audiences given the parallels it presented between occupied people, especially after interviewing several chorus members of the LNO. However, when I asked a 20-something couple in my row about this, one of them seemed more taken with the love story between Fenena and Ismaele. Part of me wonders if that was in part due to how set apart Fenena was, sartorially, from the rest of the cast.

Left: Fenena in Nabucco at the Lviv National Opera; Right: Jacqueline Kennedy in Oleg Cassini

The traditionalist approach was more effective with Stolen Happiness, a Ukrainian opera based on a play of the same name by Ivan Franko, and one studied in grade school with the same frequency that The Crucible makes it onto American high school syllabi. (In spite of such popularity, the opera, I was told, had never been produced further west than Poland.) Meitus’s fidelity to Franko’s text was reflected in his music of an earlier era. Though steeped in the early 20th-Century traditions of experimentalism and socialist realism, Meitus turned to Italian verismo (particularly the lush musical landscapes of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana) and the folk operas of Janáček and Smetana to tell the story of a fatal love triangle that plays out in a rural Ukrainian village.

The reasons behind this shift continue to be a mystery to me, and one of the impulses to study Ukrainian — a wealth of books and papers on composers like Meitus has yet to be translated into English. However, I’m persuaded by the idea that if Meitus’s stylistic shift wasn’t itself a political act, it still carried political resonance, perhaps even analogous to the resonance ascribed to Verdi’s early, Risorgimento-era operas. By the time Stolen Happiness premiered in Lviv in 1960, the memories of post-war Ukrainian resistance against Soviet rule were still fresh, as were the scars. The flame of an idea of Ukrainian national and cultural identity separate from Russia was still kindled, especially in artistic and academic circles, and could easily have made its way into Meitus’s score. Smetana had a similar experience when writing Má Vlast, a work that draws on Bohemian mythology and music at a time where Czechs and Slovaks were rebelling against Habsburg rule.

After these two productions, I was surprised to walk into the rehearsal room for the Ukrainian premiere of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. While Vasyl Vovkun’s staging didn’t completely eschew historicity, it nonetheless played with the work to fit a vision that is part of Vovkun’s larger mandate for the company. When he took over as general and artistic director in 2017, part of his mandate became to “abandon the theater as museum, in which time freezes and there are no reflections of the real world” and to “transform it into a modern space, feeling time and its actualization.”

This fits with Poulenc’s own artistic vision for Carmélites, which he wrote in the aftermath of World War II — a war that the composer briefly spent in an anti-aircraft unit and, following France’s surrender to Germany, writing music that flew in the face of Nazi values (a provocation on top of his open homosexuality). Based on the true story of the Sisters of the Carmel of Compiègne, who refused to renounce their vocation amid the French Revolution’s de-Christianization reforms and were guillotined as a result, the historical plot of Carmélites is a screen for Poulenc to project the more recent historical baggage of France during World War II, from collaboration to resistance. Through this, the Catholic Poulenc comes to the ultimate conclusion that “one does not die alone; one dies for others and even in the place of others.”

Most striking about the LNO’s Carmélites, however, is how Vovkun approaches the characters who survive. The stringent Mother Marie, the first Carmelite to suggest that the group take a vow of martyrdom as a response to the broadening reign of terror, is spared execution; she isn’t at the monastery when her sisters are arrested. Likewise, the monastery’s former chaplain survives when he accepts the loss of his post more readily than the nuns. He’s the one who tells Mother Marie of the arrests and tells her that if God has chosen to spare her life, she cannot refuse His will by joining her sisters in prison, as she wants to do.

The finale for Dialogues of the Carmelites as staged by Vasyl Vovkun at the Lviv National Opera (Photo: LNO)

For Poulenc, these characters represented the difficult and at times random circumstances that many ordinary citizens face in times of tyranny. Vovkun, however saw things differently: Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, fears of dyversanti — saboteurs working with Russia — have been both widespread and well-founded, especially in Lviv, which sits roughly 70 kilometers from the Polish border. The church hasn’t been spared these collaborators, either: Shortly before rehearsals for the LNO’s Carmélites began, a priest of the Moscow Patriarchate who had provided Russian forces with information and organized sham referendums was released from Ukrainian custody in exchange for 101 POWs.

Why, Vovkun wondered, does the Chaplain so easily give up his religious calling and enter civilian life? Is it simply coincidence that Marie is away from the convent when her sisters are apprehended? He’s not convinced. His staging seats both Marie and the Chaplain in a box of the opera house, just above the action, for the rest of the opera. “They are watching the scenario, watching their own game,” he explains. “For our audiences, it will be interesting to see art reflect the situation we were faced with.” Perhaps it’s not something they strictly like, but it nonetheless rules the sentence.

Art, however, is at its best when it asks questions rather than simply giving us sentences. “The outside world often questions the purpose of our order,” the old Prioress tells Blanche, the heroine in Carmélites who initially joins the order as a refuge for her fear of the real world. “After all, they are quite justified in asking this of us.” Vovkun asks his own questions of them as well. In Poulenc’s finale, Blanche, who has likewise abandoned the monastery out of fear, returns in the finale to accept martyrdom among her sisters. In Vovkun’s staging, Blanche still dies, but she opts to shoot herself instead of ascending the scaffold. Is she protesting the regime that condemned her sisters to death? Or is she protesting the larger enterprise that begs for martyrs in an age of terror?

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Down the rabbit hole

• Read: This interview with LNO music director Ivan Cherednichenko that ran in The Clacquers last year, shortly before the premiere of Dialogues.

• Follow: The 1991 Project, an initiative that promotes unknown classical music repertoire and supports talents at risk, started by musicologist, critic, and manager Anna Stavychenko. (You can follow Anna, too.)

• Listen: Ukrainian Live Classic, a music app that is both a biographical source for centuries of Ukrainian composers and a candy shop of recordings of their works (some of which don’t live on any of the other streaming platforms).

• Subscribe: Music and Empire, a Substack by musicologist Leah Batstone who is also the founder of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival.

• Watch: The full performance of Stolen Happiness that I saw in Lviv, conducted by Keri Lynn Wilson, is available on Wilson’s YouTube.