Mieczysław Weinberg’s 1980 opera The Portrait is a familiar Faustian parable about a penniless painter turned artistic sell-out. The libretto by Alexander Medvedev (based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story), tells the story of Chartkov, a penniless artist in St Petersburg who purchases a painting with his last kopek, only to discover that it possesses magical properties. Just as Chartkov is about to be evicted for unpaid rent, the painting expels enough money to pay off his debts and propel him into high society, where he paints the portraits of St Petersburg’s wealthy elite. Forgetting his vow to always honour his artistic integrity above fame and fortune, Chartkov gains renown for his popular yet vacuous works that only serve to bolster his clients’ vanities. When he sees the work of a young and talented artist, he realises the error of his ways: Chartkov’s overwhelming regret drives him to turmoil and eventual death.
After its premiere in 1983 (the opera’s initial and only performance during the composer’s lifetime), Weinberg’s opera fell into obscurity. The Portrait was revived at the 2010 Bregenzer Festspiele, before being adapted for its 2011 UK premiere at Opera North by director David Pountney. The same production was subsequently mounted by several European opera companies including Poznań Opera (recording available on YouTube) and the Opéra national de Lorraine.
Pountney and Potra’s production emphasise the satirical nature of Weinberg’s opera, constructing an absurd and fantastical world befitting the grotesque nouveau riche inhabitants of the city. In doing so, the production uses disability imagery, including blind, hunchbacked and disfigured characters and characters using mobility devices such as canes and wheelchairs. This perhaps inadvertent use of disability bolsters the uncanny dramatic world of The Portrait, but at the same time, its implications in light of contemporary representational politics raise questions about why, in search of dramatic emphasis, we return again and again to the visual rhetoric of disability.
In her overview of the production in Opera North: Historical and Dramaturgical Perspectives on Opera Studies (303-310), Kara McKechnie recalls:
“Pountney asserted in his model showing at Opera North (November 2010) that The Portrait was a piece about compromise and integrity […] Audiences were used to reading in code; a tale of corruption automatically read as tale of getting through without being arrested — and given Weinberg’s own tragic story, The Portrait did have biographical significance.”
— Dr Kara McKechnie
Weinberg’s life was indeed marred by tragedy. In his article, ‘Weinberg, Shostakovich and the influence of “Anxiety”’, Daniel Elphick explains that the composer’s parents and sister died in the Holocaust and Weinberg himself fled Nazi invasions on two occasions, moving from Warsaw to Minsk in 1939 and then to Tashkent in 1941. Weinberg experienced a period of fame after meeting and befriending Dmitry Shostakovich in 1943, however, his success would wane after a series of incidents beginning with the state-sponsored murder of his father-in-law, a well-known Jewish actor, in 1948. In 1953, Weinberg was arrested for his falsely suspected role in the so-called ‘Doctor’s Plot’. The ‘anti-formalist’ and ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaigns would also take their toll on Weinberg’s career and legacy.
In a programme article for the Opera North production of The Portrait, Pountney acknowledges the impact of this tempestuous political climate on creators such as Weinberg, writing that ‘[t]here can be nothing accidental in the choice of such a subject in Soviet times […] The necessity of surviving and somehow living with the arbitrary artistic whims of a totalitarian regime exercises ruthless demands on artistic integrity’. Elsewhere in the production’s programme, Weinberg biographer David Fanning notes that The Portrait’s narrative is ‘obviously applicable to all societies and all times, not excluding the officially approved and therefore richly rewarded artists of the late-Soviet era.’ This particular context is brought to the fore in Act Three of the Leeds production, where enlarged portraits of Stalin are suspended from the ceiling. However, the production also acknowledges the story’s transcultural and transhistorical applicability, incorporating references to expressionism, minimalism, pop art and performance art.
Given its artistic focus, the opera is as much about the subjects of Chartkov’s paintings as it is about his compromised artistic integrity. The themes of vanity and artificiality associated with these characters also transcend the cultural and historical moment in which Weinberg’s opera was conceived:
“The pompous, the vain, the pretentious and the ugly are still as keen as ever to be represented in art as the humble, the modest, the sincere and the beautiful, and there are still plenty of ‘artists’ only too happy to perform this sort of painless cosmetic surgery.”
— David Pountney
The excess and artificiality of the city’s nouveau riche inhabitants is suggested by their colourful fin-de-siècle costumes, which form a visually striking contrast to the neutral tones worn by Chartkov in Act One.
The opera’s satirising of these figures is taken at face value by Pountney and Potra. In a video about the production, Potra explains:
“The satire stretches pretty much 300 years, starting from early 1830s when the opera is actually historically set, all the way to our contemporary day. When you have that kind of span in terms of style and history of the costumes, you’re very liberated because you have to take some quite strong statements in order to carry that concept right through.”
— Dan Potra
One way in which the production makes such statement is its tendency to play with and stretch the boundaries of the human form, using various signposts of disability. This is most notable through the depiction of the social elite, whose use of stilts symbolises their inauthenticity and sense of superiority as they demand that the artist paints them in their own image and not his. The stilts literally hinder the performers, whose use of walking canes is not only a practical necessity but also a contribution to the production’s engagement with disability imagery. Mobility aids appear with some frequency throughout the production. Canes and crutches are also used by the lamplighter and the art dealer (who’s bodily demeanour is altered to suggest a hunched back).
Elsewhere, Liza and the General make use of mobility scooters. As Liza zooms silently around the stage, her electronic device is concealed by her Victorian-style dress, mudding the waters between body and technology. Donna Reeve explores this kind of hybridization of body and machine in relation to disability in the chapter ‘Cyborgs, Cripples and iCrip: Reflections on the Contribution of Haraway to Disability Studies’, where she explains:
“For people with impairments, the hybridisation of machine/human or animal/human is often synonymous with lived experience, particularly for those with physical or sensory impairments […] Potential cyborg figures can be seen in the wheelchair user, the person with a cochlear implant, artificial leg or pacemaker or someone who uses an assistance dog.”
— Donna Reeve
Liza often appears on stage alongside the towering Noblewoman, who literally ‘dwarfs’ her. In one of Dan Potra’s costume design sketches for the production, the Noblewoman appears to be holding a leash which is attached to Liza. This suggests that the relationship between the two characters may be proprietary, which, given Liza’s short stature, calls to mind the historical use of Dwarves as ‘pets’ and entertainment.
While Liza’s mobility scooter hints at the cyborg, the General’s use of mobility technology is more in keeping with a steampunk aesthetic. The seat of the chair, complete with lace frilling, appears to be that of a baby’s pram, and attached to it are various pipes, cogs, wheels, and weapons. His device calls to mind the intersection of steampunk and disabled people’s experiences of prostheses and other assistive technologies, as explored by Kathryn Crowther in ‘From Steam Arms to Brass Goggles: Steampunk, Prostheses, and Disability’.
McKechnie describes the General’s device as ‘fantastical’, and indeed, both he and Liza contribute to the magical and surrealist nature of the production through their use of assistive technology. At the same time, the presence of mobility aids in the production echoes the prevalent use of wheelchairs and other signposts for disability as a ‘placeholder for tragedy or negativity’ in film and TV, a phenomenon explored by Petra Kuppers in ‘The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability’. From this perspective, the devices can be seen as a stand-in for the extravagance and artificiality of Chartkov’s wealthy clients and a contribution to The Portrait’s critique of the morally and artistically stunted upper class.
Facial wounds and blindness are also suggested during the production. The recording from Poznań opera shows the Flautist (a solider) appears with a bandaged head and eyes. In Act Three, Chartkov (dressed as Andy Warhol) is blindfolded – he is literally and symbolically blind to the loss of his artistic integrity. The blindfold is dramatically removed in the sequence that follows, ahead of his catastrophic realisation of the consequences for his artistic ‘selling out’.
Neither Weinberg nor Gogol wrote any of The Portrait’s characters as explicitly disabled. The production nevertheless draws upon the powerful visual rhetoric of disability to add dramatic weight to this Faustian tale. This perhaps inadvertent use of disability as a metaphorical or symbolic device is not uncommon. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder use the term ‘narrative prosthesis’ to describe the use of disability as a ‘crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight’. I’ve written about this in relation to opera narratives in a previous post, exploring some of the ways in which composers and librettists have engaged with disability as a stock feature of characterisation, an opportunistic metaphorical device, or a form of comic relief. This production of The Portrait serves as an example of how the use of disability as a prosthesis can also occur in the staging of an opera, even if disability is absent from the original narrative. By using disability as a scenographic and thematic device, the production participates in a process much like narrative prosthesis – we might call it ‘dramaturgical prosthesis’ or ‘scenographic prosthesis’.
But using the stage as a site for exploring disability from a non-disabled perspective can be problematic: Kuppers argues that ‘when nondisabled people don disability paraphernalia or masquerade as disabled, the results rarely offer interesting insights to disability scholars looking for resistances to dominant images of disability.’ In fact, I’d argue that Pountney and Potra’s use of disability imagery does offer interesting insights into the role of disability on the opera stage, raising pertinent questions about why and by what means creators turn to disability for aesthetic and dramaturgical emphasis. The incorporation of disability imagery by Pountney and Potra is more than likely unintentional, but the production does appropriate the aesthetics of disability without engaging with disabled experiences on a meaningful level. This perhaps signifies the need for more awareness about the broader sociocultural contexts of disability and the effects of such dramaturgical engagements with physical impairment. Playing with the disability’s visibility on the stage can be both powerful and meaningful, but there is a need for creators to acknowledge the rich contextual and theoretic implications of mobilising disability in service of their chosen aesthetic. As Kuppers suggests, ‘[o]n stage and screen, wheelchairs become rhetorical devices carrying narratives and marking identities. An attention to the rhetoric of the wheelchair-object can make a spectacle of difference’.
This research has been conducted during a short-term research fellowship with the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, in collaboration with the University of Leeds Special Collections. I’m working under the mentorship of Dr Kara McKechnie with materials from the Opera North archive, which is held in Special Collections at the University Library.
