PKHENTZ!
a new opera in one act
By Dylan Schneider
After a story by Andrei Sinyavsky
Duration: about 1 hour
Cast: 4 singers, 1 actor
Instrumentation: single winds, sax,
accordion, piano, perc, strings
Premiere: 2016-17 season
Musicians: subLIMINAL opera
Currently, I am at work on my third opera, a one-act entitled PKHENTZ (pronounced “pah-KENTS”). The libretto is a collaborative adaptation of a story of the same title by renowned Russian dissident and author Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997), whose works written during the height of Soviet power offer a biting critique of life under an oppressive regime, often disguised in surreal circumstances.
In the opera, Andrei Kazimirovich, a cantankerous hunchback, endures a hermetic existence in a squalid flat in Moscow. His only relief from self-imposed isolation is his neighbor, Veronica, a voluptuous beauty, desperately in love with Andrei despite his revolting physique. Mysteriously, however, it is Andrei who finds her repulsive. Over the course of the opera, we learn why: Andrei is in fact no hunchback at all, but an alien—and also a cactus—who conceals his spiny appendages in his makeshift hump (finally revealed to the audience when Andrei, at last, takes a bath). On a symbolic level, the outrageous circumstances of the story become a dark exploration of the alienation of the individual under the totalitarian state.
PKHENTZ will receive its premiere in the 2015-16 season. It will be the inaugural production of New York City’s subLIMINAL OPERA, a collective of composers, performers, and theater designers, committed to the performance of new operas.
Andrei Sinyavsky: the Man Behind the Curtains
According to many scholars, Sinyavsky stands as one of the most significant literary figures to emerge from Russia since 1950. Fueled in part by an anti-Soviet sentiment, Cold War readers in the West relished the alacrity with which Sinyavsky satirized contemporary social mores while pointing to larger, existential questions of power, freedom, and the decline of traditional systems of value (Kolonosky 16).
In 1965, Sinyavsky was arrested in Moscow, faced with charges ranging from “pornography” to “treason.” The show-trial that followed was notable not only for its circus-like atmosphere (the courtroom cheered when Sinyavsky’s verdict of guilty was read) but also because it marked an end to the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 (Kolonosky 13). Sinyavsky received the maximum sentence of seven years of hard labor in the Gulag.
Despite such a harsh atmosphere of conformity, when Sinyavsky was asked to make a final statement at his trial, he chose to recite a line, from memory, taken from the internal monologue of Andrei Kazimirich, his eccentric, spiny vegetable-hero from “Pkhentz” (the subject of this proposal and my opera). The line reads: “Just think, if I am different from others, they immediately start to swear at me. Well, I am different” (Kolonosky 109). It seems telling that at this crucial moment, when Andrei Sinyavsky was under the greatest pressure to conform and repent, he chose instead to align himself with another Andrei, an outlandish social misfit—an alien and a cactus—hiding in Moscow.
Exposing the Cactus: The Score
For me, one of the most attractive aspects of this project is its intimacy. I scored PKHENTZ for only eleven musicians, placing the work in the genre of chamber opera. The relatively modest forces allow for tight-knit interactions among the musicians, spotlighting not only the singers but also the instrumentalists as soloists at various times in the score.
Andrei’s frequent sound-based exclamations are of particular musical interest. Loitering beneath a running drainpipe, drops of water quench Andrei’s thorny, parched neck. He moans in satisfaction: “Oooo…nice, down below…/ Oh, Veronica, Veronica / Ooo…cool…delicious.…” In the score, passages such as these present a robust opportunity to explore the more extended features of the human voice. Here, the singer’s “oos,” punctuated by delirious fits-and-starts on the bass clarinet, will melodically imitate the grotesque contortions of the accompanying instruments with intoxicated giddiness.
Another substantial feature of the score takes its inspiration from Andrei’s abundant extraterrestrial descriptions of earthly imagery. Andrei recalls his first encounter with Earth: “The air was wrong, the light was wrong / the gravity was unfamiliar. / A moon was burning in the sky, huge and yellow, but just one moon.” In order to invest a degree of this disorienting sensation into the opera, I devised a texture of vast “sound clouds”: slowly evolving masses of sustained (or subtly oscillating) pitches in the ensemble that, on occasion, dramatically shift in register and volume.
Occasional lapses into such “atmospheric” writing will create a satisfying contrast to frequent frenetic episodes, often instigated by Veronica, who, at the end of scene two, in a last-ditch attempt to satisfy her sexual needs, “catapults onto the bed and thrashes like a fish out of water.” The boisterous orgy of stratified melodies and musical sirens that animates Veronica’s writhing will place the listener somewhere between a Dixieland-jazz set on double-time and a front-row seat at the Sputnik launch.
In essence, therefore, in my score I have attempted to employ a constellation of idioms, musical gestures, and a Technicolor harmonic fabric that animate the vibrant events of the story while alluding to Sinyavsky’s deeper message—a message, current as tomorrow’s headlines, that has riveted me though I am 5,000 miles from its source and five decades from its inception.
(Kolonosky, Walter. Literary Insinuations. New York, NY: Lexington Books. 2003.)
READ A SYNOPSIS OF THE OPERA
Return to the main PKHENTZ page here
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