On September 12 at 5:00 PM, the Kharkiv National Opera will open its 150th anniversary theater season with the legendary opera Aeneid by Mykola Lysenko, marking a powerful start to the year.
The first performance of the opera took place on November 23, 1910, in Kyiv, at Mykola Sadovsky’s theater. As for the conductor, it is still unclear who exactly led the performance—Mykola Lysenko or Hans Jelinek. Another known stage version of Aeneid appeared in 1959, directed by Volodymyr Skliarenko with conductor Vasyl Kharchenko at the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater. However, the production remained in the repertoire only briefly, partly due to censorship.
Until recently, details of other productions were unknown, until the principal conductor of the Kharkiv Opera, Dmytro Morozov, discovered a handwritten score of Aeneid with a rarely performed orchestration by Borys Lyatoshynsky. One orchestral part was marked: “Dress rehearsal – January 11, 1941.” Where and how it took place—or whether it happened at all—remains a mystery.
Why have we heard so little about Aeneid? Perhaps because of its sharp social content, which inevitably clashes with any tyrannical authority that for many years held the opera tightly in the grip of censorship. Each era adds its own corrections and meanings to the work.
In the production by director Zhanna Chepelya and conductor Dmytro Morozov, Aeneid is an opera about all of us. The journey undertaken by the heroes unexpectedly becomes a journey of self-discovery for each audience member, inevitably accompanied by surprising twists. After all, we Ukrainians are all in the same ark, drifting into the unknown—toward storms, and perhaps, toward light.
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