Opera in 3 acts and 6 scenes
Libretto by Victor P. Burenin and Peter I. Tchaikovsky after Alexander Pushkin
World Premiere February 15 1884 Bolschoi, Moscow
Production acquired from the Tirol Festival in Erl, first seen July 12 2024
Sung in Russian with German & English surtitles
Introductory talks 30 mins before curtain up in the Holzfoyer, here, and everywhere podcasts can be found shortly after opening night
A love that breaks all conventions triggers a bloody family feud:
Tchaikovsky’s grim opera portrays powerful men who gradually lose all sense of proportion. Maria, wealthy Kotschubej’s daughter, loves General Mazeppa, who’s significantly older that her. When they marry, against her father’s wishes, a vicious power struggle ensues: Kotschubej charges Mazeppa, his former friend and business partner, with treason to the Tsar. But it backfires: the Tsar doesn’t believe him and has Kotschubej publicly executed. Maria loses her mind when the fatal consequences of her love sink in.
Mazeppa, like Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Pique Dame was inspired by Alexander Pushkin, who wrote a poem, Poltava (1829), about a Ukrainian Cossack who dared rebel against Russian supremacy in the early 18th century. While Pushkin’s protagonist is a manipulative traitor, in line with the Tsarist regime of the time, Tchaikovsky makes him more human: his love for Maria as audible, in wistful, tender arias, as his brutality, with spiky rhythms and militant orchestral interludes.
Matthew Wild stages the work like a political parable about an elite who think nothing of manipulating their own people to settle their conflicts. But it’s Maria who becomes the heart of the work: incapable of coming to terms with what’s happened she retreats into a state of childlike reverie. Can she ever forget such brutal violence?
