The Nose, Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast, Oct. 26 2013

The Nose was Shostakovich’s first opera, written at the age of 20. (He would go on to write Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District plus an operetta and two incomplete operas.) The plot of The Nose is derived from a satirical short story by Nikolai Gogol, in which a petty bureaucrat loses his nose to a barber’s razor. The nose takes on a life of its own, the bureaucrat pursues it and ultimately restores it to his face, suffering a number of absurd indignities along the way. This short story has been adapted in a number of other ways, perhaps most curiously as a puppet show at the Moscow Museum of Erotic Art, with the victim being Vladimir Putin. (The Russia of today is a far cry from the USSR of the 20th century!)

According to the intermission interview, Peter Gelb wanted to have the noted artist William Kentridge design an opera for the Met, and allowed Kentridge to choose the opera. He chose The Nose, and created a production based on his signature technique of animated films. Rather than smooth, 24- or 30-frames-per-second animations characteristic of Walt Disney cartoons, Kentridge uses a speed of only 4 to ½ frame per second, rendering the animated figures in rather jerky motion. And for the most part, that’s what we saw: singers toward the front of the stage, with jerky animations projected above them to the rear of the stage. Occasionally there was a more conventional set with singers and walls and decorations and props, such as for the scene in which the barber discovers the nose baked into a loaf of bread, and for the scene in which Kolvayov finds that his nose is missing.

Our cast:
Kovalyov: Paulo Szot
Police Inspector:  Andrey Popov
The Nose: Alexander Lewis
Conductor: Pavel Smelkov
Production: William Kentridge

There are no fewer than 78 sung roles in this opera, not counting the speaking roles and the chorus, so the Met’s synopsis listed only three of the singers. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera describes the music as a “deliberate experiment,” “astringent and angular, grotesque in its emphasis on musical parody and the clash of tone-colour extremes” with “no pretence at immediate mass accessibility.” Quite so. I feel the same as Rossini did after seeing Lohengrin: “One simply can not judge Wagner’s Lohengrin after a first hearing. Pity I don't intend hearing it a second time.” But I’ll judge The Nose as a delta, and don’t intend hearing it a second time.