ODESA, Ukraine – In a country at war and a city struggling with some normative rules, the Odesa Opera House reopens for the first time since the Russian invasion began, asserting define civilization against the barbarism emanating from Moscow.
Friday’s performance at the magnificent Opera House, opened in 1810 on the plateau above the now-closed Black Sea port, begins with a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem. The image of wheat swaying in the wind formed the backdrop, a reminder of the grain from its fertile hinterland that had long made Odesa rich but now lie in wartime cellars. raging competition and growing global food shortages.
“In case of sirens, go to shelter in the theater,” said Ilona Trach, theater official who presented the show. “You are the soul of this opera house, and we thought it was very important to prove after 115 days of silence that we could perform.”
Odesa has been generally quiet for the past few weeks, but just 70 miles east – in the port city of Mykolaiv, where President Volodymyr Zelensky visited on Saturday – Russian shelling constitutes a massive assault. daily. Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin covet Odesa – as an important port for Ukraine’s economy, a city long ago for the Russian empires and then the Soviet Union and as a cultural icon – not what’s secret.
If the city’s cobbled, tree-lined boulevards evoke tranquility, it’s a fragile tranquility that could be broken at any moment. But then Odesa – its history of triumph and pain as its borders changed, the Holocaust enveloped it and its successive cycles of boom and bust – persisted to this point. .
The theater – a rococo palace with golden braid, red Lyonnais velvet, chandeliers and mirrors – was a third full due to security restrictions. Viacheslav Chernukho-Volich, the Opera’s chief conductor, led a performance that included a duet from “Romeo and Juliet,” and arias from “Tosca,” “Turandot,” and by composer-born Kostiantyn Dankevych. in Odesa.
Music seems to be a defiant miracle of culture and beauty, the ultimate rebuke to Russian atrocities in Bucha and Mariupol, places that have become synonymous with gratuitous destruction caused by Mr. Putin instigated in a war that reflects his obsession that Ukraine is a fictional country.
“We were allowed to perform by the military 10 days ago, and today is pure happiness,” said Mr. Chernukho-Volich. “At the beginning of the war, the explosions and the sirens terrified me, as if I had plunged into some fantasy movie, a World War II movie, but people are used to everything. . It’s hard, but we want to believe in the victory of civilization.”
Chernukho-Volich worked in Moscow for several years, but in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and incited a separatist war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, he said he had an epiphany: Imperial ideas are inseparable from Russia, and any politician, like Mr. Putin, preparing to unleash his elixir will immediately thrive at home and threaten the world. He went.
Better understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Now, he performs in an opera house designed by an architect in St.Petersburg and rebuilt by Viennese architects after a fire, with its facade decorated with semi-statuary. body of Alexander Pushkin. And he lives in a city founded by a Russian queen and essentially coined by a French duke, home to merchants of all creeds and creeds for many years, coming from Europe. Mediterranean Sea and from all over the steppes of Central Asia.
All that Mr. Putin wants to put under his regime’s increasingly brutal grip, in the name of Russian coercion. He wanted to silence the multilingual whispers about Odesa, a city defined by its openness, where music is its blend.
“Odesa is a nationality of its own,” said Grigory Barats, a member of the Odesa Jewish community largely dispersed by the Russian invasion. Attending the concert, he said he was thinking of his 96-year-old mother in Brooklyn, who used to work at the theater.
The round of applause at the end of the performance continued, punctuated by cries of “Hooray!” Backstage, Marina Najmytenko, a soprano who plays Juliet, is filled with pride and emotion. “It is the art that will help us to survive and preserve Nature for us to win this war,” she said.
When, I ask, is that? “Unfortunately,” she said, “it will go on for a while. It makes us depressed because of how crazy Putin seems to be.” But, she continued, Juliet gave her a special inspiration. “That’s Shakespeare, that’s youth, and that’s pure love.”
In a way, at the opening of the Opera House, in a city that was hit by a rocket attack just two months ago that killed eight people, captured two sides of Ukraine as the war was going on and the front lines. move slowly, if at all: a country where something ostensibly normal life was restored in many areas even as fighting raged in the east and parts of the south .
“It is important to show that Odesa is alive, that Ukraine is alive, that we want to live and create, while the way of the Russian occupiers is to kill and die,” said Gennadiy Trukhanov, mayor of Odesa, said in an interview. “If Putin dares to attack the opera, the hatred he will face around the world is unimaginable.”
Mr. Trukhanov, long considered a pro-Russian sympathizer, has pivoted to being an outspoken defender of Ukraine and his city since the war began. Denying allegations of involvement in organized crime, he said he was saddened to see “Russia ruining its claim to be a cultural nation”.
Can Putin attack the center of Odesa? “Anyone who is capable of Bucha, of Mariupol, of what is happening on the road in Mykolaiv, can do anything,” he said. “That’s what we learned.”
For now, however, the performance goes on in Odesa undeniably, even as cultural tensions mount. Mr. Trukhanov was under pressure to change the name of Pushkin Street, near City Hall. Outstanding Russian playwright and novelist who lived in Odesa in 1823.
“No,” said the mayor. “I would not support that. Odesa is the multicultural capital of Ukraine. I am worried by the growing hatred for all things Russian”.
But that enmity is perhaps the inevitable outcome of Mr. Putin’s gratuitous battle: Tell a country that it doesn’t exist and it will stick together like never before with a defiant determination to defend its existence.
