A real discovery. Among Soviet/Russian composers of the post-Shostakovich generation the 62-year-old Nikolai Karetnikov may not be as famous as Schnittke, Denisov, Gubaidulina, Tishchenko or Kancheli, but this opera, completed in 1983, is as inspiring an experience as anything of theirs, and the story behind its composition and recording is almost as remarkable as the music itself.
The Till Eulenspiegel best known to musicians is the merry prankster of Strauss's tone poem. But the character of Karetnikov's opera derives from a mid-nineteenth-century novel by the Belgian writer Charles de Coster, in which Till is embroiled in the conflicts of the sixteenth-century Spanish Netherlands. He is exiled for insulting a monk, his father (Klaas) is burned as a heretic, his mother (Sootkin) is tortured to death, he himself is tried and condemned but saved by the intercession of his fiancee (Nele). Finally he dies, apparently as the result of drinking a magic potion; just as mysteriously he comes to life again and the opera ends in a rather throwaway affirmation and dance.
Woven into the story are a fishmonger who specializes in denunciation, a procession of monks cured of impotence by Till's uncle (Joost), a fortune-teller who is drowned as a witch (Katline), the pathetic Lamme who becomes Till's accomplice in exile, an allegorical tableau for Charles V, his wife (baritone!) and new-born son (Philip II, also baritone!!) and another for Till with Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Satan. The cast-list given above is complete—all except the first three singers take multiple roles.
A head-on approach to all of this would be a sure recipe for disaster. Instead Karetnikov comes at the text from a succession of semi-ironic angles, the result being a deadly serious parody of the traditional Russian chronicle-opera, with a tone somewhere between the absurdist fantasy of Shostakovich's The Nose and the 'tragedy-satire' of his The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District—in other words, a kind of inside-out Boris Godunov. The very opening is spine-tingling—implacable crescendos, ultra-clipped chords and blinding high trumpets, evoking the power of the Spanish Inquisition. There follow a succession of pseudo-Baroque, Renaissance, even Medieval evocations (never outright quotations), frequently blended with other stylistic references. The points of reference come as close to the present day as Parsifal, the Second Viennese School, and even 1960s Polish aleatory, and the effect is disorientating and nicely balanced between pathos and parody.
What sets Till Eulenspiegel above so much contemporary Soviet music, however, is its economy of gesture and subtlety of detail. When it suits him Karetnikov can compose note-against-note counterpoint to marvellous effect. He also has an acute ear for instrumental and vocal timbre. The special effects are never overdone, nor reached for as a substitute for melodic invention; but some- how each scene has a unique and personal colour, penetrating the gaps between conventional dramatic states. Overall there is a sense of a profound truth underpinning the ridiculous surface—a paradoxical integrity which blends the various styles to the composer's own expressive purpose.
It does not take much imagination to see why a Soviet composer in the 1960s should have been drawn to such subject-matter, nor to understand that such a manner of realization was hardly likely to earn the blessing of the Composers' Union. In fact the work was some 20 years in the making; in the meantime Karetnikov made his living composing some 60 film scores. And the story of this recording is in itself almost Gogolesque.
What Karetnikov did, with the help of contacts at the State butchers' shop amongst other things, was to persuade recording engineers and musicians from the Soviet Cinema Orchestra to stay behind after hours and record the work piecemeal over a period of years. The magnetic tape would sometimes come from the cutting-room floor; sometimes he would smuggle bits of the opera into a film score so that he could later cut them out; sometimes the orchestral texture had to be recorded section by section and the voice parts overlaid afterwards. Karetnikov himself supplied the various spoken narratives. That the recording sounds so vivid is already a minor miracle.
It all adds up to what Gerard McBurney has aptly called a Samizdat opera. For the above details I am indebted to his BBC Radio 3 commentary on the work; curiously the Chant du Monde booklet makes no mention of this background. Of course heroic circumstances of production are no guarantee of quality—Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time does not survive just because it was composed in a Nazi internment camp. And just as that work takes us to a region of the mind where death has no dominion, so Karetnikov presents us not just with unspeakable events but also, crucially, with our inner potential to withstand them. You don't need more than a pair of ears and an imagination to experience that. But I make no apology for telling the remarkable story, if it entices anyone to investigate one of the most powerful operas of recent times.
How well Till Eulenspiegel would work on stage I can't be sure. Some of the vocal effects are obviously studio-enhanced, and the quality of the singing would not be easy to match (though the text itself would surely lose little in translation). Most problematic of all, perhaps, is the deliberately punctured ending. But I've been listening to this opera over a period of months now, since its appearance on Melodiya LPs, and each time a whole series of visual images springs unbidden to mind. If I were an opera producer I would already be beating a path to the nearest impresario's door. This is a fascinating, important and inspiring issue.'