Runny Noses, Russian and Otherwise: The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera

Elizabeth – One of the more bizarre, frustrating and yet comical operas I have seen this year, William Kentridge’s production of The Nose is not to be missed. For those not familiar with Shostakovich’s opera based on Gogol’s story, The Nose is a short three act opera (no intermission) during which time a bureaucrat, Kovalyov, discovers his nose is missing one day after a shave at the barber. He spends the rest of the opera looking for the nose, trying to get it to listen to him when he does track it down, and re-attaching it to his face. As he searches, Kovalyov worries about how his mistresses will react to him without a nose.

Absurd and surreal, the whole opera has a feeling of a bizarre dream. How does a nose end up in a loaf of bread? And how would it grow to become human sized and obtain a higher ranking in the civil service than its owner? And why on earth would a nose freed from a face choose to attend mass? The incongruity and fantastic are emphasized by Shostakovich’s music which includes the use of a ratchet and castanets along with your more typical fare of clarinets, violins, flutes, and oboes. The conducting of this interesting mélange by Valery Gergiev was terrific—it conveyed both the whimsy of the story and the hurried nature of Kovalyov’s hunt for his nose.

Kentridge’s production was fabulous. I loved the elements of Dadaism on the background screens, the newspaper print, the giant red splotch of paint, the drawing of a face that turns into a horse and begins to trot. The stage itself moves and rotates and ejects pieces of the background stage for new scenes. It all appears as pieces of the same dynamic machine. Completing the cohesion, subtitles are projected onto the lip of the stage which kept me more engaged in the action on stage rather than hopping between the titles on the chair in front of me and the stage.

The nose, the character itself, was highly amusing, running away, becoming a person, commanding respect. Trying to make sense of the Kafkaesque plot I became concerned about what the nose represented. Kovalyov’s references to mistresses, plural, made me wonder about the sexual representation of the nose. It growing into its own entity, and becoming higher ranking than Kovalyov himself seemed fitting. It was frustrating that so much of the story followed a realistic plot pattern with this odd element incorporated and no explanation given.

Paulo Szot, as Kovalyov, however, took it all in stride. He was striking as the bureaucrat on the hunt for his nose. The music did not provide for many uninterrupted periods of singing, but Szot seemed game for the chase.

Shawn – Taking advantage of one the Met’s 25% off subscriber deals, I bought us tickets for a show I had very much wanted to see, The Nose. We planned to see the matinee then catch the train north to visit Elizabeth’s grandmother in the hospital. Then I got bronchitis. But I went to The Nose anyway. Thus is the level of my commitment I guess. My infirmity did force Elizabeth to catch the train alone, however lest my illness attack her grandmother’s already weakened immune system.

At the Met, I did my best to control my coughing. I even pre-unwrapped 12 lozenges and put them in a small ziploc bag to keep the noise down. But even so I was one of the coughing, twitchy, shifty people that I loathe sitting next to in the theatre. But like I said, commitment and all that.

Dmitri Shostakovich

As I was bedridden leading up to the performance, I even did a little research on The Nose. Unlike me, as I like to go into new shows cold and see what is evoked in me without preconception.

Based on the Nikolai Gogol story of 1836, Shostakovich wrote The Nose between 1927 and 1928. After a disastrous June 1929 concert performance against Shostakovich’s wishes (I can only imagine how confusing a pure concert version must have been) The Nose had only 16 fully staged performances at Leningrad in 1930. It was then “lost” until a copy of it was supposedly “rediscovered” in the Bolshoi Theatre in 1974. The Nose had its U.S. East Coast Premiere in 2004 followed by Opera Boston in 2009 and of course the original Met run in 2010. Interesting and exciting to see a major work with so little production and directorial precedent. Rare too.

William Kentridge

Let me say this about The Nose right out, the production by South African Artist William Kentridge was my favorite “modern” opera production I have seen at the Met. Ever. I found it so visually rich I would see it again immediately just to catch what I missed the first time.

The characters and action seem to emanate out of the vintage newspaper ink and paper that wraps the entire set and stage and blend seamlessly with Kentridge’s amazing charcoal animations. The Nose is the most organic fusion of live action and animated projections I have ever seen onstage. It’s like a living and breathing prewar Soviet Propaganda Newspaper. Truly amazing. Particularly in the Newspaper Office scene, where the reporters sit nestled in a giant newspaper wall they are composing around themselves as they sit there. Really stunning. I would very VERY much like to see Kentridge’s Magic Flute production from La Scala in 2011. I can only pray the Met continues to get such interesting artists to helm productions in the future.

As for Shostakovich’s music, I greatly enjoyed the various and eclectic musical styles but find myself a touch aurally lost at points. In his March 2010 review in the New York Times of The Nose’s first run at the Met, Anthony Tommasini said, “The Nose is the work of a young man eager to show off.” This made sense to me. Sometimes there was simply too much going on musically for my ear to absorb. My own shortcoming no doubt. The Nose also felt long and draggy at certain points, due probably to my losing the musical thread periodically. But Valery Gergiev and the Met Orchestra navigated the thick score admirably and I enjoyed the music enough to be very interested in seeing Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as soon as humanly possible. Which is saying a lot.

I also deeply enjoyed the fact that I could hear every singer on the stage. A tragically rare occurrence at the Met (or perhaps everywhere) these days.

Baritone Paulo Szot as Kovalyov, the Noseless Government Assessor, and tenor Andrey Popov both performed admirably. Popov especially navigated the long difficult high passages well. Though Szot is onstage almost the entire show, he and the production held my attention throughout even as the music lost me for brief periods.

But the singer who stood out most to me was Sergey Skorokhodov as Kovalyov’s servant during his second act love ballad.

Australian tenor Alexander Lewis played The Nose, which mostly consisted of running around and dancing in a large news papier-mâché nose, no small feat. There is one sung passage by The Nose apparently, but I missed it. No doubt I was coughing. My wretched lungs upstaged The Nose itself, curse them.

– Elizabeth Frayer and Shawn E Milnes

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Runny Noses, Russian and Otherwise: The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera

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