Alla Zahaikevych’s opera «Vyshyvanyi. King of Ukraine»: the experience of performance analysis
Authors: Vietrov Oleksii 
Published: September 2023

Statement of the problem. On October 1–2, 2021, the premiere performances of A. Zahaikevych’s opera “Vyshyvanyi. King of Ukraine” based on S. Zhadan’s libretto took place at the Kharkiv Opera Theater. It is a multifaceted art project that contained several equal components – music, printing of the opera libretto, advertising company, stage design, costume, use of video effects; one of the few modern Ukrainian opera works, which was written to order and perhaps the first Ukrainian opera, written in such a modern musical language. The purpose of this article is a scientific understanding of the process of creation and presentation of A. Zahaikevych’s opera. A combination of methods of generalization and systematization of information presented by several critical essays fixed the immediate impressions of the performance, as well as the method of interpretive analysis aimed at understanding the author’s idea of the musical work and the specifics of its presentation is applied. Results and conclusion. The purpose of creating the opera was an artistic presentation of the new modern Ukrainian nation. The fate of Vasyl Vyshyvanyi attracted the attention of the authors as it allows drawing parallels between the events of the present and the past. In the imaginary space of the opera, historical figures whose voices are “heard” by Vyshyvanyi are presented. A series of memories forms the dramatic structure of the work, revealing to the viewer the events that influenced the course of history. Awareness of a significant of fateful choice of the people, who even today, almost 100 years after the events that became the plot of the opera, choose the right to self-determination, define the importance of mass scenes. Choir and ballet artists appear before the audience sometimes as refugees, then as hunters, cadets, soldiers, people at the train station, revealing and commenting on the context of the events. Thanks to the juxtaposition of live and electro-acoustic sound, A. Zahaikevych achieved the embodiment of a wide range of human emotions and voices, although the performance of vocal parts posed very unusual tasks for the soloists. Playing the role of the Man in Black, for the first time I encountered the need to sing in the Sprechstimme technique, paying attention to the conversational character of the vocal part, which is formed by the use of small durations, dotted rhythm and syncopation, the interweaving of three-part pulsation with two-part, numerous pauses between words and even syllables, the use of whispering and falsetto singing, tonal uncertainty. The composer also provides for the use of microphones, which allows to enrich the palette of vocal means of expression and to densify the musical texture by means of electronic processing of the sound of vocal parts. Most of the time, the actors of the opera are in the depth of the stage on a huge metal structure with a total weight of 5 tons. It is divided into three tiers, which evokes associations with the Ukrainian “Vertep” folk theater. When you are on the third tier, the distance to the conductor is about 20 meters, which makes it much more difficult to perform stage tasks. That is why it is necessary to mention Yuriy Yakovenko, the conductor of the spectacle, whose highly professional work determined the success of the premiere. To summarize, the premiere performances of the opera “Vyshyvanyi. King of Ukraine”, without exaggeration, became a landmark event, bringing together musical figures from many cities of Ukraine. For all participants of the project, it became an extremely interesting and useful experience of rethinking the stable canons of perception of opera art.