Opera festivals have been held at Wexford, a picturesque town in the southeast of Ireland, every year since 1951. The Wexford Festival specializes in nineteenth-century operas generally ignored by the major houses and festivals. Its first season, for instance, featured Balfe's The Rose of Castile. Donizetti and Rossini figured prominently in the programming of the early years, before those two masters had begun to be revived generally. There were also rarities by Gounod, Stanford, early Verdi, Haydn, Bizet, Weber, Cornelius, Mayr, Marschner, the Ricci brothers, Glinka, Lalo, and a host of others. I used to read reviews of these productions with longing. I would have settled simply to hear these works; to actually attend performances seemed utterly beyond probability. No official recordings issued from Wexford, but an occasional pirate recording or tape would fall into my hands. I learned to value La gazza ladra and La Jolie Fille de Perth as masterpieces (the latter a flawed one owing to its shabby libretto) from pirated Wexford sources years before those two operas attained professional recordings worthy of them.

In 1993 the unattainable was attained: I was actually in attendance at Wexford's charming, cramped old opera house (wooden, with superb acoustics) for Gluck's La Recontre imprévue, Goetz's Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung, and Donizetti's L'Assedio di Calais. I returned in 1994 and 1995. In '94 the rumor was going about that one of the operas of that season, Rubinstein's The Demon, was being recorded and would be issued by one of the commercial labels. Two years later, rumor has become reality. I have before me the first Wexford Festival opera ever to be (officially) recorded. Hopefully it will not be the last. The festival season is now being taped and broadcast over the BBC, and Marco Polo will probably release Rimsky-Korsakov's Mayskaya noch' (May Night), which was staged to critical raves at the 1995 festival. After that, the world's the limit.

Wexford is turning to the Russian repertoire belatedly (they did stage A Life for the Czar in 1973) for the very good reason that top-quality Russian singers and conductors have been flooding into the West since the breakup of the Soviet Union. For the Rubinstein opera, Wexford was able to cast the main roles with singers from the Bolshoi Opera and the Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Dancheknko Music Theater. The only non-Russian among the principals is Alison Browner, an Irish mezzo with impressive credits from opera houses in Germany, Belgium, France, Holland—and Wexford. The conductor, Alexander Anissimov, studied with Rozhdestvensky and, when not conducting abroad, divides his time between the Belorussian Opera in Minsk and the Kirov in St. Petersburg. The Wexford performance of The Demon was idiomatically impeccable and the Marco Polo recording captures it faithfully. Fortunately, it does not capture the staging, which was bare-bones, modern-dress, and which sported some ridiculous props, such as an attaché case for the Angel and a house painter's ladder for the Demon to climb up and descend from as he communicates between the heavens and the earth (although what he was doing in the heavens is anyone's guess).

Marco Polo supplies a costly, 119-page booklet containing the transliterated Russian libretto and an English translation, but not on parallel pages. One has to flip back and forth to follow both. Valuable space is wasted on a track-by-track summary of the action that literally repeats the words of the translation. Those pages could have been far better utilized for a discussion of the opera and its background, which Marco Polo signally fails to provide. I will try to fill in some of this background here, drawing my facts largely from the excellent notes by Philip Taylor in the 1995 Festival program book.

Anton Rubinstein was strongly attracted to what he called “Geistliche Oper“ (sacred opera), a genre that he defined as parallel to but distinct from oratorio. Among his thirteen operas only two, apparently, conform to the Geistliche Oper type—The Demon and Die Makkabäer. But several of his sacred oratorios can also be classed as operas manques: The Tower of Babel, Moses, Chrisms, and Paradise Lost. (The latter was revised and staged as an opera in Düsseldorf in 1875.) The Demon is based on a narrative poem by Mikhail Lermontov, Russia's second-greatest poet, who, like Pushkin, was killed in a duel before attaining the age of thirty. Lermontov was an admirer of Milton and Byron, and the influence of Paradise Lost and Byron's Weave« and Earth (more, I think, than his Cain, A Mystery, as Philip Taylor would have it) is evident in his poem. The supernatural central figure, called simply Demon, is a kind of Fallen Angel, who despises all of humankind and works to do it harm whenever possible. One day, in the region of the Caucasus, he beholds a beautiful maiden, Tamara, daughter of Prince Gudal, and is immediately smitten with her. Although engaged and soon to be married, Tamara is mesmerized by the beauty and persuasive eloquence of the Demon and almost succumbs to his offers of immortal love and dominion over the world. But attraction turns to fear and horror when her fiancé, Prince Sinodal, is slain by Tatar marauders at the instigation of the Demon. Sinodal's corpse is carried to Prince Gudal's castle on the very day of the wedding. Tamara now recoils from the Demon and retires to a convent. Although an Angel attempts to bar his way, the Demon breaks into Tamara's retreat and in a long duet (it lasts nearly the whole of act III), tempts her so severely—especially by the thought that she alone can save him from the curse of heaven—that she succumbs. But when he takes her in his arms and kisses her, she falls dead. In an Apotheosis, the Angel proclaims that Tamara has been pardoned. Heaven's gates open to her. But the Demon, the “accursed spirit,“ is condemned to live on eternally, tortured by rage, frustration, and regret.

Finished in 1871, The Demon was not staged until four years later (at St. Petersburg's Mary-insky Theater), owing to censorship problems. It proved to be Rubinstein's most successful opera, not only in Russia but also in Hamburg, Cologne, Königsberg, and London's Covent Garden. Rubinstein conducted its 100th performance at the Maryinsky (the present-day Kirov) in 1884. The title role became one of Chaliapin's most striking creations. A critic of the time wrote of one of his performances, “The audience listened to him with bated breath. They couldn't tear their eyes from their opera glasses.“ The Demon fell out of favor around the period of the First World War. Rubinstein's music had been steadily losing favor as the stage and symphonic works of Mussorgsky, Rimsky, and Borodin flourished. Under the Soviets he fared little better than in the last years of the Czars. He was branded as too Europe-centered, too cosmopolitan, too Jewish, too German, too old-fashioned, too neglectful of Russian folk traditions. But a glance at the current SchwannlOpus catalog suggests that the anti-Rubinstein cartel is weakening. His instrumental work is amply represented on discs, even if his operas and oratorios have not yet come back into circulation. And post-Soviet Russia seems to have given him a clean bill of health: a Rubinstein Festival was held in St. Petersburg in 1994, commemorating the centennial of his death.

There was once a four-LP Ultraphone album of The Demon, now out of circulation for decades. It had a number of virtues, including the conducting of Alexander Melik-Pashaiev, the orchestra and chorus of the Bolshoi Opera, and Alexander Ivanov and Ivan Kozlovsky as the Demon and Prince Sinodal. It also was more complete than the Wexford performance, which makes a number of harmful cuts (including a substantial one at the end of act II) and eliminates the ballet music, two highly charged oriental dances from the second act.

The new recording, while improving on the Ultraphone in some respects, has a number of problems in addition to the cuts. Although not labeled as such, it was recorded during live stage performances and is plagued by extrinsic noises, such as footsteps that on occasion sound like those of migrating herds, and fade-outs as individual singers turn away from the stationary microphones. The first disc is recorded or mastered at too low a level; the second is a considerable improvement in that respect. Some of Anissimov's tempos are too slow and some of his dynamics too restrained. The recording and the performances are at their best in the final act, which contains the best music of the opera. Here Rubinstein's tendency to fall into a quasi-oratorio mode gives way to genuine passion as the Demon pleads with Tamara to come away with him and she pleads with him to repent and reconcile himself to the will of God. Rubinstein's authentic voice emerges here, along with evident inspiration deriving from Berlioz (The Damnation of Faust) and some striking anticipations of Tchaikovsky (Eugene Onegin).

Anatoly Lochak, in the title role, possesses a ringing baritone and just the right Romantic temperament. Marina Mescheriakova has a trace of that “white“ sound often associated with Russian sopranos (this is more noticeable on the recording than it was in the house), but she has plenty of temperament and rises handsomely to the challenge of the last act. As Prince Sinodal, tenor Valéry Serkin must make his mark in the only scene devoted to him. But the scene has two gorgeous arias (Tchaikovsky sound-alikes, again) and Serkin dispatches them with relish. He is a young and dashingly handsome artist, and I predict a major career for him. Both the basses are outstanding, the Irish one (Richard Robson) giving the Russian one (Leonid Zimenko) a run for the money, both in lyrical phrasing and authentic Russian diction. With a mezzo as attractive (both vocally and physically) as Alison Browner, one wishes that the Angel had more to sing.

Taken all in all, Rubinsteinians won't want to pass on this recording.

-- David Johnson, FANFARE [5/1996]