Astonishment and disbelief prevail after the Amsterdam premiere of the fact-based chamber opera Denis & Katya (2019) at Dutch National Opera's Opera Forward Festival. Can it be true, just as we reach the end of the second week of the Russian army’s inhuman invasion of Ukraine, that we are confronted with yet more disturbing events from this country of genius poets and composers? At this time, to what extent do the cruel acts of war cloud our view of the story of the violent deaths of two teenagers in the Russian provinces?
British composer Philip Venables is not to blame for this. Together with director and writer Ted Huffman he had been on the lookout for new operatic material after the success of his first full-length opera 4.48 Psychosis in 2016, based on the play of the same name by Sarah Kane. “It's important to tell stories of today and not always Shakespeare,” is Venables' credo. The pair came across the facts of their modern love story, which is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, by chance on the internet.
Venables, Huffman and playwright Ksenia Ravvina travelled to Russia to research the background of this story. They conducted interviews with a close friend of Denis and a journalist who had reported on the story in an online newspaper at the time. The three found further text material in newspaper articles and media reports. On a meta-level, the libretto also includes excerpts from the chat between Venables and Huffman about the creation of their opera.
Denis & Katya is structured like a strident television documentary tailored to a young audience: eyewitness accounts alternate rapidly with commentaries full of varying emotions about the events. In the last hours of their lives, the two Russian juveniles broadcast a live stream from their mobile phones to a rapidly growing number of voyeuristically fascinated viewers: a series of inflammatory quotes from the comments on that live stream are displayed on the stage backdrop as if on a live ticker.
The two outstanding young singers Inna Demenkova and Michael Wilmering played a series of continually changing roles with extreme concentration and immense conviction: the journalist, Denis' friend, a neighbour, a doctor, teacher and classmate. A constant electronic signal announces the rapid changes of perspective, another accompanies the projected app comments. As the roles change, so does the live music, played by four cellists of the Residentie Orchestra from The Hague, spaced out on a long row of chairs. They delivered disturbing sound clusters and disquieting rhythmic blocks, but in the second part also melodious, almost baroque interjections. Venables subtly mixes his simple sound structures with the electronic everyday sounds of our time.
The plot is structured and artfully broken up by excerpts from WhatsApp messages between librettist and composer, which are typed in word for word. In this way, the audience is served by several time periods at once. In 2022 we’re seeing a work researched in 2019, which describes true events from 2016.
The rapid change of music, solo singing, written and spoken text, live and electronically produced sounds make the disturbing events and their tragic climax an emotionally comprehensible and gripping media event. With the help of sophisticated sound design (Simon Hendry), subtle lighting design (Andrew Lieberman) and visually disorienting video feeds (Pierre Martin), the audience's attention is constantly challenged for over an hour. Only after the prolonged final applause (from a pleasingly younger than average opera audience) do we get an opportunity to emotionally process the almost unbelievable yet easily comprehensible plot in each phase of its escalation.
Can opera really be so topical?
Translated into English by David Karlin
