The opera Cherry Orchard, based on the eponymous play by Anton Chekhov, will premiere in Paris today with both Grande Opera and Bolshoi artists appearing in it, Voice of Russia reports. The opera’s global premier was held about a year ago at the Bolshoi’s New Stage during the Year of Russia in France and the Year of France in Russia.

For the first time in its history, the musical score for The Cherry Orchard was written by French composer, Philippe Fénelon. The author of the libretto is Alexei Parin of Russia and the opera will be performed in Russian.

Fenelon infused this quintessentially Russian story with a global resonance. “You can call my opera a postmodernist work if you like; one can easily trace the influence of an array of Russian composers, from Borodin to Shostakovich,” Fenelon said last January. “These influences are allusions, rather than quotations. What is important is that Chekhov’s story, which the Russian people have regarded for so many years as their property, is actually universal. It tells of coping with a loss and different ways of moving on from that loss.”

“I was at the Bolshoi with a friend of mine, and during the interval we just happened to see this guy whom my friend happened to know… We started chatting, and I mentioned my fascination with ‘The Cherry Orchard’ — and Parin simply looked me in the eye with the most earnest expression and said, ‘Well, I will write a libretto for you,’” Fenelon recounts.

“Russia’s intelligentsia is dying out,” Alexei Parin told the St. Petersburg Times. “Our sons and daughters are the Lopakhins of today,” Parin continues, referring to Chekhov’s pushy entrepreneur, devoid of sentimentality, who buys the Ranevsky family estate with plans to cut down its charming orchard and use the vacant land to make the purchase economically justified.

“I do not see how their generation can recover the ability to experience compassion, to see beyond practical concerns… The only hope is that our grandchildren will find such a philosophy suffocating and embark on their own spiritual journey. Hopefully, at least some of them will opt for creativity rather than for materialism. Otherwise, this country is doomed,” Panin concludes.

Russkiy Mir Foundation Information Service