Sergei Prokofiev's early mystical opera, Maddalena, will be presented on the stage of NOVAT for the first time. The premiere of the new production awaits the audience on the theatre's Small Stage on October 16 and 17. Ilya Andriyakhin, a graduate of GITIS (The Russian Institute of Theatre Arts) and participant of the Competition for Young Opera Directors “Nano-Opera”, will stage the performance.
The production of Maddalena will be a continuation of the project to support young professionals of the musical theatre, which has been successfully implemented at NOVAT for several years at the initiative of the theatre's chief stage director and artistic director of the youth project Vyacheslav Starodubtsev. Ilya Andriyakhin is the third young stage director after Alexey Smirnov and Irina Gaudasinskaya to have the opportunity to stage his debut performance at NOVAT. The production stage director explained why he chose the opera Maddalena for his first directorial work: “First of all,
2026 is Prokofiev's jubilee year, and his oeuvre, as they say now, is “on trend.” And secondly, at the moment when I was offered the production, I was already very familiar with “Maddalena”. I swear to you, the first time I listened to this opera, I didn't understand it at all. At the second audition I realized: that's it, I'm crazy. I, like Prokofiev himself, was fascinated by the idea of beautiful evil. I developed it and brought it to the absolute. In my opinion, Prokofiev often puts the inability to love into the musical features of female characters. Maddalena is a vamp woman, devoid of the ability to love. This is a glitch in nature, in the logic of classical literature.”
In the original libretto, the action takes place at sunset in Venice. The intrigue revolves around mysterious Maddalena. The fatal beauty ‒ the wife of the artist Genaro and the lover of the alchemist Stenio ‒ becomes the apex of a love triangle and provokes a bloody denouement of the story. The young stage director decided on a bold experiment in his work, expanding the opera's score with a sonata by Prokofiev and a romance by Myaskovsky. The production of the opera Maddalena at NOVAT is carried out in collaboration of the theatre and the Novosibirsk State Conservatory named after M. Glinka. The opera will be conducted by Andrey Berezin, a student of the Conservatory. Production designer (set design and costumes) is Elena Solovyova.
• The twenty-year-old Prokofiev wrote the opera Maddalena with his own libretto based on the play by Magda Lieven-Orlova, hoping to be performed by students of the Moscow Conservatory, and he treasured that work very much. However, due to the complexity of the musical material, the opera was never staged.
• The orchestration of Maddalena remained unfinished (only the first of the four scenes was orchestrated). The manuscript was considered lost: going abroad, Prokofiev took it with him and left it in Paris. It was only in 1954 that it was discovered in the archive of the Editions Russes de Musique. The opera was first performed on the BBC radio station in 1979 under the baton of the British conductor, Edward Downes, an ardent promoter of Prokofiev's oeuvre, who completed the score. The premiere of Maddalena took place on the theatre stage in 1981 at the Graz Festival (Austria).
• In its homeland, in Russia, the opera Maddalena was performed for the first time 75 years after its creation. Under the baton of the outstanding conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the world's first recording of Maddalena was made in 1986, and in September 1987, the opera was broadcast on the All-Union Radio.