Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In a studio space tucked away on a side street in central Lviv, 14 nuns fling themselves, one at a time, to the centre of the room. More accurately, the women are members of the Lviv National Opera, engaged in a staging rehearsal for what will be the Ukrainian premiere of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, set in a nunnery during the French Revolution.Director Vasyl Vovkun and conductor Ivan Cherednichenko are working on the opera’s starkly haunting finale: having refused to renounce their vocation in the face of the Terror, the sisters of the Carmel of Compiègne are sentenced to death. At the scaffold, they sing the “Salve Regina”, punctuated by the steely screech of the guillotine blade as each nun ascends to martyrdom. At first, you don’t notice as the voices drop out. When you do, the cumulative loss hits you all at once.The French Revolution is probably the last thing on most Ukrainians’ minds at the moment, more than two years into Russia’s invasion. However, they are all by now familiar with the themes of tyranny, sacrifice and terror — as intimately as Poulenc likely was when he wrote the opera, in the shadow of France’s recent past under Nazi occupation.This connection is not a coincidence to Vovkun, who has added some touches to his Carmélites that will speak more directly to the current war, such as evoking the collaboration with Putin’s government on the part of Russian Orthodox clergy in Ukraine. Vovkun, the LNO’s general and artistic director since 2017, has a long-term vision for the company that includes abandoning the idea of “theatre as a museum, where time stands still and there are no reflections of the real world”.“Art has always reflected what’s going on in the world,” adds Cherednichenko, who is also the LNO’s music director. “Our art in Ukraine is obviously reflecting the war.”Many works in the company’s repertoire, even those whose stagings predate the invasion, are having this effect. Watching a recent performance of Verdi’s Nabucco, I was struck by a moment in the fourth act, where Nabucco frees the Hebrew slaves and joins their faith. The entire cast fall to their knees as they sing a hymn of salvation. It mirrored a regular occurrence I’ve seen in Lviv: as funeral processions for fallen soldiers drive by, accompanied by a police escort and liturgical music, civilians drop to their knees on the pavement in a moment of gratitude and reverence.“This war brings new contexts to such things,” Vovkun tells me when I bring up this parallel. Mezzo-soprano and LNO chorus member Lyubov Dika echoes this sentiment, adding that every time she sings Nabucco’s most famous musical moment, “Va, pensiero” — a chorus of exiled Judaeans who lament their country, “so beautiful and so lost” — she gets goosebumps: “It’s a chorus of slaves, but we sing it with faith in our victory.”Many members of the company credit that faith in part to Vovkun’s ability to navigate the vagaries of war, which have not spared Lviv — a city far from the front lines, but nonetheless deeply affected by the past two years. Having served as the minister of culture and tourism under Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Vovkun quickly put his government experience to work after the beginning of the invasion, turning the house into a way station for displaced Ukrainians and helping many to resettle in the western provinces or abroad.Ten company members joined the military, including several from the production team, ballet dancers and a soloist (one, Yaroslav Mykoliv, was killed last November in Kherson). The theatre was the first in the country to reopen for public performances in April 2022. At first, it had limited seating to reflect its bomb-shelter capacity; now it is cleared to sell all 1,100 seats and, judging by the performances I saw, it is doing this with a fair degree of success.Since its reopening, it has maintained a steady-unsteady working rhythm. The stage manager’s desk, for instance, now includes a screen devoted to monitoring air-raid alerts. One went off during a rehearsal for Ukrainian composer Yuliy Meitus’s Stolen Happiness, shortly before the central love triangle comes to a head. After a moment of consulting with the stage manager, conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and the three main singers forged ahead.“They don’t care about it, so I don’t either,” says Wilson (who grew up in Canada but has family in the nearby oblast of Chernivtsi) following the rehearsal.“We’ve gotten to the point where we joke about it,” adds one of the opera’s leads, tenor Vitalij Rozdajgora. He recalls another rehearsal where the sirens went off and the conductor quipped, “We still have 20 minutes!” — roughly how long it would take for any missiles launched from Russia to reach Lviv. (The company is more cautious when sirens go off during a performance; audiences are brought to a shelter and, if the alarm lasts for less than an hour, the performance resumes.)The bigger concern now for the LNO is asserting Ukraine’s musical and cultural identity, separate from what had been imposed on the country during centuries of Russian occupation. “They tried to destroy the whole of Ukrainian culture,” says Cherednichenko of Russian rule. “Our task is to show that we have serious academic music.” Stolen Happiness, which premiered at the LNO in 1960, is one such salvo in this campaign. Born in 1903, Meitus developed a musical style rooted in experimentalism and, eventually, the pressures of socialist realism. His operas, though, abandon this in favour of a lush and propulsive verismo style that also incorporates local folk music, calling to mind Janáček’s use of Moravian songs in his opera Jenůfa. Over the next few years, the LNO will premiere 10 newly commissioned Ukrainian works, including a grand opera by Alexander Rodin based on national hero Ivan Mazeppa. “For us, it’s vital nowadays to create a very modern Ukrainian cultural product at a very high level,” says Vovkun.In 2024, however, the company is facing a new challenge: just as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed bafflement and frustration over diminishing material support in the face of increased Russian aggression, so Vovkun now senses a reticence within the European opera community when it comes to the war and its impact on opera in Ukraine. When he brought up the new Mazeppa-based work at the last meeting of Opera Europa (a service organisation of opera companies and festivals throughout Europe), he was bewildered by how many fellow theatre directors dismissed the idea because Tchaikovsky had already written one (with a Russo-nationalist slant) about Mazeppa.“There isn’t even any interest about how we’re working under the conditions of war. They’re going on as if nothing has happened here,” Vovkun says. He shakes his head when I ask if he has any idea what has caused the shift. “It’s a question I return to day after day, but without any answers.”In Poulenc’s finale, Blanche, who has abandoned the monastery from fear, returns to accept martyrdom among her sisters. Yet, as I see this rehearsal play out, I watch as Blanche opts to shoot herself instead of receiving the guillotine. “It’s a gesture of protest against the system,” says Vovkun, “against the regime that brought the Carmelites to their deaths.”‘Dialogues des Carmélites’ is on June 15-16, July 5 and 7, opera.lviv.ua
