Real Reactions
Borys Lyatoshynsky’s The Golden Crown in Lviv, selective solidarity everywhere else
After a few nonstop news weeks, I have a piece up on the London Review of Books blog from my trip to Ukraine last month for the Lviv National Opera’s quasquicentennial (a word that Google Translate renders into the great Ukrainian language as кваскі-сторіччя — literally, “kvass-century” — which is visually intriguing but ultimately inaccurate).
I arrived in Lviv just a few days after the October 5 attacks (I was on a train to Poland to get a ride into Ukraine as the attacks were still going on), which, as I note in the LRB piece, elicited “zero real reaction” from the West, in the words of Volodymyr Zelensky. For some reason, I was reminded of this line that week during a daylong musicological conference held at the opera house: “We haven’t managed yet to find the appropriate level of our national identity and cherish it as other nations have done,” said Liubov Kyianovska. Later in her talk, Kyianovska pointed to Borys Lyatoshynsky’s Zolotyy Obruch as an object lesson in how such a failure “can spin out of control, leaving the best people to pay for it.”
Zolotyy Obruch, which the LNO renders into the great English language as “The Golden Crown,” was performed that Friday, in a new production by Ukrainian theater director Ivan Uryvskyi that transposed Lyatoshynsky’s libretto (borrowed from the Ivan Franko novella Zakhar Berkut) into a faceless authoritarian setting, one that reminded me of the opening classroom scene in The Lives of Others — a stark contrast to the democratic principles upheld by the inter-Carpathian network of villages via the metaphorical golden crown. Lyatoshynsky, who had been pressured by the Soviets to revise his opera after having his music denounced for “formalism” (the same allegation that was levied against Shostakovich in an infamous 1936 Pravda editorial). It was, in Uryvsky’s words, “a clear and very serious example of how the system tried to control creators.”
The landscape is also a nod to similar terrain that Franko describes at the beginning of Zakhar Berkut, whose first words are: “How melancholy is our Tukhlya today!” Yet when Franko goes back in time to tell the story of star-crossed lovers and sundered sovereignty in 13th-Century Galicia, his prose turns pastoral and nostalgic. The landscape of Lyatoshsynsky’s opera is inhospitable to the bucolic.
Explaining the plot of an opera, particularly one that is rarely heard and details a little-known story from a little-known period of history, is a bit like using a wine list to describe a hangover. The disconnect becomes even more pronounced with describing Ukrainian operas to non-Ukrainian audiences, particularly those like The Golden Crown (or one I covered last year for the Financial Times, Yuliy Meitus’s Stolen Happiness), where the source materials are so well-known and easily received ideas for audiences. Even if Lyatoshynsky’s opera hadn’t been performed in nearly 40 years since this new production for Lviv, most Ukrainians know Franko just as well as Americans know Arthur Miller or Germans know Friedrich Schiller.
It therefore became necessary to focus my piece for the LRB on the story of The Golden Crown, and the generational resonances it held between the Franko source text, a 95-year-old opera, and today. As a non-Ukrainian, it was relatively easy for me to follow along with the work, thanks to both the inclusion of English supertitles for this gala performance and my having discovered an English translation of Zakhar Berkut before I saw it. I missed some of the elements Franko introduced, particularly in his character development. His heroine Myroslava (annoying translated into English as Peace-Renown) is full of “intrepid ardor,” a princess raised with the skills and fearlessness of a prince. There’s something more reserved and shrinking about her in Yakiv Mamontov’s libretto, and in the LRB I add that he doesn’t offer any of the characters much in the way of development. Fables rarely do.
But while there were moments in the first two acts of The Golden Crown that felt disjointed or rushed — the developing love between Myroslava and the hero Maksim, the internal struggles and external pressures facing Myroslava’s father, Tugar Wolf — the third act was completely gripping. It carries that same brand of sensory overload tempered with ethnographic folklore that would resurface several decades after The Golden Crown’s premiere via the Ukrainian poetic cinema movement (especially Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). I still think about the final moments of last month’s performance, with Maksym’s lifeless body being cradled by a grandmotherly figure of death and a score that, like Stravinsky’s finale to Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, ends as if being reabsorbed by history.
“Yes, but we already have Mussorgsky,” is one variation on the responses I’ve heard to opera companies incorporating more Ukrainian works into their repertoire. The October 5 attack on Lviv made an already-small number of non-Ukrainian audience members at this performance of The Golden Crown even smaller, and I was surprised by how muted the reception felt among my fellow travelers.
Beyond last month in Lviv, conversations about incorporating more Ukrainian music into the canon has also invoked the fear of losing Russian repertoire; a false dichotomy that in many ways supports propagandistic claims that Ukraine has no indigenous culture of its own. While The Golden Crown hasn’t been heard onstage — anywhere — in decades, more popular works like Meitus’s Janáček-ian Stolen Happiness haven’t been staged further west than Poland. The Ukrainian work most performed in opera houses around the world since February 2022 has been its national anthem.
This, too, was something I had discussed with my editor at the LRB. The last time I wrote for them was in July, when Danni Perry took their curtain call at the Royal Ballet and Opera holding a Palestinian flag, only to be met with physical resistance from company director Oliver Mears. This led to many critics (myself included) pointing out the dissonance and the incongruities between the company’s censuring of one gesture of solidarity while supporting others (after the start of the full-scale invasion, for a time, the company prefaced each performance with “Shche ne vmerla Ukraina,” and illuminated the opera house in the colors of the Ukrainian flag).
Despite the company insisting that Palestine and Ukraine were two different matters, particularly as their involvement was concerned, they couldn’t escape their confluence this summer. A decision to cancel their plans to tour a new production of Tosca (helmed by Mears) to Tel Aviv also brought up the fact that this Tosca, which opened the company’s season in September, would be the first time Anna Netrebko returned to the RBO stage. The company was one of several who broke ties with the soprano given her previous, unambiguous support for Vladimir Putin (and one incident in which she was photographed holding the flag of Novorossian separatists in Donetsk).
In August, an open letter (signed by over 50 writers, leaders, and intellectuals1) called for the RBO to reconsider this casting choice. It also took issue with Mears’s statement that the company’s previous support for Ukraine “‘was aligned with the global consensus at the time’ and that its position has since changed due to ‘complex geopolitics.’” Both Labour and Conservative MPs criticized Mears and the company. While audiences watched Netrebko’s return to the stage (as an opera diva grappling with her apoliticism under increasing autocracy), several dozen protesters demonstrated outside of the theater.
Even if the RBO had replaced Netrebko, however, this gesture of solidarity towards Ukrainian cultural sovereignty feels only half-baked. An even more non-starter of a conversation with many opera administrators these days is to ask when they plan on producing a work from Ukraine (or asking a major orchestra when they’ll do the same without pairing that work with something from the Russian canon). It’s hard to sell untested works in this climate. Singers need time to learn new works and it’s hard to find one who would be a fit for this. We program so far out that there may not even be a war by the time we’re ready to produce it. None of these arguments have stopped a messy political saga like Khovanshchina from enjoying a recent revival with newfound resonance.
There are other reactions from the west: Earlier this week, Kyiv received UNESCO status as a City of Music, in “international recognition of the musical heritage, contemporary potential, and creative energy of the Ukrainian capital.” Denmark also became the first foreign nation to commit funding for the newly-formed Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Fund.
“The war in Ukraine is not only fought on the battlefield,” said Danish Minister for Culture Jakob Engel-Schmidt. “It is also about the Ukrainian people’s right to preserve their culture, their language, and their connection to the values and places that define their nation.”
But the realness of these reactions is still up for grabs. Denmark’s pledge of €1.3 million is modest compared to the cultural destruction across Ukraine over the last three-and-a-half years, and (as of this writing) it’s the only country to commit to this new fund. Denmark’s pledge is also pendant upon acceptance by its Parliament.
All of this begs the question of who a national identity and historical memory are for. For the last 125 years, the LNO has preserved Ukrainian opera’s past while vouchsafing its future. Its reception outside of Ukraine, however, has been next to nil. For an international art form, this lack of curiosity from the wider public is lazy and condescending at best.2 If this continues at pace, Ukraine will keep doing the work, and we’ll keep mistaking our non-reaction for solidarity.
As well as Bernard-Henri Lévy, noted Islamophobe and sentient scrotal tumor. Recognizing the effort, noting this exception.
This is also where Ukrainians and Palestinians converge: In 2021, I was discussing a piece I was writing on Palestinian composers with a colleague. “Are there many Palestinian composers?” he asked. When I responded that there were, he paused and looked at me skeptically. “…good Palestinian composers?”