Name: Akhmatova
Start: 2011-03-28T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2011-04-13T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Opéra Bastille

Organization

Singer

Janina Baechle

Anna Akhmatova

Michael König

Lev Goumilev

Lionel Peintre

Pounine

Varduhi Abrahamyan

Lydia Tchoukovskaïa

Valérie Condoluci

Faina Ranevskaïa

Christophe Dumaux

Le Représentant de L'Union des écrivains

Conductor

Pascal Rophé

Stage director

Nicolas Joël

Set designer

Wolfgang Gussmann

Costume designer

Lighting designer

Hans Toelstede

Chorus master

Patrick Marie Aubert

Fabrice Dalis

Un Sculpteur

Un Universitaire anglais

Opéra National de Paris

Others

Chœur de l’Opéra national de Paris

Orchestra

Paris Opera Orchestra

French

Akhmatova

Paris

France

Opéra Bastille

The Opéra Bastille presents as a world premiere, Bruno Mantovani’s second opera inspired by the life of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) of which he made an opera with a psychological course, a mirror of the inner heartbreak of a humiliated, worried intellectual by the Stalinist regime. The libretto by Christophe Ghristi is particularly interested in the (difficult) relationship of Akhmatova and her son Lev who was interned several times without the mother apparently struggling or fighting the regime to get him out. Like Paul Hindemith’s painter Mathis, recently approached on the same stage, the opera evokes the place of the creator confronted with tyranny. What to do, what to say? To be silent in silence but to resist by thought and a literary and poetic work which continues today to grasp and question … This is the way of Anna Akhmatova, poet of the shadows, tortured mother but tenacious spirit , tense, still on the brink. However, Bruno Mantovani’s music is far from whispering. Between two explosions, the poet speaks of her discomfort and her helplessness …

Akhmatova Mantovani

Public

Approved

Production booklet

Further reading