“Faust” by Ch.-F. Gounod as a debut of a director E. O. Jungwald‑Khilkevych on the Ukrainian National Opera and Ballet Theater stage (1925)
Authors: Lobanova I.V. 
Published: July 2019

Background. When Kharkiv was the capital of Ukraine (1917–1934), many outstanding artistic events were happening there, which have not been studied properly up to this day. Among them – an experiment is, that started in 1925. In this time in Kharkiv the Ukrainian National Opera and Ballet Theater was founded. Strictly speaking, the new theater was not created completely anew: the art of opera and ballet had the established traditions in Kharkiv to that time. Yet, it had not been free from certain provincial features, trying to imitate the style of well-known theaters. The new theater was meant to overcome those drawbacks. The visual side of performances presented practically no problem, scenery being created mostly by avant-garde artists, but there was almost a total lack of stage directors, capable of creating performances adequate to the time and new contingent of spectators. One of the most important events of the theater’s first season happened to be the appearance of Yosyp Lapytsky, famous for his stubbornness in overcoming stereotyped patterns of staging opera performances. Though his attempts were widely criticized, today we can fully appreciate the master’s creative ideas. Now the name of Y. Lapytsky is rather well-known as an example of a director’s creativity within the framework of Ukrainian opera theaters of his time. However, only some peoples, even among professionals, remember his adherent and long-time assistant, Emil Olgerd Jungwald-Khilkevych. Yet, the latter was an extraordinary figure among his colleagues. Less than the decade afterward the Kharkiv performances, E. O. Jungwald-Khilkevych was appointed a chief stage director and an art director of two theaters simultaneously, the Russian and the Uzbek Operas in Tashkent. Thus, he became one of the founding fathers of the Uzbek professional musical theater and a figure worth remembering in the history of operatic art in Kharkiv. The author was unable to find any studies into E.O. Jungwald-Khilkevych’s activities as stage director. At least, no such publications have been found in Ukrainian, Russian or any widely known European languages, while materials in Uzbek were not searched as requiring a profound knowledge of that language. As far as the Ukrainian segment of Jungwald-Khilkevych’s activities is concerned, it has not been studied at all. The objectives of this study lie in an attempt to systematize isolated facts of the director’s biography; to collect and analyze the information concerning his debut performance on Kharkiv stage; to reveal the significance of his activities within the context of the Ukrainian National Opera and Ballet Theater’s first season. Results. E. O. Jungwald-Khilkevych graduated from the Kyiv Academy of Music in 1920 and started his career at the Kyiv Opera Theater. In a short while, he was invited by the administration of the Poltava Opera Theater as a chief director. In 1923, the young director became an assistant to Y. Lapytsky, when the latter was on tours, staging performances in various cities. We may presume that his work in Poltava enriched him with the experience of independent actions, so important for anyone’s professional progress. That why he was invited to Kharkiv not only as Y. Lapytsky’s assistant, but as independent artistic figure as well. He got a special assignment of directing “Faust” performance. The new theater’s administration seems to have had little hope for the success of “Faust”. There were too little material resources and time allocated for the performance and rehearsals. Too much work had to be done in a very short period. November 4, 1925, was the first night of the performance. It provoked a lively discussion among musical critics: the director’s interpretation of Gounod’s opera seemed to be too peculiar. It is worth noting that all the transformations in action on stage were made strictly within the framework of the original musical material with minimal changes in the libretto. The director only implemented some new ideas as to the interpretation of certain episodes as well as characters’ nature. They concerned, first and foremost, Dr. Faust, the hero of the opera. E. Jungwald-Khilkevych saw him as a medieval scholar who had lost his lifelong faith in science. So, Faust is in a desperate search of the way out, ready either to change his life drastically or to put an end to it. Thus, the conflict, as seen by the director, is the inconsistency of the intellectual and the sensual, and this point of view is much closer to Goethe’s tragedy, whose philosophical intricacy was somewhat simplified in Gounod’s opera. Building up the logical and psychological motives of the characters’ actions (where one can trace the influence of Y. Lapytsky and his ideas), E. Jungwald-Khilkevych introduced a supplementary personage, the young Faust. The director also interpreted in his own way the character of Mephistopheles – not as a devil from the other world, but as the “Alter Ego” of Faust himself, as the dark side of the doctor’s personality. E. Jungwald-Khilkevych did not hesitate to break some respected operatic traditions. For example, he insisted on substituting traditional travesty actress (alto or soprano) in the part of Siebel with a male tenor. I. Turkeltaub, a famous musical critic of Kharkiv, maintained in his review that the director enriched the performance with new brilliant elements, which significantly broke off the opera routine. Conclusions. Certain conclusions justly can be made not only from the praise by an authoritative erudite musical critic I. Turkeltaub, but also from the details of the director’s conception, disclosed in his own articles. This materials prove that the debut of E. Jungwald-Khilkevych, then 28, on the main stage of the Ukraine’s capital was far from being imitative or immature. He proposed an interpretation both independent artistically and adequate to his time. This performance testifies to maturity of rather a young director, his ability to work under extreme conditions, to captivate the actors and inspire them with his ideas. It is obvious that the theater’s administration did next to nothing to support the director of “Faust”: the leading singers were not included in the cast, the scenery was made by secondrate painters instead of A. Petrytsky and O. Khvostenko-Khvostov, which were the leading designers of the theater, and so on. In spite of all that, “Faust” became one of the real zests of the Ukrainian National Opera and Ballet Theater’s first season. This result proves the real necessity of closer scholarly studies into the Ukrainian period of E. Jungwald-Khilkevych’s creative activities, precisely, the performances executed under his guidance on Kharkiv stage.