Cri de Coeur

How important this issue was for the composer is obvious from the way he chose to open the opera, with a stormy overture that mirrors the gathering momentum of Mazepa's spiral into the secret erotic urge that ultimately seals his public political fate. During entertainments in the hetman's honor at the estate of the noble Kochubei, Mazepa arouses consternation by asking his host for the hand of his young daughter, Maria. Aghast as late-nineteenth-century audiences may have been at this prospect, old husband--young wife pairings were as common as toothaches in the seventeenth century, especially when the suitor was as powerful as Mazepa. Kochubei, however, seems to symbolize rigid societal expectations writ large. Like a Victorian paterfamilias, he refuses to give up his daughter to a man so much older than she. Maria does not improve matters by overriding her father's refusal. She has been in love - almost madly in love - with Mazepa for some time. As she sings earlier in the act, while pondering her passion for the hetman, "I love everything about him, everything about him," an admission that would be thrilling if directed toward a young lover; toward Mazepa, Maria's godfather, it conjures concern at best. Her unusual obsession is made the more vivid when a tenor swain named Andrei confesses his long-standing love for her, only to be told he cannot compare with Mazepa and sent away in tears.

Enraged by Kochubei's insults, Mazepa demands that Maria choose between him and her father, between her shocking passion and duty to her family. Before Act I even ends, we have reached the crux of the opera - and perhaps that of the composer's own personal battle. Maria turns her back on all the rules, familial and otherwise, and, like Tchaikovsky, who had made an unsuccessful attempt at heterosexual marriage in 1877 that lasted less than three months, gives herself over to her lawless love. The thrill of admission is there when Maria announces, "Tvoyá!" (I am yours!). The phrase is ecstatic, even as the fear of having gone dangerously beyond proper bounds seems embodied in the Tristanesque dissonances of the orchestra. When crossing the bridge to the pain and pleasure of forbidden love, Tchaikovsky seems to tell us, there can be no turning back.

Mazeppa has sometimes been described as Tchaikovsky's effort at Meyerbeerian spectacle (as was the case with his unsuccessful The Maid of Orleans, which immediately preceded it), and much of the score bears this out. In what may have been an effort to focus the inner drama of duets and solos, and perhaps to echo Maria's own confusion, Tchaikovsky scores much of the revelation scene of Act I for full crowd-scene ensemble. Mazeppa's six scenes, spread across three acts, are arranged in the received order of conventional opera. But there is nothing workaday about Tchaikovsky's orchestration. The conductor of the Petersburg premiere, Eduard Napravnik, is on record as wondering just where Tchaikovsky would find all the orchestral colors necessary to do justice to such larger-than-life drama. He need not have worried. Mazeppa's is the color palette of the Symphony No. 6, of the A-minor Piano Trio, the haunting darkness that permeates the score of Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky's balletic take on the tragedy of impossible love. It is an atmosphere of darkness versus light, of the glinting through shadow of unnamed fears. It is the sound of storms and the thud of a racing heart: the ear scarcely has time to stop and breathe, pushed ever forward on a flood tide of conflicting desires, naked passions and the pitiless march of politics. Through it all runs the love of an old man for the young woman who gave up everything for him, an unconditional love the composer never really found, except from his many faceless admirers in concert hall and opera house.

In his 1974 study The Mazeppa Legend in European Romanticism, Hubert F. Babinski outlines a Mazepa who is, much like the real hetman, a little something for everyone, particularly crucial to Romantic-period artists in search of an embodiment of "their artistic anguish and aspirations." But it is perhaps that seminal event of Mazepa's mythos - the dash into the steppes strapped naked to a wild horse - that resounded most intensely with Tchaikovsky. By trying to fit into traditional society, the composer had been suicidally bound to the bucking bronco of public disapproval. His own honesty rescued him, when he decided after his abortive 1877 marriage that, however painful the gossip his homosexuality aroused, he was born to love men. Did Tchaikovsky see himself, as his fellow self-dramatizer Byron saw Mazepa, as a sort of nineteenth-century equivalent of the "Noble Outlaw" of Russia, intrepidly semaphoring his sexuality through the medium of music? As the composer wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, shortly after Mazeppa's premiere, "Opera and opera alone makes you friends with the people … the property not merely of separate little circles but - with luck - of the whole nation." In Mazeppa, Tchaikovsky bares not just soul and genius but an equal portion of courage.

GRANT HAYTER-MENZIES lives in Victoria, B.C., where he writes about classical music and opera, and has completed the first biography of American theater and film star Charlotte Greenwood.

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