Teaching Materials
Using Mazeppa to Teach Humanities
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Setting the Stage
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Projects and Further Research
... by 1704, the intrepid Charles XII had successfully removed Denmark and Poland from the coalition against Sweden, but Peter [“the Great” of Russia], his principal enemy, was gathering strength. The “Great Northern War” was entering a new and devastating phase when Charles committed a fatal error, one made by several other leaders in history too -- invading Russian territory. He received encouragement in this venture from Ivan Mazeppa, hetman (leader) of the Ukrainian Cossacks, a subject of the Tsar but disloyal to him and anxious to win independence for Ukraine.
On this occasion Mazeppa, a survivor of many previous crises ... chose the wrong side. He overestimated the strength of the Swedish army, whose reckless advance into Russia was soon slowed down by Peter’s “scorched earth” policy. Moreover, fearful of the Tsar’s power, most of Mazeppa’s own Cossacks abandoned him by the time the Hetman could join forces with a Swedish army decimated by illness and starvation.
It was at Poltava, near Kharkov in Ukraine in a decisive battle on May 11, 1709, that the vastly outnumbered Swedish army was forced to surrender. Charles and Mazeppa escaped into Turkey, where the Hetman soon died, while Charles tried in vain to enlist the Sultan in a campaign against Russia.
Peter’s triumph at Poltava, recalled as one of the great victories in Russian history, inspired a great epic, Pushkin’s Poltava (1828). In that heroic poem Pushkin combined stirring battle scenes with a merciless portrait of Mazeppa, whom he characterized as “a man of ambition, steeped in perfidy and crime.” Hardly anything of Pushkin’s panoramic vision was retained in Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa (1883), despite the fact that the opera’s libretto (by Viktor Burenin, as revised by the composer) contains many of Pushkin’s original lines. Peter the Great does not even appear in the opera, and the great battle is represented mainly by a stormy orchestral interlude.
Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa deals with the fierce Cossack’s tragic real-life involvement with Maria, the young daughter of the wealthy Kochubey. Though Mazeppa, at this point of the action, is a man in his sixties, Maria truly loves him and when her father refuses to marry her to Mazeppa, she willingly allows herself to be abducted. To avenge his humiliation, Kochubey denounces Mazeppa’s treasonable Swedish negotiations to Peter the Great. The Tsar, however, refuses to believe the accusation and delivers Kochubey to his enemy Mazeppa, who has him tortured and executed. Meanwhile, Mazeppa’s treason is discovered, and he must escape. The last scene shows the abandoned Maria, maddened by guilt, singing a lullaby recalling her happy childhood.
It is obvious that Tchaikovsky’s concern was with human emotions, not the national issues motivating the participants in the Great Northern War, not even the cause of Ukrainian independence championed by Mazeppa, an issue that was decisively settled by the devastating defeat of Charles XII at Poltava.
In what Pushkin wrote during these years there was little to give the authorities cause for suspicion. Indeed, in his forceful if ill-constructed long poem, Poltava (1828), he celebrates imperial Russia as Virgil did imperial Rome. The traitor, Mazeppa, plotting the Ukraine’s secession from Muscovy, is a villain out of melodrama, while Peter, the victor of Poltava, and symbol of the rising empire, is pictured as a demi-god. One or two of his lyrics go so far as to express the poet’s devotion to his sovereign, and on the occasion of the Polish rebellion of 1830-31, he spoke in the unmistakable accents of a nationalist and a patriot. For the rest, the social motif is muted in his verse. It is upon the emotional commonplaces in which the personal lyric is rooted that his shorter poems dwell. There are among them manifestoes of an aristocratic aestheticism ... This aestheticism carries an emphasis on the poet’s independence, which in itself was an implicit protest against the tyrannical paternalism that was strangling Russia.
Vulture, dove, and arrow are the metaphors used in Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa to describe three of the central characters. More than a love-triangle romance, this opera, adapted by Viktor Burenin and Tchaikovsky from the epic poem "Poltava" by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, unfolds a history of political intrigue, revenge, May-December marriage, parental love, and madness.
Written directly after Tchaikovsky’s better known opera Eugene Onegin, which was also inspired by a Pushkin work, Mazeppa, completed in 1883, centers on Ivan Mazeppa, a legendary but historically real Cossack hetman (leader) in the Russian Ukraine. Mazeppa (1640-1709) inspired poetry from Lord Byron and Victor Hugo, a painting by Eugene Delacroix, and a virtuoso etude by Franz Liszt not to mention less touted operas, choral works, and piano compositions by composers throughout Europe from Poland to Ireland. Although the Russians portray Ivan Mazeppa as a villain, the Ukrainian leader, who built churches and established libraries and educational institutions, was venerated by his countrymen as a patriot, statesman, and diplomat.
Opera composers have always been big on history. Historical figures from Anne Boleyn, Lucrezia Borgia and Mary Queen of Scots, to Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Richard Nixon have all become the title characters of operas. Mind you, whether these characters in any way resemble their historical namesakes is up for grabs. But in opera, that's never seemed to matter much. The key is in the telling, not in the history.
Still, a compelling figure needs the least embellishment - especially if that figure has a colorful story. So, given their bigger-than-life country, with its long and storied history, it's little wonder that Russian composers have relied on historical drama perhaps more than any others. Borodin wrote about Prince Igor. Mussorgsky had Boris Godunov and the Khovanschins. Rimsky-Korsakov had Ivan the Terrible, and Glinka had his "Life for the Tsar." And even Tchaikovsky, maybe the least nationalistic of Russian Romantic composers, paid tribute to his country's history with ... Mazeppa.
That title character, Ivan Stepanovich Mazeppa, was either a valiant and idealistic leader, a reprehensible traitor, or something in between; it depends on who's doing the telling. In fact, he was a Ukrainian leader who tangled with Peter the Great in an attempt to win Ukrainian independence - and lost, winding up in exile.
In Tchaikovsky's version of his story, Mazeppa is all that, as well as a red-hot lover. This is, after all, an opera. The trouble is, after this crusty old warrior marries the adoring young woman of his dreams, he proceeds to have her father killed. He couldn't help it. Really. This drives his new wife crazy - literally - and the once-heroic Mazeppa winds up riding off into the Ukrainian sunset, lonely and defeated.
Is all this historically accurate? Well, probably not; Tchaikovsky may deserve a "D" in history. But we'll give him an "A" in opera.
Characteristically enough, Tchaikovsky began composing the opera (apart from a few sketches), late in 1881, precisely with the scene that [is] emotionally the warmest in the opera, in which Mazeppa confides to Maria both his tender feelings and his decision to seek the Ukrainian throne for himself - and for her - with the aid of the Swedish king, thus bringing the libretto´s intimate-romantic and heroic-historical themes into a somewhat forced conjunction.
The libretto was not originally prepared for Tchaikovsky. In view of its patriotic import, it is not surprising to learn that it had been commissioned by the directorate of the tsar´s own Imperial Theatres, on its own initiative, from Victor Burenin (1841-1926), a reputable conservative journalist as well as a poet, who some years previously had furnished a libretto for Cesar Cui. The intended composer was the great cellist Karl Davydov, who was then the director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and lacked the time to carry out the task. Tchaikovsky got wind of the situation and asked his friend if he might be assigned the job instead. The libretto arrived practically by return mail.
Tchaikovsky decided finally to end the opera not where Burenin had ended it (with mad Maria´s Ophelia-like suicide by drowning and a conventional horror chorus), but with her haunting lullaby to the dying Andrey, whom she has mistaken for a sleeping child. Tchaikovsky also decided, later on, to insert an arioso for Mazeppa in the middle act, so that the hetman can step briefly out of diabolical character and sing sincerely (his melody going so far as to echo that of Prince Gremin, Tatyana´s doting husband in Eugen Onegin) about his own love for Maria. The text, a rush job, was furnished to the composer´s specifications by V. A. Kandaurov, the administrator in charge of sets and properties for the Moscow Imperial Theatres.
The resemblance here between Mazeppa and Tchaikovsky´s previous opera based on Pushkin was neither isolated nor fortuitous. While Mazeppa, as a historical opera, had all the makings of a pompous spectacle along the lines of The Maid of Orleans, the Joan of Arc extravaganza that was its immediate predecessor in Tchaikovsky´s output for the stage, this time the composer sought every opportunity to fashion a more inward lyric drama out of his semi-historical materials. Only the execution scene at the end of Act II is handled in the grand manner, replete with stage banda. Otherwise, the opera´s relatively intimate scale and formal freedom (at least compared with the grandiose “Maid”) suggest a reversion to the "realist" dramaturgical ideal of Eugen Onegin.
"Realism" is an ideal Tchaikovsky is often wrongly assumed to have opposed. Eugen Onegin, along with La Traviata one of the earliest operas to be based on a novel with a near-contemporary setting, is one of its shining exemplars. Mazeppa, improbably enough, is another. Its relationship to the middle-period Verdi of La Traviata is especially clear in the masterly blend of parlante and full-blown lyric ritornello that mark the dialogue scenes in the second act. Most striking is the one between Maria and her mother, in which the daughter´s resistance, expressed in recitative, is over-come by her mother´s big sweeping melody, finally taken up in duet.
Most distinctive of all in Mazeppa, despite all romance and local color, is its heavy pall of morbidity. Eduard Napravnik, the conductor of the St. Petersburg premiere and an inveterate complainer, nevertheless caught the opera´s special quality when he bemoaned its way of “heaping scene upon scene, each more horrible than the last: enmity, betrayal, torture, execution, murder and madness - there is nowhere for the listener to relax.” Napravnik´s worries on behalf of the audience were characteristic. His misgivings on the composer´s account – “Where will he find such a quantity of necessary colors?” -- seem particularly misplaced and patronizing. But by then even Napravnik must have been feeling envious. It is precisely from Mazeppa, fought over and finally presented in tandem by both leading Russian opera houses (Moscow Bolshoy on 15 February 1884, Mariinsky three days later) that Tchaikovsky´s undisputed ascendancy among Russian composers may be said to date.
Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa [is] a stunning opera that has only made it to the margins of the repertory in non-Russian companies. This is a deeply moving and skillfully written work, reminiscent in its theme, scope (nearly three hours) and genius of Verdi's Don Carlo.
The story is based on events in the life of the 17th-century Ukrainian separatist Ivan Mazeppa, who allied himself with Czar Peter of Russia and served as a Cossack overlord in Ukraine until he turned on the Czar, started a rebellion and was put down. Today, of course, Mazeppa is viewed in Ukraine as a hero of nationalism.
Tchaikovsky essentially ignores the history, instead portraying Mazeppa as an overreaching, though charismatic, opportunist who abandons his principles and his rightful ruler. For the composer to suggest otherwise in the Russia of 1884 would have been foolhardy.
The history may be skewed, but the psychology of the story, as made vivid here by Tchaikovsky's remarkable music, is insightful and convincing. The score has plenty of swashbuckling energy. Mazeppa's visit to the estate of his Cossack ally Kochubey is celebrated with a stirring chorus and exuberant ballet music ... The battle of Poltava that depicts the eventual showdown between Mazeppa and the czarist forces is evoked in a driving symphonic sequence, complete with an onstage battalion of brass players.
But most of the score is given to extended, reflective scenes between the main characters where the battles are internal. Mazeppa, a stolid man of 70, falls deeply for Kochubey's young daughter Maria. Intriguingly, Maria loves everything about him: his maturity, his wizened appearance, his deep voice. Their music, expansively lyrical yet pungent with shifting harmonies, conveys the ambiguity. Does Mazeppa truly love Maria, or is he using his charisma to ensnare her? Does Maria perceive nobility in Mazeppa's soul, or is she an unstable adolescent with a father complex?
The operatic need for love duets between a tenor and a soprano is fulfilled here by Tchaikovsky's invention of a character, Andrei, a young Cossack who adores Maria unrequitedly. Later, when Maria's father goes to the Czar to expose Mazeppa's true intentions, he is condemned to death for maligning Peter's overlord. Rushing to save him, Maria is too late, and slips into madness.
In the opera's most daring touch, Maria sings an eerie lullaby over the body of Andrei, who has died in battle, thinking him her unborn child. With this unhinged yet strangely angelic music the opera ends.
Many were drawn to a story made to order for Romantic artists, an episode in Mazepa's [sic] early life that Ukrainian historians say has no basis in fact. Written down by Voltaire in his biography of Sweden's Charles XII and first popularized by the Polish memorialist J.C. Pasek, the legend recounts Mazepa's supposed affair with a Polish countess and his subsequent punishment by being lashed naked to the back of a wild horse set loose to gallop across the countryside. Surviving the ordeal, Mazepa was found by a group of Ukrainian peasants who hailed him as a liberator sent miraculously to their subjugated land. The exciting tale and the heroic character appealed to the imagination of writers and composers.
The Russian composer Alexander Pushkin, however, took a different view. Writing his verse tale Poltava in the time of Tsar Nicholas I, he expressed the tsarist (and decidedly Russian) view of Mazepa as a turncoat vassal, a vainglorious tyrant and a womanizer who was having an affair with his goddaughter Maria. Tchaikovsky, who began composing his opera Mazeppa in 1881, based his plot on Pushkin's work and made Mazepa the villain of his composition.
Tchaikovsky, the master of orchestral music, is barely known as the composer of ten operas. Although hardly successful with his dramatic stage works, excepting Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, he again and again tried his hand at operatic subjects.
Possibly his attempts failed because these works were less inspired by an inner need for personal expression than were his orchestral compositions in which, abstractly, without live scenes and personages, he could freely project whatever moved him toward creative urges. At one time he, himself, wrote Madame Nadejda von Meck, “Words often are disturbing, and always pull music down from its heights ... In this perhaps lies the reason that my instrumental compositions are comparatively more successful than my vocal works” ...
He applies his talent and skills as a masterful orchestral technician to his operas as well, but in these rather than project himself, he attempts to depict characters and situations objectively. Subsequently [sic], although effort and workmanship exist, the soul is missing. Since Tchaikovsky does not identify with any aspects of these creations, there is no personal rapport, and the audience, in turn, finds nothing to which it can relate. He describes without emotion, but in opera, as in the theatre, the listener or spectator wants to be moved, immerse himself into and experience the action and events on the stage. Therefore Tchaikovsky essentially is not a dramatist. Although his subjects arouse interest, the plots are not always in good taste or easy to stomach, and the dramatic action is rambling rather than tightly interlaced ...
Mazeppa ... exhibited Italian influences which had a strange, incongruous effect on the basically Russian theme. Tchaikovsky was not exceptionally inspired by his subject but used it because he had nothing beter available at the moment ... The reception of this opera, too, proved a disappointment.
2. One commentator calls attention to this opera’s “morbidity.” Does “Mazeppa” seem to you excessively gloomy or pessimistic? Is the music as “morbid” as the text, or more, or less?
3. Does this opera glorify war and violence? Is the onstage violence, as called for in the libretto, excessive?
4. Like many operas based on actual incidents and characters, this one deviates from the historical record. Why? Why not just stick to “the facts?” Is this deviation a flaw in the work?
5. One of the above sources refers to the “realism” of this opera. Do you agree? Is it realistic? If so, in what sense? If not, why not?
6. Most of the sources call the title character a villain. How villainous is he? Are his motives selfish and cynical? Does he have any admirable qualities? Consider Tommasini’s comments about the ambiguity of his relationship to Maria. Consider also the “love” arioso added to Act II at Tchaikovskyąs insistence.
7. Many operas emphasize the relationship of, and the conflict between, personal life and political life. This opera seems more interested in personal feelings than in their larger political context. Is that a fair assessment? Is this what opera (and music theater generally) should do? Should it use politics and history as a mere backdrop for personal matters (especially those relating to romantic love), or should political issues be central?
8. In this opera, an old man desperately wants to marry a young girl. She’s willing. What do you think about that?
9. Mazeppa is infrequently staged in Russia, and far more rarely outside of it. Why? Isn’t it any good? Are there other reasons for its neglect besides (lack of) artistic quality?
10. Ruth Berges doesn’t think much of Tchaikovsky as an opera composer. Is she right? Is Mazeppa undramatic? Does the composer fail to penetrate his characters? Is “the soul missing?”
2. Read Pushkin’s Poltava. (Finding an English translation currently in print may be difficult.) Compare it with the opera’s libretto. Also, read biographical material about Pushkin, especially concerning his attitude and relationship to the Tsarist regime.
3. Read Byron’s poem Mazeppa, which tells of the legendary forced ride on the back of a wild horse. See a reproduction of the Delacroix painting and hear the tone poem by Lizst for other treatments of that story.
4. Get to know the other Tchaikovsky operas based on Pushkin, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. Both are in the Met repertory; youąll find study guides on this site. In both cases, especially the former, there is a radical transformation in tone from source to opera. Many critics (notably Vladimir Nabokov) consider this a betrayal of Pushkin. What do you think?
5. And then there are all those Pushkin operas by other composers. The two great ones by Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov and The Queen of Spades) are in the Met repertory and represented by study guides. Rimsky-Korsakov set The Golden Cockerel and Mozart and Salieri, Rachmaninoff The Covetous Knight, and Dargomizhky The Stone Guest, to name a few. Recordings are available.
6. Napoleon’s disastrous attempt to invade Russia is both foreground and background to Prokofiev’s War and Peace, based on the Tolstoy novel. The Met has staged it, and you’ll find a study guide at this site. Read the novel (it’s appropriately vast), hear the opera, and compare it to Mazeppa as a lesson in what happens when you try to invade Russia.
7. You might take a more historical approach to that subject, and read scholarly narratives about the Napoleonic adventure, or about Hitler’s equally massive failure.
8. The recent breakup of the Soviet Union enabled Ukraine to gain independence for the first time in centuries. It’s a very large country with a distinct identity and culture, but it has long been overshadowed by Russia. Its current political activities have brought it to attention in the Western press. Learn about Ukraine.
9. Back to Tchaikovsky. Berges considers the operas unsatisfactory compared to the orchestral music. Much of that, though, also tells stories: the three major ballets, for example, and the overtures (most famously Romeo and Juliet). Listen to them, and see productions of the ballets. Is she right in regarding them as superior to the operas, and for the reasons she gives?
10. Among the many operas mentioned by our commentators as comparable to Mazeppa, perhaps the most intriguing parallels are with works by Verdi. Don Carlo is another large historical canvas where personal issues stand out in bold relief against the political backdrop. Mazeppa’s kinship with La Traviata is both musical and dramatic. The commentators might have mentioned Rigoletto, which explores a complex relationship between a doting father and rebellious daughter. These works are in the Met repertory; you’ll find study guides here.
11. That legendary wild ride depicted by Delacroix has attracted many artists. If you’re visually inclined, try your hand at a painting or drawing, or perhaps a series of panels, representing it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Setting the Stage
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Projects and Further Research
The East is bright with dawn. Already
From field and hill the cannon roars.
The purple smoke in swirl and eddy
Toward a cloudless heaven soars
To meet the beams that morning pours.
The ranks are closed. The marksmen scatter --
They lie awhile in ambush yet.
The balls go rolling, bullets spatter,
And coldly slants the bayonet.
The Swede, long crowned with Victory’s favors,
Tears through the trench-fire, nor wavers.
The frantic cavalry in force
Rides forth -- the infantry, impassive,
With solid tread and firm front massive
Moves forward to support the horse.
And here the battlefield is burning,
And there with fatal thunder lours;
And fortune, it is plain, is ours ...
Noon nears. The blazing heat bores deeper.
The battle rests -- a tired reaper.
The Cossack steeds, paraded, shine.
The regiments fall into line.
No martial music is redounding,
And from the hills the hungry roar
Of the calmed cannon breaks no more.
And lo! across the plain resounding,
A deep “Hurrah!” rolls from afar:
The regiments have seen the Czar.
(Alexander Pushkin, from Poltava, translated by Brigid Brophy)
... by 1704, the intrepid Charles XII had successfully removed Denmark and Poland from the coalition against Sweden, but Peter [“the Great” of Russia], his principal enemy, was gathering strength. The “Great Northern War” was entering a new and devastating phase when Charles committed a fatal error, one made by several other leaders in history too -- invading Russian territory. He received encouragement in this venture from Ivan Mazeppa, hetman (leader) of the Ukrainian Cossacks, a subject of the Tsar but disloyal to him and anxious to win independence for Ukraine.
On this occasion Mazeppa, a survivor of many previous crises ... chose the wrong side. He overestimated the strength of the Swedish army, whose reckless advance into Russia was soon slowed down by Peter’s “scorched earth” policy. Moreover, fearful of the Tsar’s power, most of Mazeppa’s own Cossacks abandoned him by the time the Hetman could join forces with a Swedish army decimated by illness and starvation.
It was at Poltava, near Kharkov in Ukraine in a decisive battle on May 11, 1709, that the vastly outnumbered Swedish army was forced to surrender. Charles and Mazeppa escaped into Turkey, where the Hetman soon died, while Charles tried in vain to enlist the Sultan in a campaign against Russia.
Peter’s triumph at Poltava, recalled as one of the great victories in Russian history, inspired a great epic, Pushkin’s Poltava (1828). In that heroic poem Pushkin combined stirring battle scenes with a merciless portrait of Mazeppa, whom he characterized as “a man of ambition, steeped in perfidy and crime.” Hardly anything of Pushkin’s panoramic vision was retained in Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa (1883), despite the fact that the opera’s libretto (by Viktor Burenin, as revised by the composer) contains many of Pushkin’s original lines. Peter the Great does not even appear in the opera, and the great battle is represented mainly by a stormy orchestral interlude.
Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa deals with the fierce Cossack’s tragic real-life involvement with Maria, the young daughter of the wealthy Kochubey. Though Mazeppa, at this point of the action, is a man in his sixties, Maria truly loves him and when her father refuses to marry her to Mazeppa, she willingly allows herself to be abducted. To avenge his humiliation, Kochubey denounces Mazeppa’s treasonable Swedish negotiations to Peter the Great. The Tsar, however, refuses to believe the accusation and delivers Kochubey to his enemy Mazeppa, who has him tortured and executed. Meanwhile, Mazeppa’s treason is discovered, and he must escape. The last scene shows the abandoned Maria, maddened by guilt, singing a lullaby recalling her happy childhood.
It is obvious that Tchaikovsky’s concern was with human emotions, not the national issues motivating the participants in the Great Northern War, not even the cause of Ukrainian independence championed by Mazeppa, an issue that was decisively settled by the devastating defeat of Charles XII at Poltava.
(George Jellinek)
In what Pushkin wrote during these years there was little to give the authorities cause for suspicion. Indeed, in his forceful if ill-constructed long poem, Poltava (1828), he celebrates imperial Russia as Virgil did imperial Rome. The traitor, Mazeppa, plotting the Ukraine’s secession from Muscovy, is a villain out of melodrama, while Peter, the victor of Poltava, and symbol of the rising empire, is pictured as a demi-god. One or two of his lyrics go so far as to express the poet’s devotion to his sovereign, and on the occasion of the Polish rebellion of 1830-31, he spoke in the unmistakable accents of a nationalist and a patriot. For the rest, the social motif is muted in his verse. It is upon the emotional commonplaces in which the personal lyric is rooted that his shorter poems dwell. There are among them manifestoes of an aristocratic aestheticism ... This aestheticism carries an emphasis on the poet’s independence, which in itself was an implicit protest against the tyrannical paternalism that was strangling Russia.
(Avrahm Yarmolinsky)
Vulture, dove, and arrow are the metaphors used in Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa to describe three of the central characters. More than a love-triangle romance, this opera, adapted by Viktor Burenin and Tchaikovsky from the epic poem "Poltava" by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, unfolds a history of political intrigue, revenge, May-December marriage, parental love, and madness.
Written directly after Tchaikovsky’s better known opera Eugene Onegin, which was also inspired by a Pushkin work, Mazeppa, completed in 1883, centers on Ivan Mazeppa, a legendary but historically real Cossack hetman (leader) in the Russian Ukraine. Mazeppa (1640-1709) inspired poetry from Lord Byron and Victor Hugo, a painting by Eugene Delacroix, and a virtuoso etude by Franz Liszt not to mention less touted operas, choral works, and piano compositions by composers throughout Europe from Poland to Ireland. Although the Russians portray Ivan Mazeppa as a villain, the Ukrainian leader, who built churches and established libraries and educational institutions, was venerated by his countrymen as a patriot, statesman, and diplomat.
(Karren L. Alenier)
Opera composers have always been big on history. Historical figures from Anne Boleyn, Lucrezia Borgia and Mary Queen of Scots, to Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Richard Nixon have all become the title characters of operas. Mind you, whether these characters in any way resemble their historical namesakes is up for grabs. But in opera, that's never seemed to matter much. The key is in the telling, not in the history.
Still, a compelling figure needs the least embellishment - especially if that figure has a colorful story. So, given their bigger-than-life country, with its long and storied history, it's little wonder that Russian composers have relied on historical drama perhaps more than any others. Borodin wrote about Prince Igor. Mussorgsky had Boris Godunov and the Khovanschins. Rimsky-Korsakov had Ivan the Terrible, and Glinka had his "Life for the Tsar." And even Tchaikovsky, maybe the least nationalistic of Russian Romantic composers, paid tribute to his country's history with ... Mazeppa.
That title character, Ivan Stepanovich Mazeppa, was either a valiant and idealistic leader, a reprehensible traitor, or something in between; it depends on who's doing the telling. In fact, he was a Ukrainian leader who tangled with Peter the Great in an attempt to win Ukrainian independence - and lost, winding up in exile.
In Tchaikovsky's version of his story, Mazeppa is all that, as well as a red-hot lover. This is, after all, an opera. The trouble is, after this crusty old warrior marries the adoring young woman of his dreams, he proceeds to have her father killed. He couldn't help it. Really. This drives his new wife crazy - literally - and the once-heroic Mazeppa winds up riding off into the Ukrainian sunset, lonely and defeated.
Is all this historically accurate? Well, probably not; Tchaikovsky may deserve a "D" in history. But we'll give him an "A" in opera.
(NPR World of Opera)
Characteristically enough, Tchaikovsky began composing the opera (apart from a few sketches), late in 1881, precisely with the scene that [is] emotionally the warmest in the opera, in which Mazeppa confides to Maria both his tender feelings and his decision to seek the Ukrainian throne for himself - and for her - with the aid of the Swedish king, thus bringing the libretto´s intimate-romantic and heroic-historical themes into a somewhat forced conjunction.
The libretto was not originally prepared for Tchaikovsky. In view of its patriotic import, it is not surprising to learn that it had been commissioned by the directorate of the tsar´s own Imperial Theatres, on its own initiative, from Victor Burenin (1841-1926), a reputable conservative journalist as well as a poet, who some years previously had furnished a libretto for Cesar Cui. The intended composer was the great cellist Karl Davydov, who was then the director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and lacked the time to carry out the task. Tchaikovsky got wind of the situation and asked his friend if he might be assigned the job instead. The libretto arrived practically by return mail.
Tchaikovsky decided finally to end the opera not where Burenin had ended it (with mad Maria´s Ophelia-like suicide by drowning and a conventional horror chorus), but with her haunting lullaby to the dying Andrey, whom she has mistaken for a sleeping child. Tchaikovsky also decided, later on, to insert an arioso for Mazeppa in the middle act, so that the hetman can step briefly out of diabolical character and sing sincerely (his melody going so far as to echo that of Prince Gremin, Tatyana´s doting husband in Eugen Onegin) about his own love for Maria. The text, a rush job, was furnished to the composer´s specifications by V. A. Kandaurov, the administrator in charge of sets and properties for the Moscow Imperial Theatres.
The resemblance here between Mazeppa and Tchaikovsky´s previous opera based on Pushkin was neither isolated nor fortuitous. While Mazeppa, as a historical opera, had all the makings of a pompous spectacle along the lines of The Maid of Orleans, the Joan of Arc extravaganza that was its immediate predecessor in Tchaikovsky´s output for the stage, this time the composer sought every opportunity to fashion a more inward lyric drama out of his semi-historical materials. Only the execution scene at the end of Act II is handled in the grand manner, replete with stage banda. Otherwise, the opera´s relatively intimate scale and formal freedom (at least compared with the grandiose “Maid”) suggest a reversion to the "realist" dramaturgical ideal of Eugen Onegin.
"Realism" is an ideal Tchaikovsky is often wrongly assumed to have opposed. Eugen Onegin, along with La Traviata one of the earliest operas to be based on a novel with a near-contemporary setting, is one of its shining exemplars. Mazeppa, improbably enough, is another. Its relationship to the middle-period Verdi of La Traviata is especially clear in the masterly blend of parlante and full-blown lyric ritornello that mark the dialogue scenes in the second act. Most striking is the one between Maria and her mother, in which the daughter´s resistance, expressed in recitative, is over-come by her mother´s big sweeping melody, finally taken up in duet.
Most distinctive of all in Mazeppa, despite all romance and local color, is its heavy pall of morbidity. Eduard Napravnik, the conductor of the St. Petersburg premiere and an inveterate complainer, nevertheless caught the opera´s special quality when he bemoaned its way of “heaping scene upon scene, each more horrible than the last: enmity, betrayal, torture, execution, murder and madness - there is nowhere for the listener to relax.” Napravnik´s worries on behalf of the audience were characteristic. His misgivings on the composer´s account – “Where will he find such a quantity of necessary colors?” -- seem particularly misplaced and patronizing. But by then even Napravnik must have been feeling envious. It is precisely from Mazeppa, fought over and finally presented in tandem by both leading Russian opera houses (Moscow Bolshoy on 15 February 1884, Mariinsky three days later) that Tchaikovsky´s undisputed ascendancy among Russian composers may be said to date.
(www.tchaikovsky.host.sk)
Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa [is] a stunning opera that has only made it to the margins of the repertory in non-Russian companies. This is a deeply moving and skillfully written work, reminiscent in its theme, scope (nearly three hours) and genius of Verdi's Don Carlo.
The story is based on events in the life of the 17th-century Ukrainian separatist Ivan Mazeppa, who allied himself with Czar Peter of Russia and served as a Cossack overlord in Ukraine until he turned on the Czar, started a rebellion and was put down. Today, of course, Mazeppa is viewed in Ukraine as a hero of nationalism.
Tchaikovsky essentially ignores the history, instead portraying Mazeppa as an overreaching, though charismatic, opportunist who abandons his principles and his rightful ruler. For the composer to suggest otherwise in the Russia of 1884 would have been foolhardy.
The history may be skewed, but the psychology of the story, as made vivid here by Tchaikovsky's remarkable music, is insightful and convincing. The score has plenty of swashbuckling energy. Mazeppa's visit to the estate of his Cossack ally Kochubey is celebrated with a stirring chorus and exuberant ballet music ... The battle of Poltava that depicts the eventual showdown between Mazeppa and the czarist forces is evoked in a driving symphonic sequence, complete with an onstage battalion of brass players.
But most of the score is given to extended, reflective scenes between the main characters where the battles are internal. Mazeppa, a stolid man of 70, falls deeply for Kochubey's young daughter Maria. Intriguingly, Maria loves everything about him: his maturity, his wizened appearance, his deep voice. Their music, expansively lyrical yet pungent with shifting harmonies, conveys the ambiguity. Does Mazeppa truly love Maria, or is he using his charisma to ensnare her? Does Maria perceive nobility in Mazeppa's soul, or is she an unstable adolescent with a father complex?
The operatic need for love duets between a tenor and a soprano is fulfilled here by Tchaikovsky's invention of a character, Andrei, a young Cossack who adores Maria unrequitedly. Later, when Maria's father goes to the Czar to expose Mazeppa's true intentions, he is condemned to death for maligning Peter's overlord. Rushing to save him, Maria is too late, and slips into madness.
In the opera's most daring touch, Maria sings an eerie lullaby over the body of Andrei, who has died in battle, thinking him her unborn child. With this unhinged yet strangely angelic music the opera ends.
(Anthony Tommasini)
Many were drawn to a story made to order for Romantic artists, an episode in Mazepa's [sic] early life that Ukrainian historians say has no basis in fact. Written down by Voltaire in his biography of Sweden's Charles XII and first popularized by the Polish memorialist J.C. Pasek, the legend recounts Mazepa's supposed affair with a Polish countess and his subsequent punishment by being lashed naked to the back of a wild horse set loose to gallop across the countryside. Surviving the ordeal, Mazepa was found by a group of Ukrainian peasants who hailed him as a liberator sent miraculously to their subjugated land. The exciting tale and the heroic character appealed to the imagination of writers and composers.
The Russian composer Alexander Pushkin, however, took a different view. Writing his verse tale Poltava in the time of Tsar Nicholas I, he expressed the tsarist (and decidedly Russian) view of Mazepa as a turncoat vassal, a vainglorious tyrant and a womanizer who was having an affair with his goddaughter Maria. Tchaikovsky, who began composing his opera Mazeppa in 1881, based his plot on Pushkin's work and made Mazepa the villain of his composition.
(Helen Smindak)
Tchaikovsky, the master of orchestral music, is barely known as the composer of ten operas. Although hardly successful with his dramatic stage works, excepting Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, he again and again tried his hand at operatic subjects.
Possibly his attempts failed because these works were less inspired by an inner need for personal expression than were his orchestral compositions in which, abstractly, without live scenes and personages, he could freely project whatever moved him toward creative urges. At one time he, himself, wrote Madame Nadejda von Meck, “Words often are disturbing, and always pull music down from its heights ... In this perhaps lies the reason that my instrumental compositions are comparatively more successful than my vocal works” ...
He applies his talent and skills as a masterful orchestral technician to his operas as well, but in these rather than project himself, he attempts to depict characters and situations objectively. Subsequently [sic], although effort and workmanship exist, the soul is missing. Since Tchaikovsky does not identify with any aspects of these creations, there is no personal rapport, and the audience, in turn, finds nothing to which it can relate. He describes without emotion, but in opera, as in the theatre, the listener or spectator wants to be moved, immerse himself into and experience the action and events on the stage. Therefore Tchaikovsky essentially is not a dramatist. Although his subjects arouse interest, the plots are not always in good taste or easy to stomach, and the dramatic action is rambling rather than tightly interlaced ...
Mazeppa ... exhibited Italian influences which had a strange, incongruous effect on the basically Russian theme. Tchaikovsky was not exceptionally inspired by his subject but used it because he had nothing beter available at the moment ... The reception of this opera, too, proved a disappointment.
(Ruth Berges)
B. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND WRITING
1. Karren Alenier identifies the vulture, dove, and arrow as three symbols representing central characters in Mazeppa. Which character does each symbol represent, and what does it tell us about that character?2. One commentator calls attention to this opera’s “morbidity.” Does “Mazeppa” seem to you excessively gloomy or pessimistic? Is the music as “morbid” as the text, or more, or less?
3. Does this opera glorify war and violence? Is the onstage violence, as called for in the libretto, excessive?
4. Like many operas based on actual incidents and characters, this one deviates from the historical record. Why? Why not just stick to “the facts?” Is this deviation a flaw in the work?
5. One of the above sources refers to the “realism” of this opera. Do you agree? Is it realistic? If so, in what sense? If not, why not?
6. Most of the sources call the title character a villain. How villainous is he? Are his motives selfish and cynical? Does he have any admirable qualities? Consider Tommasini’s comments about the ambiguity of his relationship to Maria. Consider also the “love” arioso added to Act II at Tchaikovskyąs insistence.
7. Many operas emphasize the relationship of, and the conflict between, personal life and political life. This opera seems more interested in personal feelings than in their larger political context. Is that a fair assessment? Is this what opera (and music theater generally) should do? Should it use politics and history as a mere backdrop for personal matters (especially those relating to romantic love), or should political issues be central?
8. In this opera, an old man desperately wants to marry a young girl. She’s willing. What do you think about that?
9. Mazeppa is infrequently staged in Russia, and far more rarely outside of it. Why? Isn’t it any good? Are there other reasons for its neglect besides (lack of) artistic quality?
10. Ruth Berges doesn’t think much of Tchaikovsky as an opera composer. Is she right? Is Mazeppa undramatic? Does the composer fail to penetrate his characters? Is “the soul missing?”
C. PROJECTS AND FURTHER RESEARCH
1. Read the historical record: learn about Peter the Great, Charles, XII, Mazeppa, the military and political history of this era involving Russia, Sweden, and Ukraine. Compare that record with how it’s treated in the opera.2. Read Pushkin’s Poltava. (Finding an English translation currently in print may be difficult.) Compare it with the opera’s libretto. Also, read biographical material about Pushkin, especially concerning his attitude and relationship to the Tsarist regime.
3. Read Byron’s poem Mazeppa, which tells of the legendary forced ride on the back of a wild horse. See a reproduction of the Delacroix painting and hear the tone poem by Lizst for other treatments of that story.
4. Get to know the other Tchaikovsky operas based on Pushkin, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. Both are in the Met repertory; youąll find study guides on this site. In both cases, especially the former, there is a radical transformation in tone from source to opera. Many critics (notably Vladimir Nabokov) consider this a betrayal of Pushkin. What do you think?
5. And then there are all those Pushkin operas by other composers. The two great ones by Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov and The Queen of Spades) are in the Met repertory and represented by study guides. Rimsky-Korsakov set The Golden Cockerel and Mozart and Salieri, Rachmaninoff The Covetous Knight, and Dargomizhky The Stone Guest, to name a few. Recordings are available.
6. Napoleon’s disastrous attempt to invade Russia is both foreground and background to Prokofiev’s War and Peace, based on the Tolstoy novel. The Met has staged it, and you’ll find a study guide at this site. Read the novel (it’s appropriately vast), hear the opera, and compare it to Mazeppa as a lesson in what happens when you try to invade Russia.
7. You might take a more historical approach to that subject, and read scholarly narratives about the Napoleonic adventure, or about Hitler’s equally massive failure.
8. The recent breakup of the Soviet Union enabled Ukraine to gain independence for the first time in centuries. It’s a very large country with a distinct identity and culture, but it has long been overshadowed by Russia. Its current political activities have brought it to attention in the Western press. Learn about Ukraine.
9. Back to Tchaikovsky. Berges considers the operas unsatisfactory compared to the orchestral music. Much of that, though, also tells stories: the three major ballets, for example, and the overtures (most famously Romeo and Juliet). Listen to them, and see productions of the ballets. Is she right in regarding them as superior to the operas, and for the reasons she gives?
10. Among the many operas mentioned by our commentators as comparable to Mazeppa, perhaps the most intriguing parallels are with works by Verdi. Don Carlo is another large historical canvas where personal issues stand out in bold relief against the political backdrop. Mazeppa’s kinship with La Traviata is both musical and dramatic. The commentators might have mentioned Rigoletto, which explores a complex relationship between a doting father and rebellious daughter. These works are in the Met repertory; you’ll find study guides here.
11. That legendary wild ride depicted by Delacroix has attracted many artists. If you’re visually inclined, try your hand at a painting or drawing, or perhaps a series of panels, representing it.
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