It's a strange marionette presentation directed by Rezo Gabriadze, whose
name may mean more to some readers here; I'd never heard of him before.
The marionettes were operated by three men and two women, none of whose
names appeared on the program.  As in some Japanese shows I've seen, their
black clothes blended into the total darkness making only their faces
visible.

A description of this presentation in the Kennedy Center News, which didn't
say much more than I've just written, prompted me to buy a ticket at half
price when I was at the  KC for *Parsifal* last Saturday.

True to the maxim that a performance never starts on time unless you're
late, this one had just started as I entered the American Film Institute
theater, where this was being presented and I was therefore unable to read
even the cryptic crib notes in the program I was handed.

The theater was pitch black and a black clad puppeteer on the side
of the stage was manipulating a grotesque cadaver-like figure w/ a
disproportionately sized head either burying something in a pile of sand
or simply stirring the sand, all to the tune of Schumann's "Traeumerei".
There were other musical works being played continuously, of which I could
place only the "Barcarolle" from Offenbach's *Tales of Hoffmann*, the
"Maxims" theme from Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, and some music which
was either genuine Klezmer or, possibly, from one of Shostakovich's or
Prokoffiev's music on Yiddish themes.

The narration was in Russian with English subtitles.

According to Gabriadze's notes, he was driven to create this requiem after
reading a war correspondent's post battle description of the devastation,
dwelling particularly on the thousands of horses that had been killed or
were dragging themselves around on three legs.

Thus many, but not all of the characters, although having human names and
in their talk showing human emotions are depicted by animals, including in
the final scene, an ant grieving over the death of her young child.

Other scenes depict every-day life, at least one, before the war (one takes
place in 1937 in Berlin's "Eleventh Finger Cafe"), some as yet untouched by
it, and others caught up in its midst. Two scenes back to back, entitled
"The Mass of an Atom" and "Black Sea", show a girl trying to get the
answers to a science exam from her classmate,  and a lover grieving over
his beloved's marriage to someone else as she and her fiance are under
a Jewish wedding canopy. One Russian general finds himself demoted to
successively lower ranks after various battles and eventually becoming a
prisoner, only to be incrementally rehabilitated again to the rank of field
marshall.  The German General von Paulus also has a scene.

Perhaps someone who knows a bit more about this production or the artists
involved in it can give me a more coherent picture of all this.

Walter Meyer