Иосиф Лапицкий и Михаил Бихтер – к истории творческого содружества режиссёра и дирижёра

Abstract

On December 12, 1912 the Theater of Musical Drama opened up in St. Petersburg with a production of Piotr Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” Its creator, producer Iosif Lapitsky viewed the Theater of Musical Drama as a foothold for opera reform, a space for artistic experiments and innovations, touching upon all the elements of the theatrical performance. Lapitsky found for himself an ideal supporter and associate in Mikhail Bikhter, a young graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, who became the musical director of the theater. Lapitsky and Bikhter saw the main goal of their work with the artists of the theater as the achievement of meaningfulness of singing and scenic authenticity. At his job as musical director Bikhter, following Lapitsky’s advice, carried out scrupulous individual coaching not only for the soloists of the Theater of Musical Drama, but also with the choral singers. According to his contemporaries, Bikhter’s rendition of the musical repertoire as a conductor was distinguished by its high level of freedom in terms of tempo and rhythm and an abundance of unusual accents and nuances. The innovative ideas, countering the traditions of interpretations of Piotr Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Modest Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Snow Maiden” aroused plenty of lively debates in the press and posed before the opera critics of that time the question of the permissible level of freedom for the artist-interpreter. In various ways, the “battle against the routine” declared by Lapitsky and Bikhter, their struggle against the engrained performance cliches, served as one of the catalyst elements of renewal of the operatic genre. Keywords: I.M. Lapitsky, M.A. Bikhter, opera, Theater of Musical Drama, musical interpretation, opera conducting.