Vladimir Deshenov’s 1929 opera Ice and Steel, based (loosely) on the Kronstadt sailors’ revolt of 1921 isn’t very good but it is of some interest as one of the very first Soviet era works for the operatic stage. The libretto, by Boris Lavrenjov, is so crude it might be project work for GCSE Stalinist Propaganda. In the first act black marketeers and sundry other anti-socials are rebuked by sound workers and the political police. Next we move to grumbling factory workers who are, again, rebuked by the politically sound ones news of the Kronstadt rising reaches Petrograd and a rather dodgy looking commissar recruits the loyal workers to help put down the rising. The one character with any real individuality, Musja, a female organizer in a metal works, volunteers to infiltrate the mutineers. Meanwhile a really motley band of counter-revolutionary elements; SRs, a Mensheik, foreign agents, Tsarist officers, a çi devant aristo vamp and anarchist sailors, argue among themselves in the fortress. Musja is unmasked and tortured as a spy but as the Soviet infantry launch their famous attack across the ice she manages to blow up the key defensive position and herself. Cue heroic revolutionary tableau vivant and curtain.
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In 1988 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle made the last of his lip synched opera films; Mozart’s Così fan tutte. It carries Ponnelle’s trademark “artificiality” even further than in other of his films that I have seen. The sets, the costumes, the acting and the camera work never let us forget that this is a work of the, in the director’s words, “greatest artificiality”. It also becomes increasingly clear as the piece progresses that Ponnelle has a very clear idea of what “the opera is about”. Continue reading 
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