It must have been quite a night at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg a week before Christmas 1892 that saw not one but two Tchaikovsky premières. Despite a mixed reception, one went on to be world famous, a festive favourite across the world, while the other fell into comparative obscurity.
One was The Nutcracker, the other his one-act lyric opera Iolanta. There have been several attempts to revive the latter in the last few years, the most appealing by Swedish opera in 2021, the least an ugly concept by Peter Sellars for Madrid, while Bavarian opera spliced the work with Stravinsky’s Mavra.
So the idea of combining Iolanta with another piece is not new, but this is the first time I can recall an opera being stitched together with a ballet, in this case, fittingly enough, with The Nutcracker.
Conductor Omer Meir Wellber and director Lotte de Beer cut the 90-minute opera by one-third, with passages of about four to ten minutes divided by a half-hour of selections from the ballet for this 2022 Vienna production.
Iolanta, daughter of King René, is blind, but no-one is allowed to reveal this to her. Only when the knight Vaudemont falls for her and tells her the truth, explaining the brightness of the world and the glory of God, does she agree to undergo a cure, forsaking the imaginary world she has built in her head.
The production makes a fluid transition between the two, the dancing flowers, mice, caterpillars, fairies, treats and nutcracker prince appearing as creatures of her fantasy, around Iolanta's ballet double.
To me they seemed rather intimidating—as far as a seven-foot choc-ice can be—and especially those big-head expressionless puppets, even if one does eventually turn into a human prince. It made me wonder why the poor girl would be so reluctant to abandon such a scary place.
Productions in the Soviet Union used to replace the element of religious awakening in Iolanta's recovery. The production team are true to the original, but the secular message would work equally well, if not better.
The integration of opera and dance is handled perfectly, and makes a coherent whole in narrative terms, but there is a necessary trade-off in that the ballet floor does not admit much by way of extraneous furniture and the opera, beautifully presented in fairy-tale detail in the Swedish production, is enacted here in modern dress and on a virtually empty stage.
Olesya Golovneva sings beautifully while projecting an affecting vulnerability as Iolanta, with Stefan Cerny as her desperate, loving father. Georgy Vasiliev is an enraptured, ardent Vaudemont, and Szymon Komasa shines as physician Ibn-Hakia in his lilting arioso. Despite the Slavic origins of much of the cast, the piece is sung in German, with English and other subtitles available on the disk.
This is overall a clever, intellectually valid interpretation of Iolanta, drawing upon some of the lovely and familiar music of the ballet. But those seeking magic may do better to look elsewhere.