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The work of William Kentridge has not had much luck when it comes to Polish audiences. It eludes our attention like a fleeting image seen from the window of a speeding train and is quickly forgotten. In 2009, when Krystyna Meissner finally managed to bring Kentridge’s production Woyzeck on the Highveld to Wrocław’s Dialog Festival, it went virtually unnoticed. When Kentridge came to Kraków to receive the ASIFA Prize 2014 for outstanding achievements in animated film, it once again became necessary to remind people of his life and artistic accomplishments. Opera lovers preferred to watch Lulu and The Magic Flute in other stagings. The film screenings of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse from La Monnaie at Kraków’s Cricoteka attracted mainly fans of Kantor curious about Kentridge’s play with his theatre of death. Last year’s presentaiton of the installation I am not me, the horse is not mine at Białystok’s Galeria Arsenał did not even get a separate vernissage.

One might say, therefore, that the situation with the reception of the South African artist in Poland is even worse than with the proverbial sea serpent: not only has no one seen him, but hardly anyone has even heard of him. This is quite unlike in the UK, where the new production of L’Orfeo at Glyndebourne attracted interest for two reasons: because of Kentridge’s involvement in the project and the astonishing fact that Monteverdi’s masterpiece – the premiere of which in 1607 is regarded as the symbolic birth of opera – had never before featured in the programme of the legendary Sussex festival. Another thing is that reactions following the first performance on 14 June ranged from rapture to complete rejection of Kentridge’s concept. Intrigued, I decided to break my iron rule and, before heading off to the fourth of the thirteen performances, read – even if only perfunctorily – the director’s pre-premiere comments.

Krystian Adam (Orfeo), Roseline Wilkens and Francesca Aspromonte (La Musica, Euridice). © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

And then something strange happened. Kentridge’s declaration – not surprising really – that the starting point for his work on the staging was Rilke’s poetry, his Sonnets to Orpheus and, above all, the extraordinary poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, brought back memories of my youthful fascination with another, relatively little known piece from the collection Neue Gedichte. As a result, instead of analysing the source of Kentridge’s inspiration, I went back to Der Junggeselle, a poem in which chairs stand haughtily along the wall, night sneaks into the furniture and the mirror releases a drape behind which the eponymous bachelor sees his own death. Then I went on to read Sibyl, then other pieces and only quite some time later did I return to the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus, where a “tree climbed” at the beginning.

This is precisely how Kentridge works: his method is that of loose, rapid associations, sudden shifts, loops, which initially can overwhelm and seem chaotic, and yet they do consistently lead the audience to the heart of the matter. This L’Orfeo has basically everything we know from the artist’s earlier installations and productions. There are moving collages and Dadaist constructions featuring Kentridge’s signature motif of the megaphone. There are stop motion animations, projections by Janus Fouché on Sabine Theunissen’s sparse sets. There are subtle plays of shadows, there is unsettling “black” light (directed by Urs Schönebaum), there are stunning costumes designed by Greta Goiris, inspired partly by the aesthetics of Bauhaus theatre. There are also references to Kentridge’s works from recent years, including dynamic, evolving images of trees painted in ink on paper, charcoal drawings and monotypes on pages from old books.

This extraordinary multiplicity of visual stimuli is a symbol of our desire for the world to give us everything we expect from it, a metaphor for our refusal to accept suffering and dying. In order to understand that death is an inextricable part of human existence, Orfeo has to come to terms with the loss of Euridice. In order to remain an artist, he needs to learn how to transform the visible into the invisible. Following in Rilke’s footsteps, from that moment on Kentridge gradually cleanses the stage of excessive images. Euridice becomes a separate being, a patch of light in the blackness of memories.

Krystian Adam. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

In Kentridge’s vision – the coherence of which we realise only in the finale of Act V – Orfeo is the figure of the poet. La Musica, present on stage not only in the Prologue, in which she announces the story of Orfeo’s love for Euridice, but also throughout the performance, is the figure of the artist, perhaps also the poet’s alter ego, and is thus a generalised allegory of art. She stands bent over a table in a studio that is strikingly similar to Kentridge’s own studio, and, with total abandon, “creates” all the projections and animations appearing in the background. For a brief moment she will lend her voice to Euridice portrayed by a sensual dancer – presumably the prematurely deceased Wera Knoop, a friend of Rilke’s daughter, to whose memory the poet dedicated his Sonnets to Orpheus. The Nymphs, Shepherds as well as the singer in the dual role of the Messaggera and La Speranza are a group of artists who are the couple’s friends. The gods occupy separate positions on ladders raised above the stage. The infernal spirits, which accompany Orfeo in his trip across the Styx, bring to mind the grotesque figures from the print series Dada Picnic, one of Kentridge’s most expressive works.

The rest is conveyed by the artist through movement drawn directly from physical theatre techniques and performative methods, giving the performers considerable freedom in their choice of the means of expression. An important role in Kentridge’s concept is played by props, including “Sibyl’s leaves” on sticks, symbolising the fleeting nature of human prophecies, and, above all, asymmetric cardboard “fans”, used highly evocatively as screens separating Orfeo from Euridice in the scene in which he tries to lead his beloved out of the underworld.

Kentridge’s vision is by no means easy to take in and interpret, which, in my opinion, is one of its strengths, although I do understand that it may have proved too much for part of the audience. However, in no way did it interfere with the musical side of the production. I have heard dozens of performances of L’Orfeo in my life, but I don’t think I have ever encountered an orchestra conducted with such lightness, playing with such ease and a sense of phrasing, supported by such a stylish and confidently executed continuo. Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is a self-governing ensemble that has been associated with Glyndebourne since its beginning. It plays under the direction of its concertmasters, who take turns in the role, or chooses conductors individually. Jonathan Cohen, the current head of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, led the OAE not for the first time and rightly so.

Francesca Aspromonte. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

Krystian Adam, whom I have been following in the role of Orfeo for nearly a decade (that is, since his sensational debut in 2017, during John Eliot Gardiner’s concert tour featuring Monteverdi’s three operas), is undoubtedly one of the world’s leading performers of the role today. His voice has since developed a suitable baritonal quality in the lower register, while his interpretation has matured and gained in expressiveness. He had always known how to move a heart of stone with the powerful monologue “Possente spirto” from Act III, regarded as one of the finest examples of early Baroque performance practice. This time he dazzled me with the brief “ohimè”, a heart-rending cry of despair mixed with disbelief at the news of Euridice’s death. The news was brought by a phenomenal Messaggera portrayed by Xenia Puskarz Thomas, a mezzo-soprano with a power of expression worthy of a Shakespearean heroin. I do not share the admiration for the vocal artistry of Francesca Aspromonte, who sang the roles of La Musica and Euridice in a lovely soprano voice, albeit one that had too much vibrato and was uncertain in terms of intonation; however, I fully appreciate her brilliant acting. Among the other soloists one that deserves special mention is Hugo Herman-Wilson for his performance as the Second Shepherd; I would also like to express my highest praise for the outstanding Glyndebourne Chorus.

And I am grateful to Kentridge for the idea of introducing a silent, dancing Euridice into the story. Roseline Wilkens – grace and fire, passion enclosed in a body far removed from the European notions of the canon of dance beauty – proved in the finale to be so imbued with the great death, so convincing in her new girlishness, that I felt a twinge of sadness that Rilke could not see this.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

High up on the list of my guilty pleasures is reading comments on online fora. During this year’s visit to Göttingen I came across a surprising opinion of a tourist whose impression was that the city was beautiful but there were too many young people in it. I thought to myself – irrespective of my personal impressions, quite different from the disgruntled globetrotter’s opinion – that it would be hard to find a better description of the atmosphere in one of Germany’s most important centres of scholarship, the home to over forty Nobel Prize winners as well as the university known in Latin as Giorgia Augusta, whose students included the Brothers Grimm, Heinrich Heine and Hugo Steinhaus. Indeed, there are plenty of young people here. The student population alone is equal to that of an average town in Poland – approximately one-fourth of the total number of residents of the Göttingen District’s capital.

Apart from the fact that it is easier to be run over by a bicycle than a car here, Göttingen is quiet, joyful and fairly safe. This may be the reason why the atmosphere at the Händel-Festspiele Göttingen, the world’s oldest Handel festival, which celebrated its centenary in 2020, is decidedly more casual than most of the European festivals of early music. Tradition demands it: after all, the Festspiele is the brainchild of music-making amateurs, lecturers and students at the local university, who had enough audacity a few years after its launch to entice Gunnar Graarud, a star of the Berlin stages at the time, to come to Göttingen and sing in their first staging of Xerxes. After all, one of the first directors of the Deutsches Theater, the venue of festival opera performances today, was a sought-after film actor who starred in two thrillers directed by Hitchcock and died on the set of a musical comedy written by Billy Wilder, a comedy so full of plot twists and secrets uncovered by the protagonists that it would have sent many a Baroque librettist into a fit of envy.

It’s been seven years since I found myself at this wonderful event for the first time – quite by chance really, as I was in Göttingen for entirely different reasons. I was lucky to witness the last few years of Laurence Cummings’ musical tenure and now I watch with admiration how George Petrou, who has taken over the reins from Cummings, continues the festival’s established programming line, enthusiastically attracting an increasingly younger audience – also thanks to special concerts for children as well as family-friendly versions of operatic productions. The motto of this year’s Händel-Festspiele was VERLOCKUNG or “enticement”. It was hard not to succumb to it, even if only for three Festspiele days, which I had chosen carefully, complementing a performance of Handel’s Deidamia with concerts in Göttingen and at the Welfenschloss in nearby Münden, where the Weser River originates from the confluence of the Werra and the Fulda.

Unfortunately, due to the cancellation of some services, I was unable to attend a performance by the flautist Erik Bosgraaf and the Italian ensemble filoBarocco playing “Polish-Moravian” music by Telemann, who in 1705 took up the post of Kapellmeister to Count Erdmann II Promnitz, Lord of Żary, which enabled him to travel even farther, including to places like Pszczyna and Kraków. Fortunately, I was able to get to the evening performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Stadthalle, to which I had been particularly looking forward, because it featured several soloists I knew and admired, but mainly because of the FestspielOrchester Göttingen, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary and has confirmed its versatility in recent seasons, easily adapting to Petrou’s spirited interpretations and his preferred expressive, pungent and juicy sound aesthetics.

George Petrou. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Yet this time it was the sound that was lacking, primarily because of the acoustics of the Stadthalle concert hall, ruined effectively – and probably irreversibly – during the thorough renovation of the modernist edifice. As it often happens these days, sight has won over hearing. The design by the German studio soll sasse architekten was showered with awards. No one thought that reconstructing the Grosser Saal on a larger scale and using different materials would have such a significant impact on its acoustic properties. I hope that with time the festival oratorio concerts will return to previous venues – in the case of Messiah the problem was further compounded by the fact that the NDR Vokalensemble was placed at the back of the stage, behind the orchestra, in a nineteenth-century style. As a result, the choral fragments, so important in this masterpiece, were heard as if through a mist, the text did not reach the audience – instead of being an equal participant in the narrative, the ensemble was relegated to the role of insignificant accompaniment. The orchestra, too, got off to a difficult start, from the very beginning sounding uneven when it came to intonation and, at times, also rhythm. I also wondered about the criteria for selecting the soloists, who were without exception talented artists with experience in this repertoire, though not necessarily a good fit for the vision of George Petrou, who, presumably, wished to remain faithful to the composer’s intentions.

The best among the four soloist was the tenor Ru Charlesworth, a former prize-winner at the Cesti-Wettbewerb in Innsbruck, a passionate singer with a still youthful sound, and, most importantly, peerless teller of the story of the Messiah’s life and death as well as the anticipated salvation of the souls (a phenomenal “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted” from the Isaiah’s prophecy scene). In this respect he was superior to the Canadian baritone Drew Santini, whose voice is far less expressive and marked by a small but persistent vibrato, not always consistent with his interpretation. The mismatching problem was especially evident in the case of the two ladies: Ana Maria Labin, whose soprano is light and resonant, shimmering like quicksilver; and Lena Sutor-Wernich, whose powerful, deep alto has a tenor-like quality in the lower register. Handel wrote the alto part in Messiah especially for Susannah Maria Cibber, an excellent actress and amateur singer, whom the composer appreciated above all for her “sweet voice” and extraordinary power of interpretation. Yet Sutor-Wernich’s alto brings to mind Wagner’s Erda or Gea from Strauss’ Daphne, both when it comes to the sound and style of expression, which was particularly evident in the duets.

The above reservations stem solely from the fact that Petrou has got me used to performances pulsating with energy and, at the same time, thought-out in every detail. Fortunately, two days later he more than made up for any doubts relating to the Messiah performance. Before this happened, however, I had listened to some other festival concerts, each of which deserves a separate mention, despite their different statures and experience of the artists.

I will start with one of “out-of-town” events, at the Welfenschloss in Münden, which attracts a slightly different audience: made up of the locals as well as music lovers, who, thanks to a guided tour organised by the festival, can combine an encounter with music at the residence of the Princes of Brunswick-Göttingen with a walk around this small town, famous of its beautiful half-timbered houses. The programme of this year’s concert, entitled “Ein feste Burg”, a title borrowed from Martin Luther’s hymn, featured works by composers active in Lübeck during the Thirty Years’ War, which passed the city by, but marked the end of its former glory. Among the performers were participants in masterclasses devoted to the music of Hanseatic cities – as part of the Europäisches Hanse-Ensemble project, launched in 2019. The ensemble, led by Manfred Cordes – for many years a professor and former rector of the Hochschule für Künste Bremen – performs each season with a different line-up, supported by artists experienced in this repertoire (like the gambist Hille Perl and the soprano Ulrike Hofbauer, who joined it this year). I was amazed by the stylistic variety of this repertoire, from chorale cantatas, Venetian-style motets, to dances and other small instrumental pieces, in which the local north German traditions are combined harmoniously with Italian, French and English inspirations. I was delighted by the solo cantata Ach Herr, lass deine lieben Engelein by Franz Tunder – Buxtehude’s father-in-law and his predecessor as organist at St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck – with the same text by Martin Schalling the Younger that Bach used in the final chorale of his St. John Passion. I was moved by the listeners who recognised in many compositions melodies known to them from church services, but “performed so much more nicely”.

Rachel Brown and Laurence Cummings. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

I expected a lot from Laurence Cummings’ return to the festival, to which he devoted ten years of his life. However, I did not expect that during the concert at the University Hall, where the harpsichordist appeared alongside the legendary flautist Rachel Brown, everything would go in line with the title “To Melt a Stony Heart”. This was not another musical tale by the charismatic artist, who – much to the audience’s delight – can transform any Baroque opera into a masterful one-man show, combining the roles of a compère, a singer and an accompanist. This was a true treatise on the nature of music, worthy of Orpheus himself – a two virtuosos’ tale of how to charm the listeners, how to captivate them not only with the content, but also with the form, built on a strong structural framework featuring appropriate ornamentation, skilfully repeated rhythmic figures and clear articulation. How to build up the tension in order for the audience not to melt like wax too soon, to keep their attention with a lively dialogue between the performers, with focused singing from the keyboard and a poetic passage woven into the narrative. Brown and Cummings led us through the oeuvres of Baroque Orpheuses – from Couperin, Campra, Lully and Vivaldi, to Handel and Gluck. And it was indeed as if shadows wept, as if the heart of the lord of the underground himself melted. I still hear the magnificent sarabande “Le Départ” from Hotteterre’s Flute Suite in E minor. I will remember for a long time the aria “Cara sposa”, ending the first part of the concert, in which Cummings sang from harpsichord Rinaldo’s despair after the loss of the abducted Almirena. The two artists were the source of one of my most beautiful experiences in recent years, not just in Göttingen.

And the very next day I was in for an experience that was just as intense: the festival’s closing performance of Deidamia, Handel’s last Italian opera, which proved to be undoubtedly one of the best productions of George Petrou’s tenure. His boundless energy at the conductor’s desk and his unique sense of humour, to which he gives free rein in each of his projects, found the perfect outlet in this work. Deidamia was written to a libretto by Paolo Antonio Rolli, who presented the mythical story in a slightly different and more playful manner than Metastasio in his Achille in Sciro. The story of Achilles, son of Thetis, who decided to save her son from certain death at the walls of Troy by hiding him, disguised as a girl, on the island of Skyros, where he fell happily in love with Deidamia, one of the daughters of the island’s king, Lycomedes, was enriched by Rolli with a number of subplots. Before Ulisse, arriving on Skyros in search of Achille – whom everybody except Deidamia believes to be a fair maiden named Pyrrha – manages to reveal his true identity and persuade Achille to go to war with him, he himself will begin to flirt with Achille’s beloved. In turn, Fenice, Ulisse’s companion, makes advances towards Pyrrha. Unsurprisingly, this will give rise to numerous misunderstandings and scenes of jealousy. In the end Fenice will settle for Nerea, Deidamia’s confidant, Ulisse will fulfil the mission entrusted to him and everything will end with the mandatory lieto fine, that is the marriage of the king’s daughter to Achille, who is preparing to set off for Troy.

Deidamia. Bruno de Sá (Achille) and Sophie Junker (Deidiamia). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Rolli’s mad libretto, full of plot twists, enabled Handel to weave a number of comic elements into this melodramma. Unfortunately, the cunning plan of making the Londoners interested again in Italian opera – going out of fashion at the time – failed. Deidamia was performed at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre only three times and went silent for more than two hundred years. Despite tentative attempts to revive it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it proved impossible to bring it back to the repertoire. Until October 2025 that is, when a production directed by Petrou, with splendid sets by Giorgina Germanou, was presented for the first time at the Wexford Festival – with the same conductor and the same cast. We commented on a recording of that event with Marcin Majchrowski on the Polish Radio Two. Dazzled by the performance, we complained about the crisis of Handel’s invention, still not predicting any success for the opera.

It was only in Göttingen that I realised that the critics’ enthusiasm at the time had been entirely justified. What carries this Deidamia forward and up is an extraordinary synergy between the musical and the theatrical side of the production, giving the artists not only freedom, but also authentic joy of spinning this convoluted tale. The undisputed star among the cast is Sophie Junker in the title role. She captivates the audience not only with her acting talent and her beautifully rounded, soft soprano, but also with her phenomenal technique and mastery of the rules of stylistic ornamentation (which she  demonstrated already in the showpiece aria “Nasconde l’usignol” in Act I). Despite an indisposition, manifested in slight intonation problems, Sarah Gildford gave a fine performance as Nerea with her fresh, warm and irresistibly sensual soprano. The two future heroes of the Trojan War – Achille and Ulisse – were portrayed by Bruno de Sá and Nicolò Balducci, respectively. These two outstanding artists have recently caused quite a stir in the world of historically informed performance. Both have voices Handel did not even dream of in Italian opera: de Sá – a genuine male soprano with an extensive range, Balducci – a very handsome soprano countertenor, which, as it turned out, sounds excellent also in a slightly lower tessitura. In the original cast of Deidamia the part of Achille was entrusted to the teenager Mary Edwards, another singing actress, who played characters of the opposite gender also later on in her career. The role of Ulisse was written by Handel for a mezzo-soprano castrato. I would, therefore, venture to say that de Sá’s and Balducci’s involvement in this tragicomedy of errors and mistaken identities fully meets the criteria of the historical convention. The baritone Rory Musgrave did well in the role of Fenice, written for a high bass, while the velvety-voiced Petros Magoulas was outstanding in the bass role of the equable king Licomede. And everybody had great fun, including the orchestra of the Festspiele Göttingen, playing under Petrou’s baton in the typical Handelian pitch of 422.5 Hz.

Deidamia. Nicolò Balducci (Ulisse) and Rory Musgrave (Fenice). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

There would not have been so much fun, if it had not been for the staging – as handsome as it was mischievous. Petrou has the action take place on two temporal planes. The adventures of the mythical heroes unfold in parallel with a thoroughly modern themed trip to the island of Skyros (the tourists are played by members of the university choir, who are present on stage far beyond the requirements of their musical duties). The comic tension has its source in the fact that the representatives of the two worlds do not realise their co-existence and even if they do notice that something strange is intruding into reality, they are unable to interpret it. Nerea finds a suitcase on the beach, starts rummaging through it, and, disconcerted, pulls out a bra and a box of tampons. Something is knocking over the Sunday painter’s easel, though there is not a breath of wind. Licomede muses over peaceful old age amidst the depths of the sea, where an ancient treasure hunter is diving. Achille aims his bow at a cardboard doe at a shooting gallery. And yet everyone in this crowd grapples with their own dilemmas; they suffer and love in the same manner, and are overcome by bouts of equally painful jealousy. The group of holidaymakers even includes a suspiciously tall and sinewy lady who in the end will turn out to be a man.

I might have missed all these little details had I not been translating a book by a classical philologist who first allowed his elderly father to attend a student seminar on the Odyssey, and then took him on a themed cruise following in the footsteps of Homer’s hero. Petrou’s idea for Deidamia may not be as intricate as my author’s prose, but it does come down to a similar conclusion: in many respects the heroes of Troy were no different from today’s holidaymakers. Present-day tourists, too, can be killed one day: in another Trojan War, worthy of our times.

The organisers of the Händel-Festspiele Göttingen deserve credit for leading us into temptation for the works of bygone eras to make us think and to genuinely care about them.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Czech music lovers are just as unlucky when it comes to Dialogues des Carmélites as Poles. As I have recently pointed out, when reviewing the premiere or, in fact, reconstruction of Robert Carsen’s Amsterdam production at Teatro Regio di Torino, the first and so far the only Polish staging of Poulenc’s opera took place in 2000 at Łódź’s Teatr Wielki. Dialogues had to wait seventy years for its Prague premiere. It finally happened this year in May, at the Prague Spring, an event marked by several other round anniversaries.

Dialogues des Carmélites finds its hard to get onto the operatic stages in the former Eastern Bloc, even after the political transformation. The work’s long absence in Czechia is all the more understandable given that shortly after the war the country introduced one of the most restrictive models of fighting the Catholic religion in this part of Europe – in line with the instructions given by Zhdanov, who held up the Soviet experiences in the battle against the Orthodox Church as a model for the USSR’s satellite countries. The repressive measures also affected monasteries. The night of 13–14 April 1950 saw the launch of the so-called Operation K, preceded by show trials of a dozen or so monks, some of whom received life sentences. Over 200 male congregations were dissolved, a few thousand members of monastic communities were interned, monasteries were left to their fate or deliberately vandalised, property was confiscated or plundered. August was marked by the launch of Operation Ř (from the Czech word řeholnice, meaning a nun), carried out in stages and more selectively, targeting mainly “non-useful sisters”, which for the communist authorities meant those involved in education and care of the sick. The victims of that persecution included Magdalena Anna Schwarzová, a Carmelite postulant, who was accused of high treason a few years later, sentenced to eleven years in prison and deprived of her public rights. In the 1980s, following another wave of repression, she was forced to renounce her citizenship before leaving for Kraków, Poland, where she spent the rest of her life as a cloistered nun.

Photo: Petr Neubert

No wonder, therefore, that Barbora Horáková Joly, the director of Dialogues at Prague’s State Opera, saw this inglorious chapter in the history of Czechoslovakia as a parallel with the fate of the wretched Compiègne sisters, guillotined in July 1794. The bad thing is that she treated it too literally, forgetting that Poulenc’s opera was not a reconstruction of historical events, but an adaptation of Gertrude von Le Fort’s mystical novella drawing on these events, an adaptation featuring new elements added by Georges Bernanos and the composer himself. Horákova Joly’s entire concept is dominated by violence, conflict and humiliation, which blur the attitudes and motivations of the various characters.  There is no existential fear, nor any inner transformation. For some unknown reason Marquis de la Force abuses his own son mentally and physically; the Old Prioress dies smeared with her own faeces, with her hair messed up, as if she were in a neglected care home and not in Mother Marie’s tender care; Chevalier de la Force arrives at the convent to say good-bye to Blanche covered in blood and barely able to stand – and yet he is supposed to pay her a visit as a potential guardian in her escape, convinced that he would be able to keep his sister safe in the turmoil of the revolution.

Photo: Petr Neubert

The list of absurdities is endless – which is a pity, because the production is presented in sparse and functional sets designed by Ines Nadler, well-lit by Sascha Zauner, complemented by Annemarie Bulla’s costumes that would have been quite sufficient as an allusion to post-war repressions: without the director’s excessive and ill-conceived ideas, without projections (by Sergio Verde) and fragments of documentaries overused to the point of tedium, not to mention Blanche’s child lookalike, as superfluous as in most opera productions à la mode. It is a pity, because had Horáková Joly reined in her vivid imagination and focused on the only clever, though perhaps not too original, idea of “assigning” to the sixteen nuns sixteen mobile metal structures, lowered from the flies and placed at various angles – which first get covered by the greenery of the vegetables and flowers cultivated by the sisters only to turn in the end into the condemned women’s graves – the rest would have told itself, in a simple reference to this clear metaphor. Like the final execution scene, in which the nuns stand on their own graves in beams of spotlight going out suddenly one by one after each strike of the guillotine.

This rather unsuccessful staging did not quite hold its own musically either. The weakest link was the orchestra, clearly not ready to tackle Poulenc’s shimmering, rhythmically relentless and, at the same time, inhumanly precise score. In Act I everything, including intonation, was off. Then things began to improve somehow – under the experienced baton of Hermann Bäumer, the new music director of Státní opera, whom I came to know during his excellent directorship in Mainz. This may have happened, because at some point the conductor abandoned any further attempt to bring out the sharp contrasts and wealth of harmonies in favour of sounds that were hard, harsh and powerful, but at least impressive. On the other hand, a fine performance came from the chorus, directed by Adolf Melichar, which has little to do in this opera, so I appreciate its commitment and clear articulation all the more.

Photo: Petr Neubert

In an exceptionally uneven cast the soloist that stood out was above all Jana Sibera, who has a soft, girlish, beautifully rounded soprano, perfect for the role of Blanche. I was also very impressed by Mother Marie sung by the Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tone Kummervold, whose dense, technically impeccable voice I had admired a few years earlier in Schulhoff’s Flammen. The sharp, strained high notes of Tamara Morozova (Madame Lidoine) were not very pleasant on the ear and neither were serious intonation problems of Ekaterina Krovateva (Constance). Markéta Cukrova was completely miscast as the Old Prioress, a character she was unable to bring to life either with her acting or with her singing: as she ages, her mezzo-soprano is getting increasingly harmonically deficient and increasingly unstable owing to insufficient support. Daniel Matoušek has a lovely tenor, but it is definitely too light for the role of Chevalier de la Force; Paul Gay as Marquis de la Force was rather bland; Michael Skalický did his best as the Chaplain, although the role was too complex and big for his experience and skills.

Perhaps I should have gone to see some of the following performances. Perhaps the production will grow with time. I left the premiere, feeling that the Prague Dialogues des Carmélites did not do justice to either the “Compiègne Sixteen” or the thousands of Czech and Slovak nuns expelled from their convents, interned in camps, harassed by the security services, deprived of the remains of their human dignity.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Krystian Lada does not like to separate the audience from the symbolic performance space. All his productions begin with the curtain raised – long before the first sounds of the opera are heard. Before the Mainz staging of Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves a dozen or so women slowly make their way onto the dark grass of the rocky hills of the Isle of Skye; they are unassuming, modestly dressed, young and old, beautiful and ugly. They are soon joined by a group of men in costumes bringing to mind not only the traditional dress of the Free Church of Scotland elders and the workwear of the Hebrides fishermen, but also the glistening blackness of oil from the drilling platforms scattered across the North Sea. The women introduce themselves and say a few words about their origin and religion. Not all of them are allowed by the men to finish. One by one, they are all pushed off the stage. Just one of them manages to say her name, Bess. This is enough for the men. The community dresses the girl in a wedding gown and has her “try on” various symbols of virginal martyrdom.

The gesture, which at first appears to contradict the doctrine of the Presbyterians – who reject the veneration of saints, their relics and images – is, in fact, an apt reflection of the worldview of the Danish artist Lars von Trier, the director of the 1996 film, which became the basis of Mazzoli’s opera, composed to a libretto by Royce Vavrek. Breaking the Waves, the winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, was released just over a year after the announcement of the famous Dogme 95 manifesto and is still regarded as the seminal work of the movement. It was precisely at that time that von Trier, raised in a family of atheists, decided to convert to Catholicism, although he later abandoned the idea and chose agnosticism. He never hid his fascination with the oeuvre of his compatriot Carl Theodor Dreyer, primarily his Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), as well as the 1943 Day of Wrath and the post-war The Word. With time the iconoclast Dreyer came to be hailed as a master of religious cinema and Lars von Trier found his successor in himself. In Breaking the Waves he mused over dilemmas similar to those explored by Dreyer. From Joan of Arc he took Bess’ martyrdom; from Day of Wrath – the ambiguous bell motif; from The Word – the theme of his protagonist’s madness or mental disability.  However, he did not manage to shake off his reputation as someone who liked to cause scandal, partly because, even in his later films, he continued to point to patriarchal religion as a source of harm and suffering, exposing its inherent mechanism of the community using sexuality to exercise control over the individual.

Mazzoli’s three-act stage work was written twenty years after the film’s premiere, having been commissioned by Opera Philadelphia. Vavrek had the idea even before that, but the composer refused to be persuaded to adapt Breaking the Waves until she discovered the immanent “operatic nature” of von Trier’s work. His tale of Bess has the obsession and sacrifice of Wagner’s Senta, the vastness of the sea from Britten’s Billy Budd and Peter Grimes, and the hell paved with good intentions, like in Janáček’s Jenufa. The libretto of the opera follows the original text quite closely, a decision followed also in theatrical terms by the authors of most previous productions, maintaining a classic, linear narrative structure.

Julietta Aleksanyan (Bess) and Brett Carter (Jan). Photo: Andreas Etter

Krystian Lada has opted for a different approach: against the backdrop of an almost unchanging sets (designed by Annette Murschetz), masterfully organising the space, he stages a morality play about presumed guilt and ambiguous redemption, bringing to mind the tradition of medieval Passion plays. On the rocky grassland mentioned earlier there grow white lilies, usually not to be found in this environment. Jan, a Norwegian oil rig worker, will use them to make a wedding bouquet for Bess. They are both dressed in white: the groom in a suit, the bride in a gown with an enormous train, which she will hardly take off until the very end of the performance (costumes by Adrian Bärwinkel). There is no nard, no saffron or calamus here, but we cannot help but feel that this patch of land is supposed to satisfy all the needs of the community, both physical and spiritual. That is why it is an area that is closely watched – from the platforms surrounding it behind which a different world stretches: a world of boundless seas, distant oil rigs and rights rejected by the community.

In this enclosed garden Bess will lose her virginity; this is where she will say goodbye to Jan setting off for an oil rig, this is where she will have sex with him via phone, still in the same white dress, stained with the blood of their wedding night. When the news of Jan’s tragic accident arrives, the dark grass will be replaced with the steel grey floor of a hospital ward, reminiscent more of a mortuary than of an intensive care unit. Half-naked and bloodied, Jan, with his loins covered by a white cloth, brings to mind the tortured Christ just as strongly as he evokes the suffering Amfortas. Paralysed and unable to have sex, he slowly loses his will to live. When he finally manages to persuade his wife to have sex with other men, this will begin the Bess’ painful transformation into a holy harlot. New bloodstains appear on the dress. Bess “will finish the job”, giving herself to sailors from a red ship the presence of which we can only guess at from the flood of vermillion light at the back of the stage (as always, excellent lighting design by Aleksander Prowaliński, this time in collaboration with Frederik Wollek).

Julietta Aleksanyan. Photo: Andreas Etter

The rape scene takes place behind a semi-transparent curtain, with streams of terrifying filth pouring down on it. Blood mixed with oil? Faeces? Or perhaps disembowelled entrails? After the gruesome climax the narrative slowly comes to a close. Bess dies in the arms of women, Jan regains the use of his legs and returns to the stage in his wedding attire – splattered with dirt and blood like the white train of the dress, which now covers the woman’s coffin. Soon a purifying rain will fall from the flies. In the depths of the invisible sea we will hear the sound of non-existent bells, the sound Jan longed for on his wedding day.

Lada has served the operatic version of Breaking the Waves well. He has distanced it from the cinematic original and introduced it to the world of theatrical symbolism – much to the benefit of the audience and without detracting from the music, which has earned Mazzoli a reputation as one of the brightest stars in the firmament of twenty-first-century American opera. Critics often label her oeuvre as post-minimalist: indeed, Mazzoli organises most scenes around a vivid, repetitive pattern, not necessarily rhythmic – however, the main asset of her music is its harmonic language, which vaguely brings to mind Schönberg’s fluid tonality and polytonality. Mazzoli beautifully tints chords with dissonances, recasts instruments, and breaks up the colour of the orchestra with the sound of electric guitar and synthesiser. In addition, she has an extraordinary feel of the human voice, as is evidenced by the truly Brittenesque choruses and the poignant and, at the same time, surprisingly melodious part of Bess.

Brett Carter. Photo: Andreas Etter

A part with which Julietta Aleksanyan coped splendidly. She is a soprano with a very handsome voice, uncommon sense of phrasing, and admirable ability to build such a complex and tragic character. The fragile Bess was perfectly partnered by the imposing Jan of Brett Carter, who has a healthy, flexible baritone with a bright, almost tenor-like timbre. I was really taken by Karina Repova as Dodo, Bess’ sister-in-law: her velvety mezzo-soprano possesses both soothing tenderness and strength essential to the role – they were well contrasted with the merciless severity of the Mother (sung by Nancy Weißbach, a reliable dramatic soprano). Among the male cast the Ukrainian bass-baritone Daniel Semsichko as the Councilman stood out as well, but I was disappointed by Yoonki Baek as Dr. Richardson, whose tenor was quite frail and whose intonation was uncertain. Other roles were competently performed by the baritone Tim-Lukas Reuter (Terry) as well as the bass Doğuş Güney and the tenor Frederik Bak as the two rapists. A fine performance also came from the male chorus directed by Sebastian Hernandez Laverny – rough, at times brutal in its sound, particularly convincing in fragments styled as Presbyterian hymns and psalms. The whole, featuring the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Mainz, was conducted by Dirk Kaftan – with remarkable verve and attention to every detail of this highly complex score.

However, the Mainz staging of Breaking the Waves ended differently from the earlier productions of the opera. A dozen or so “Mainzer Frauen”, the women from the prologue, came back on stage with Bess in order to sing a simple song, “My body is a map”, composed by Mazzoli to a paraphrase of the text of the main protagonist’s aria from the beginning of Act III. Perhaps it was a nod to librettists from the past, who were able to end every opera with a well-put-together lieto fine? If so, it was  untimely. Every single day over one hundred raped women die, with their bodies proving to be a map to nowhere.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

This visit – at the invitation of the North Rhine-Westphalia’s Culture Secretariat, with an eight-strong group of international observers, including my former editor colleague Monika Pasiecznik – was for me like Odysseus’ return to his beloved Ithaca. For thirteen years I have been working almost exclusively as an opera critic. I sometimes forget how much of my professional career was devoted to contemporary music, for example, when I reported on the successive editions of Berlin’s MaerzMusik, a festival I accompanied throughout Matthias Osterwold’s tenure, eagerly following its ups and downs. Year after year I would immerse myself deeply for a week and a half in the latest works, sometimes for over ten hours a day – until the festival began to eat its own tail. After that I would come to Berlin only sporadically and none of the subsequent MaerzMusik curators managed to win me over to their concept. That is why I accepted without hesitation an invitation to two concurrent festivals: the ORBIT biennial of new music theatre, taking place for the third time in Cologne, and the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, celebrating its ninetieth anniversary.

I would venture to say that the programmes of both events – ORBIT, still experimenting and groping its way, and the venerable festival in Witten, which, incidentally, has expanded the formula of its title to include orchestral works and music theatre presentations – if combined into one and spread over time, would produce a festival surprisingly similar to the “MaerzMusiks” from Osterworld’s best years. But these happened nearly two decades ago. If I were younger, this would sound like an complaint. But I am older and I really need something like this: an intense festival of contemporary music that would satisfy both elderly avant-gardist and concert hall regulars, and an audience that still has no idea what to do about it. Listeners and spectators who want to explore such music in the contexts of time, space and other abstract notions. Who prefer to treat new music as a fact of which we know nothing yet, and to set this fact against the harsh reality and the social behaviours associated with it. To listen in darkness, on the go, lying down and while eating. To experience music in the urban space or, on the contrary, to retreat with it into ever changing and less obvious interiors.

What a dream. Meanwhile, Cologne is almost a hundred kilometres away from Witten, and we, as privileged critics, managed to cover almost the entire programmes of both festivals solely thanks to the efforts of the NRW KULTURsekretariat, which enabled us to attend rehearsals and meet the authors of still unfinished projects. Our advantage over the “ordinary” audience was that we knew the aesthetics of many composers from previous encounters. Interestingly, these were not always consistent with our present impressions. “Of all my memories, the saddest are the happiest ones,” confessed Jean Genet, to whom I will return, in The Miracle of the Rose. Well, sometimes it is the other way round: the music of Chaya Czernowin, the focus of this year’s Wittener Tage, which two decades ago I found to be dreadful, albeit technically competent, waffle, this time had me completely engaged. Am I finally mature enough to understand that the various threads of sound in her work alternately intertwine and unravel, run backwards and across the narrative, sometimes disappearing into the fabric only to emerge from it again unnoticed? Or perhaps I was confined in the cocoon of the past and was not keeping up with the voice of the younger generations?

Let us begin at the beginning. Before the ORBIT Festival opened officially, we went to the Ensemble Musikfabrik studio to observe the general rehearsal of Mutants in Music: III. Dreamteam + Playlist of Deaf Dreams, a performance featuring musicians and dancers from the Cologne-based Ensemble uBu. It looked promising: the opening “symphony” of involuntary muscle twitches while falling asleep, enacted by the performers on beds laid out on the studio floor to the rhythm of sounds reminiscent of a children’s music box, failed, however, to develop into a coherent narrative about the art of dreaming together. The drama got stuck until it was carried away by the music, building up gradually from overlapping fragments of a playlist compiled by the deaf artist Matthias Ranner – sung, articulated through instruments, vibrating on low-frequency waves. Only then did I feel like dreaming together with uBu: when Schumann’s Mondnacht emerged from a cloud of clangs, shouts and hums, when Schubert’s Notturno in E flat major began to murmur like a lullaby and when pop-culture texts began to mix gracefully with fragments of avant-garde classics.

Gefängnis ohne Mauern, Schiff ohne Meer. Photo: Sophia Hegewald

The hidden structure of dreams – or rather nightmares – was explored many times by Jean Genet, for example, in his provocative Miracle of the Rose, a semi-autobiographical, non-linear narrative in which the writer loosely drew on his own experiences at the Mettray reformatory for juvenile offenders and his subsequent imprisonment at Fontevrault. The sudden leaps in time and the disorienting blurring of fantasy and reality, characteristic of Genet’s prose, have fascinated numerous composers, resulting in works like Bengtson’s opera The Maids and Eötvös’ Le Balcon, and, before that, Hans Werner Henze’s instrumental “imaginary theatre”, based on motifs from Le Miracle de la Rose. Philipp C. Meyer, a student of Isabel Mundry and Stefano Gervasoni, among others, has decided to use the same material in Gefängnis ohne Mauern, Schiff ohne Meer, a piece of music theatre for one actor (Max Kurth) and seven musicians from Ensemble Garage. Although the set designer Jan Patrick Brandt did indeed create a convincing vision of a supposedly “open” prison (a semi-transparent lightbox at the back of the Roter Saal at the COMEDIA Theater, which both shields the actor entering it and exposes him to public view; illuminated spheres in which the narrator’s distorted face is reflected), and director Miriam Götz intensified the atmosphere of oppression by scattering the musicians across the stage and making their performance seem like intrusive, obsessively repeated actions – the whole thing turned into a drawn-out monodrama with sparingly used background music. True, it was very interesting at times (I was particularly struck by the modulated train whistle, the dreamlike clamour of birds and the crunch of glass being gnawed at by one of the fellow prisoners), but it fell silent at key moments in the narrative, above all in the scene when the mystical rose was discovered at the bottom of the heart of Harcamone, the “holy murderer”. It is a shame, because Meyer is undoubtedly a talented composer and deserved to work with a dramaturge who would have radically shortened the spoken text and woven it more effectively into the musical fabric of the piece.

By contrast, the final performance of Sombre. In the Shadows of Our Time was excellent. It was a moving tribute to Kaija Saariaho, who passed away less than two years ago, made by her husband, the composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière, her son, the director Alexi Barrière, and the composer and sculptor Cécile Marti. The musical material of the production was made up of four chamber pieces by Saariaho (Caliban’s Dream to fragments of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; NoaNoa to a text from Paul Gauguin’s journal; Ciel étoilé; and Sombre to excerpts from Ezra Pound’s Cantos). Marti “replied” to the first two with a composition entitled ‘ŌVIRI to a text by Aleksi Barrière, while Jean-Baptiste Barrière followed Ciel étoilé with Un Tempo di Lampi Senza Tuono to the poem Attesa by Primo Levi. The whole, surprisingly uniform stylistically, was a convincing tale of the fatal consequences of idolatry: in private and artistic, as well as political life. Once again, I was reminded of Maerzmusik and a conversation from twenty-one years ago, after the staged concert Italia Anno Zero, when we fulminated that if we were shown a film featuring Mussolini one more time, we would not be answerable for our actions. In the world we are living in now projections of photographs from concentration camps and filmed speeches by the Duce – interspersed with images of the heavenly beaches of the Hiva ‘Oa island – again make an electrifying impression. Another thing is that this time we were dealing with a very well-produced, if slightly conservative, theatre, which suited the small stage at the Alte Feuerwache perfectly, and, above all, was superbly performed by four instrumentalists (Eija Kankaanranta on the kantele, the flutist Camilla Hoitenga, the double bassist Aleksander Gabryś, the percussionist Fritz Hauser) and the outstanding bass-baritone Robert Koller. The Swiss singer, adding rainstick to the sound layer of the piece, also demonstrated exceptional acting talent. Every one of his portrayals – from Gauguin to Pound – was equally convincing; every word was rich in meaning, every gesture essential. Right up to the final tearing of the projection screen, behind which stood a sculpture by Marti: a primeval stone idol that could represent anything from the painter’s fourteen-year-old mistress, the leader of the Italian fascists, to today’s objects of idolatrous worship.

Sombre. In the Shadows of Our Time. Photo: Sophia Hegewald

I wish we had been able to see Samu Gryllus Host_Opera – based on a documentary novel about the abduction of a dozen or so girls in the Hungarian town of Balassagyarmat, carried out by the sons of local apparatchicks and hushed up by the communist authorities. I am glad that the encounter with the Cologne-based experimentalist Rochus Aust and his Deutsches Stromorchester gave us the chance to explore the still-deserted spaces of the port mill in the revitalised Deutz district, wearing helmets and protective clothing, just like the future audience of the cosmic performance Die Dualen/Grand Jury. We missed out on a few other ORBIT events, including a Symposium and a Speaker’s Corner featuring representatives from the independent arts scene. The Cologne festival is brimming with youthful energy, at times discovering something new, on other occasions reinventing the wheel. One day it will probably become established and thus less interesting.

The Wittener Musiktage are certainly well-established, which in the context of the previous sentence may again sound like a complaint, but the matter is more complicated. ORBIT is still searching, the Witten festival has already found what it was looking for: at least that is how its regulars see it, enamoured as they are with the great avant-garde of the third quarter of the twentieth century and greeting every hint of tonality with a consternation not unlike that which Wagner’s Tristan caused Clara Schumann. The tentative attempts to persuade the audience to embrace a slightly different kind of music, made during the brief tenure of Patrick Hahn, the festival’s former curator, fell on deaf ears – the oeuvre of Cassandra Miller, the face of last year’s Musiktage, who specialises in musical recycling, got a frosty reception. The helm was taken over from Hahn by Anselm Cybinski – together with the majority of the programme already planned for 2026 and focused on the oeuvre of Chaya Czernowin. We will have to wait and see what happens next.

I feel that, given my experiences to date, I am sitting on the barricade dividing the experimentalists and the advocates of the museum avant-garde. I have been quite happy to see the festival’s programme being expanded to include music that is decidedly “non-chamber” music. I was excited to discover the aptness of this year’s motto of the event: Gegenwart. Unentrinnbar (“The Present. Inescapable”). The present played a trick on us. It made us put greater emphasis on the context when assessing the works presented – often at the expense of a detailed analysis of the artists’ compositional technique.

Forty-eight hours of music in three days. That is why I will focus on delights, surprises and disappointments. Above all, on a radical change in my attitude towards Czernowin’s oeuvre, in which I finally began to recognise pain, unresolved trauma and opposition to the actions of tyrants. Surprisingly, her oeuvre sounds the least convincing when it engages directly in contemporary discourse (the underdeveloped NO! A Lament for the Innocent, featuring Sofia Jernberg’s strangely detached amplified soprano part, at a concert by the WDR Orchestra conducted by Yalda Zamani). I definitely find myself more in tune with Czernowin’s sensibility when she uses delicate musical means to evoke the scent of biblical hyssop, that ambiguous plant used by the Israelites in the Passover ritual to ask God to spare them, while slaying the firstborn of Egypt (a phenomenal performance of Ezov by Quatuor Diotima). I was equally struck by the performance of the Cologne-based band hand werk in a music theatre production, Red-Headed Man, based on the modernist poetry of Daniil Kharms: those who realised that a poem about a red-haired man who had no hair no eyes, no ears, no lips, no nose, who had absolutely nothing at all – and, therefore, it was better not to mention him – was a terrifying metaphor for Stalinist terror, turned a blind eye to Chernowin’s unsuccessful directorial debut in staging her own work, which was saved by the spectacular musical and acting performance of the cellist Niklas Seidl.

Red-Headed Man. Photo: Claus Langer

Another highlight from the Wittener Tage for me was Mártón Illés’ Four Sketches from the opening concert, in which vibrant live electronics merged seamlessly with an equally vibrant performance by Klangforum Wien, conducted by Elena Schwarz, clattering, chirping and shouting against a backdrop of fragmented czardases and Romani rhythms, bringing to mind a torn map of neural connections in the human brain. I was moved by Dmitri Kourliandski’s Partially Restored Landscapes, performed by the Diotima Quartet, and described by the composer as a musical deconstruction of encoded radio signals, but which I perceived as an inability to articulate and express the simplest human emotions, a manifestation of a desperate longing for the irretrievably lost land of childhood. I still cannot quite make sense of the concert by Basel Sinfonietta conducted by Titus Engel, during which the audience gave a warm reception to the technically accomplished, seductively Orientalising piece Untamed River by the Iranian composer Amen Feizabadi (with the superb Noa Frenkel in the solo part), and booed the naive Seven Valleys of Love by his compatriot Golfam Khayam, a clumsy composition, but one that remains touchingly faithful to the aesthetics of the classical Persian dastgāh system.

Noa Frenkel. Photo: Claus Langer

I will not hide my admiration for Øyvind Torvund’s Two Pieces for Orchestra and Electronics, performed by the WDR Orchestra under Zamani. Torvund has always thrown listeners off the scent, branched off down different paths and drawn the audience into an intriguing discussion about the blurred boundary between nature and civilisation – this time he put shreds of inspiration from the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Sibelius into the muzzle of wolves howling in the wilderness and other strange creatures.

There are many things I have not written about and I do not regret it. This trip has transported me back to a beautiful past, when I would immerse myself in the music of the day for weeks and would pick out only what was essential. This trip has thrown me into the inescapable present. I am happy to be able to experience it not only in the existential dimension, but also in the aesthetic dimension, filtered through the sensibility and unbridled imagination of contemporary composers.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Who are you, world, that you terrify me so? – asked Gertrud von Le Fort, the author of the novella The Song at the Scaffold, from which everything began. The German writer was a woman full of existential angst, which is said to be an essential prerequisite for true faith. She lived in this anxiety for a long time, ninety-five years, until her death on All Saints’ Day in 1971. She was a Catholic, but born in a Protestant family whose members – as her father, a Prussian army officer used to say – participated in history wherever they could. Her paternal ancestors came from the Duchy of Savoy-Piedmont and bore the surname Liforti. They were Waldensians, members of one of Christianity’s oldest pre-Reformation movements. In the mid-sixteenth century they converted to Calvinism and fled to Switzerland. There they adopted the surname Le Fort, associated etymologically, like its Italian variety, with strength and courage. In the period directly preceding the action of the novella one of the Le Forts co-organised Louis XVI’s failed attempt to escape to Varennes and two others died at the hands of the revolutionaries.

Gertrud von Le Fort wrote The Song at the Scaffold in the form of a letter from an eyewitness to the events, an exiled French aristocrat. The narrative focused on a fictitious figure of a young Carmelite nun, Blanche de la Force, another mutation of the author’s own surname. However, the story described by von Le Fort did indeed happen. The Compiègne convent was closed by the revolutionary authorities in 1792; for the following two years the nuns lived as “laypersons” in several adjacent houses. In 1794 Fouquier-Tinville, the first public accuser of the Revolutionary Tribunal, delivered an indictment against the Carmelites, arguing that despite official prohibitions they had managed to create a monastic community of sorts. In June the women were transported to the infamous “vestibule of the guillotine”, that is the Conciergerie prison at the former royal palace on the Île de la Cité in Paris, and were subsequently sentenced to death. The Carmelites were executed on 17 July, barely ten days before the end of the Reign of Terror. On their way to the execution site they sang the Salve Regina. After the execution truly deathly silence fell among the crowd. But the last nun to be beheaded was not Blanche de la Force but Madame Lidoine, the prioress, whose dowry to enter the convent had been paid years earlier by Marie Antoinette no less.

The literary Blanche is von Le Fort’s alter ego, a character reflecting her own grief over the values squandered by the Great War, her own fear of the consequences of the October Revolution and the rise of a radical mood in Germany. “Fear is a great emotion,” wrote Gertrud von Le Fort in The Song at the Scaffold, “The nation should know fear. (…) The terrible events I am going to write of have really taken place and may be repeated at any moment”. The short novella, showing not only the horror of history, but also the possibility of inner transformation of people participating in it, caused quite a stir among the intellectual and artistic elites of the day. Interest in von Le Fort’s work continued also after the Second World War. In 1948 the French Dominican Léopold Bruckberger persuaded Georges Bernanos to adapt the novella for a film script. However, he was not pleased with the adaptation. Bernanos died a year later, and his manuscript – markedly different from the original in several respects – was unearthed by his publisher and published as Dialogues des Carmélites, the title having been changed at von Le Fort’s request. Bernanos’ work began a new life on theatrical stages, first in a German translation (as Die begnadete Angst, “Blessed anxiety”) and then, after the 1952 Paris premiere, in the French original.

Photo: Mattia Gaido

Following Bruckberger’s suggestion, Bernanos enriched the portrayal of Blanche with elements borrowed from the biography of Constance, Blanche’s younger “soulmate”. It was Constance who had a brother who, amidst the turmoil of the Revolution, tried to rescue her from the convent – and thus the narrative of the Dialogues gained the character of Chevalier de la Force. In addition, Bernanos put a stronger emphasis on the horrific agony of the old prioress, Madame de Croissy, most likely motivated by his own fear of looming death. The drama became more human than Gertrud von Le Fort’s novella, suffused with mysticism – this may have been the reason why it immediately became hugely successful.

It also struck a chord with Poulenc, deeply anxious at the time about the fate of his partner, Lucien Roubert, who was dying of cancer. However, it was Margarete Wallman, an Austrian dancer, choreographer and director, who finally persuaded the composer to adapt Bernanos’ play for an opera – through her husband, head of the Ricordi publishing house. Poulenc transformed the play into a libretto almost without any interference in its content and form. He worked two years on the music, creating a score that did not go beyond tonality, was full of references to modal scales in its harmony, and limited in its use of chromaticism.  His Dialogues is a magnificent continuation of the French tradition, including Pelléas and Mélisande – with Debussy’s characteristic, unobvious treatment of leitmotifs – as well as the vocal fluency of Massenet’s operas, not to mention other sources of inspiration, from Monteverdi’s recitative and expressive style to the dramatic intensity of the work’s climactic scenes worthy of Mussorgsky.

In Poland Dialogues des Carmélites did not attract much attention until the beginnings of the political transformation. However, the brief popularity of Bernanos’ play ended already in the mid-1990s and Poulenc’s opera was staged only once, over a quarter of a century ago, at Teatr Wielki in Łódź. Yet there are avowed fans of the masterpiece in Poland, usually agreeing that in purely theatrical terms no one has presented it in a more compelling way that Robert Carsen, author of the legendary 1997 production for De Nederlandse Opera. Carsen’s staging has been seen in nearly twenty opera houses across the world. I only managed to catch up with it in Turin – and with good reason, for after nearly three decades of its stage travels it had come full and significant circle. The Dialogues at the Teatro Regio di Torino was prepared by the same conductor who had been in charge of the Amsterdam performances: Yves Abel, a Canadian of French origin, who has been devoted to the popularisation of the musical tradition of his ancestors all his life.

Photo: Mattia Gaido

I have seen plenty of stagings revived without the involvement of the original directors, by assistants unaware of the context and disregarding the timeless significance of gestures that had ceased to be meaningful to them. Nothing of the sort happened in Turin, where Carsen’s original concept was meticulously reconstructed by the experienced director Christophe Gayral, and lighting – which is key to this staging – by Carsen himself, in collaboration with Cor van der Brink, who had gained his experience by working on productions by true giants of opera theatre, like Robert Wilson and Pierre Audi. Carsen’s vision unfolds on a nearly empty stage, on which every solitary prop – a bench, an armchair, a bed, a grave – plays a significant role (sets by Michael Levine, costumes by Frank Baer). Carsen cleverly plays with colour: for example, in Act One, when Blanche wears a white robe, with Marquis de la Force wearing red and his son parading in a blue costume. However, this is not an anachronistic reference to the allegedly revolutionary symbolism of the French flag, but more to the colours associated with the ancien régime: the white of the clergy, the heraldic red of the aristocracy and the blue of the rising bourgeoisie. The duet of Blanche and her brother takes place on both sides of a symbolic cloister wall, represented on stage by a row of nuns with their backs turned to the audience. The wall proves to be an illusion – at some point the protagonists start to pass through this porous partition and every word they utter only serves to emphasise the power of their transgression. The famous final execution scene – phenomenally highlighted by Philippe Girodeau’s evocative choreography – eschews literalness. There is no blood and no guillotine: the sisters announce their death one by one with a sequence of symbolic gestures and then fall prostrated on the stage, with their arms outstretched – but with their faces turned upwards, as a sign of faith, hope and trust in the unknown.

Blanche was portrayed by Ekaterina Bakanova, who has a rounded, ringing and expressive soprano – which was evident especially in the episodes of extreme dilemma and terror, when the artist would sometimes sacrifice the beauty of sound in favour of an almost tangible expression. A perfect counterbalance to the emotional Blanche was provided by Francesca Pia Vitale as Constance, sung with a radiant voice full of girlish ardour. I was less impressed by Sally Matthews as Madame Lidoine – her beautiful, mature soprano is still very sonorous, but has too much vibrato, which, unfortunately, affects the delivery of the text. In this respect Matthews was clearly inferior to the rest of the female cast, including Antoinette Dennefeld, a moving and intensely human Mother Marie, and, above all, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, a phenomenal Madame de Croissy. The alto part of the old prioress, like the part of the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, is usually entrusted to eminent singers who are also excellent actors, but who have their best years way behind them. Brunet-Grupposo went against this trend, demonstrating that a sense of theatre and impeccable vocal technique could support interpretation regardless of age. The intensity of her portrayal overshadowed Bakanova already in the first dialogue, in which she explained the order’s rule in sentences sharper than the blade of the guillotine. In the death scene, when her entire world of values had collapsed like a house of cards, she rose to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Faced with such acting and such musicality, a critic remains helpless with admiration: even occasional lapses in intonation seem to be a conscious tool of communication with the listeners.

The men have very little to do in this opera. All the more credit should, therefore, go the baritone Jean-François Lapointe, an undisputed master of the French repertoire, who, in his brief role as Marquis de la Force, dazzled the audience not only with his spot-on sense of style, but also with his superb diction and outstanding stage presence. Valentin Thill as Chevalier de la Force was more than decent, although his handsome lyric tenor loses some of its power of expression because of awkward transitions between registers. I cannot fail to mention Krystian Adam, who sang the Chaplain in impeccable French, with a warm and beautifully open voice, at the same time creating a nuanced portrayal of a man torn between fear and duty.

Photo: Daniele Ratti

Yves Abel conducted the Turin Dialogues in a highly stylish manner, in wisely measured tempi, skilfully balancing the proportions between the shimmering, colourful orchestral layer, and the wealth and weight of the words uttered on stage. It should be said at this point that the conductor had to cope with the untypical acoustics of Teatro Regio di Torino, where the orchestra’s selective and resonant sound can get out of hand and overwhelm the singers. Nothing of the sort happened. The conductor was in control of everything, including the chorus, superbly prepared by Gea Garatti Ansini, whose members also joined the soloists in the final scene, complementing the musical image of the tragedy of the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne.

And once again we experienced the power of a nearly thirty-year-old staging and the power of artists believing in Poulenc’s masterpiece. For evil truly has no power other than the helplessness of good – to refer to Gertrud von Le Fort’s words again.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I never cease to be amazed by the Czechs, and the grace as well as ease with which they bring back to life underrated operas from their national repertoire. True, it can be argued that Czech composers’ masterpieces have long been present on the world’s stages and that audiences craving for something new – not only in their homeland – will welcome any dusted-off piece with open arms. Yet this argument is false: first, not all of these operas deserved to be banished from theatrical stages, second – even if they are inferior to the more distinguished achievements of their authors, the Czechs usually know how to hide their flaws and highlight their strong points. This is primarily due to the fact that they have never broken with their operatic tradition; they know how to make it fit it into the framework of modern theatre, to look at it with detachment and, when necessary, to approach it somewhat tongue in cheek.

This has recently been the case of The Devil’s Wall, Smetana’s last completed opera and, at the same time, one of the four he wrote to Eliška Krásnohorská’s libretti, including the romantic opera Viola, based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and abandoned after several hundred bars. Krásnohorská, a writer, translator, editor of Ženské listy and activist in the women’s emancipation movement, was much younger than the composer. They met in 1864, before Eliška turned seventeen. Their true friendship began unusually – with an article in which Krásnohorská, whilst making no secret of her admiration for Smetana’s musical talents, pointed out his errors in the prosody of the Czech language, using The Bartered Bride as an example. Instead of taking offence, Smetana took her comments to heart. Krásnohorská was the composer’s muse, collaborator and unfulfilled love in the final decade of his short life, when he was battling increasing deafness, soon compounded by vertigo, hallucinations and sudden rage outbursts – according to Smetana, these were symptoms of madness that brought him to the brink of suicide several times. In spite or perhaps because of that, their first joint operas (The Kiss and The Secret) were bitter-sweet, lyrical comedies in which it is often hard to tell the difference between irony and melancholy, fiction and autobiographical themes.

However, work on The Devil’s Wall dragged on for longer than expected, also because of disputes over the nature of the work itself. From the very beginning Krásnohorská suggested something along the lines of a romantic opera, combining a historical theme with the legend of a devil trying to prevent the construction of the Monastery of Vyšší Brod, founded by Vok of Rožmberk as an expression of his gratitude to the Virgin May for saving him from the waters of the Vltava. Smetana wanted a lighter approach to the subject, to which Krásnohorská agreed, but their subsequent collaboration was a struggle. In the end Smetana removed more or less one-third of the original text from Krásnohorská’s libretto and did the whole his own way. He may have wanted to laugh and be moved a bit before he died.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The premiere in October 1882, at the now defunct Nové České Divadlo in Prague, was received with moderate enthusiasm. The wooden building, used as the summer base of the Temporary Theatre, had neither the technical facilities nor sufficiently talented creative team to properly stage an opera about devils, dreams full of phantoms, a thunderstorm and reversal of the Vltava course (suffice it to say that sheep were played by suitably trimmed poodles). Rarach, a role written for Karel Čech, was in the end sung by a different singer, shattering the illusion of a striking resemblance between the hell’s emissary and the hermit Beneš. Despite favourable opinions about the music, The Devil’s Wall was removed from the repertoire after just six performances. Bad luck continued to plague the the work: a performance in Prague on 28 June 1914 was interrupted by news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Smetana’s last opera did not make it beyond Czech theatres and still remains one of the composer’s least frequently staged works. Worse still, after a while it came to labelled a a work of declining years showing symptoms of the gradual disintegration of the composer’s creative powers.

The Devil’s Wall has not been seen in Brno for nearly half a century. Now the opera has returned in a staging that is so impressive with the richness of theatrical imagination and, at the same time, so irresistibly funny that I do not quite know whom to praise first. Let me, therefore, start unusually with Dragan Stojčevski, who, at the request of the director Jiří Heřman, designed the sets drawing solely on the architecture of the buildings and the interiors of the Vyšší Brod monastery, but making them an equal protagonist of the narrative. Although there is no Rožmberk Castle, nor a shepherd’s hut, nor a cliff on the bank of the Vltava, nor even the eponymous devil’s wall, that is a river dam – everything is there, in the sets organising the entire stage space, constantly moved, turned away, attracting the eye to strange nooks and crannies. Jarek, tormented by temptation, has a dream of an orgy involving smoking weed in the monastery library; Katuška is making out with her lover in the cloister garden; the Vltava River swells just outside the window of St. Anne’s Chapel.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The more our sense of the absurd grew, the easier it was to turn the narrative into a convincing whole – thanks to the brilliant direction of Heřman, who approached The Devil’s Wall with a panache worthy of the Salle le Peletier in Meyerbeer’s era. And with a sense of humour similar to that which must have characterised the authors of special effects of the French grand opéras. Heřman masterfully exploits the “alienness” of a detail or prop – the medieval setting (Zuzana Štefunková Rusínová’s superb costumes) is disrupted by a young monk in trainers; wheelbarrows from a DIY store roll onto the stage several times, and the peasant women push quite modern, neatly compressed bales of straw with their rakes. In addition, the director plays a hilarious game with symbols. The abundance of fish caught in the orchestra pit and swimming in the banked up Vltava, and, finally, the carp wagging its tail in a Gothic sculpture’s arms serve as a subtle (?) reminder that Vyšší Brod is a Cistercian abbey. The Rožmberks’ heraldic rose appears in a variety of contexts – for example, in Vok Vítkovic’s ceremonious entrée in full armour (I will not describe the scene, for if anyone is intending to go to Brno, I will spoil all the fun for them).

Some of Heřman’s ideas are so mad that I sometimes had the impression that I was watching the film Arabela, alternating with The Red Inn. However, wherever lyricism, horror or seriousness is needed, the spectator will find it. What deserves a special mention is the director’s collaboration with the choreographer Marek Svobodník, who has provided Rarach with a retinue of skeletons in black-and-white costumes, moving with the eerie grace of danse macabre figures (in scenes where Rarach is not parading in Beneš’s habit, but appears as a skeletal devil, the singer animates a hermit’s puppet in front of him). Add to this the superb crowd scenes, Dominik Žižek’s evocative projections and the lighting design overseen by Heřman himself, and we have a production that will captivate everyone – from a child taken to the opera by their parents for the first time, to a discerning music lover who has hitherto not believed in the power of Smetana’s work.

Photo: Matek Olbrzymek

For after what we heard in Brno, no one will believe that the opera is a work of declining years. Under Robert Kružík’s confident yet delicate hand the performance revealed not only obvious allusions to Wagner and Liszt, but also unexpectedly sophisticated and novel harmonic and colour structures bringing to mind Dvořák’s and Mahler’s late works. This was due to the disciplined and attentive orchestra, not to mention the phenomenal chorus of the Brno Opera, which I cannot praise highly enough in every performance. In the solo cast I saw a month after the premiere I was impressed the most by Pavel Švingr in the role of Rarach. He is a singer blessed with a powerful bass voice, yet one that is both exceptionally handsome and musical. Singing Beneš, David Szendiuch, with his considerably less distinctive voice, paled somewhat in comparison. On the other hand, an excellent performance came from Roman Hoza – a moving and human Vok Vítkovic, sung with a soft baritone with excellent breath control and beautiful middle range. The ever reliable Peter Berger was outstanding in the tenor role of the knight Jarek – no doubt aided by the soprano Lenka Máčiková, who gave a superb acting portrayal of Katuška with a mercurial voice. Romana Kružíkova lacked a similar stage presence; hers is a soprano light and girlish enough for the role of Hedvika, Vok’s beloved, but she still needs to work on her interpretation on the character. Záviš was convincingly portrayed by Václava Krejčí Housková, whose assured, steely mezzo-soprano is perfect for this trouser role. Finally, a round of applause should go to the tenor Petr Levíček in the character role of Michálek, the castle steward and Katuška’s father, a part that seems to have been taken straight from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Next year The Devil’s Wall will be presented at Prague’s National Theatre in a production by Ondřej Havelka, the first director that made me cry with laughter at the opera. A quarter of a century has passed since then and Havelka now has some stiff competition. If the Prague production turns out to be just as successful, Smetana will die of laughter in the beyond.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

To this day it is still unclear why, on 8 June 1972, the US and South Vietnamese air forces dropped napalm on the village of Trảng Bàng, near Saigon, which had previously been captured by the Vietcong forces. The reason may have been the same as the one used to explain the “collateral damage” in recent and ongoing wars – the hiding of militants and terrorists among the civilian population. According to the official version, a pilot of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force mistook a group of people fleeing from a local temple for enemy soldiers, as a result of which the aircraft changed course and launched an attack on defenceless civilians. One of the bombing victims was a girl my age: nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who miraculously survived, having torn off her burning clothes.

The photograph of the naked “napalm girl”, screaming in pain, went viral around the world and soon became a symbol of the brutal Vietnam War. It also reached Poland. I’m not quite sure whether my memories of those days have merged with what I saw later. However, I seem to remember that a news report by the Polish Television’s infamous Dziennik Telewizyjny programme featured not only Nick Ut’s legendary photograph, but also clips from the footage shot by reporters from NBC and the independent British broadcaster ITN. Suffice it to say that I keep hearing the scream of the anguished nine-year-old and I keep seeing her running past me, revealing her bare, burnt back.

We were children of the Cold War, instructed from the very beginning of primary school by the sombre men from the security services as to whose side we should take in the event of a conflict. However, this did not dulled our sensibility. We were brought up on the records of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath, smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain. This was also how we got to know Galt MacDermot’s musical Hair – in the original Broadway recording – and then rooted for our elder brothers who turned up for their mandatory military medical exam with defiantly long hair. We naively believed that we would live to see a world without violence and divisions, a world in which no one would have nightmares about children burnt with napalm.

One grows out of one’s illusions. Some of the flower children of the day turned radically right, others abandoned their youthful ideals for peace and quiet, many did not survive the attempts to augment their consciousness by means of hard drugs. And yet Hair became not only a manifesto of a generational rebellion, but also a symbol of universal quest for freedom, for the right to determine one’s own life, for the right of every human being to respect, love and security. Even if it did not influence the course of the Vietnam War, it certainly contributed to the difficult process of its re-evaluation. The premiere of the musical in London, in September 1968, marked the end of theatrical censorship, which had existed in the UK continuously since 1737. The film version of Hair, directed by Miloš Forman, reached Poland in the memorable year 1980, shortly after the signing of the August Agreements.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

The musical will soon turn sixty and it might seem that it has long become part of venerable classics of the genre. However, a few years ago something strange began to happen. Nearly every new production is now accompanied by comments that Hair has never been as relevant as it is today. I thought about it, setting off to see the premiere of the Theater St. Gallen staging directed by Krystian Lada. I don’t think anyone expected an American-Israeli attack on Iran to begin on that very day. Before the performers came on stage, over twenty people had died in the air raids. The highest death toll resulted from three missiles that struck a school in Minaba. The incident was subsequently attributed to the target having been mistakenly identified as a military facility – which is all the more astonishing given that the nearby military base had been demilitarised fifteen years earlier. The attack killed 168 primary school girls, who were roughly the same age as Phan Thị Kim Phúc.

It has been a long time since I experienced such intense cognitive dissonance. The fourth anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine had just passed; five thousand kilometres from St. Gallen the nightmare of yet another war was beginning, and I was strolling through the foyer of the Swiss theatre, surrounded by an audience dressed in bell-bottoms and patterned dresses, with garlands of flowers around their necks. An audience of all ages: from young people who had heard about the hippies from their grandparents to eighty-year-old flower children leaning on their grandchildren’s shoulders. What the hell is it that makes Hair relevant? That every rebellion will be in vain? Where do I go?

I calmed down only when the lights went out in the auditorium. Fortunately, the heirs of the musical’s creators insist that the original context of the work be preserved and that no references to current events be included in new productions. Fortunately, Lada respects their will. Better still, he does it in his own way. The production begins with a stylish projection set in the aesthetics of the late 1960s and featuring American commercial shown on a television screen in which a smiling housewife marvels at the silky softness of Kleenex tissues spread out on her child’s lap, while a white couple, wading through white snow, flash their white teeth, brushed with Macleans toothpaste, at the camera. The vision of happy suburbs will soon vanish, giving way to images of a dirty and bloody war raging somewhere far away.

The projections – by the Columbian dancer and video artist Rubén Darío Bañol Herrera – will return many more times, also generated in real time. Meanwhile, however, the screen rises, revealing a room shrouded in semi-darkness, which is to become the setting for this strange rhapsody from the life of a New York hippie commune: an abandoned East Village warehouse or factory, with a dingy bathroom, characteristic flights of iron fire escapes and a tiny room upstairs, where a small instrumental ensemble is hidden behind a “glass” partition made of opaque film (excellent set design by Sotiris Melanos, well lit by Lukas Marian). This is where the flower children will celebrate the dawn of the Age of Aquarius; this is where Claude Bukowski, George Berger and their flatmate Sheila Franklin will grapple with their fear of war, the dilemmas of their own identity, and their quest to find genuine feelings amidst the anarchy of free love. This is where the great psychedelic trip will take place; this is where Claude will have to decide whether to continue his rebellion or sacrifice his ideals – and, most likely, his life – on the altar of conservative America.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Hair has basically no plot to speak of. It is a string of rhapsodic, interrupted narratives, fierce protest songs interwoven with scathing satire, fragments of drug-fuelled visions, and very serious songs about dreams, feelings and loneliness. Lada – greatly assisted by the choreographer Jess Williams and the costume designer Wojciech Dziedzic, whose varied designs perfectly capture the spirit of the era – has preserved the frenetic energy of the work, at the same time making every effort to bring out the individual characteristics of each protagonist within the collective portrait of the commune. The most impressive performance comes from Dante Sáenz in the role of George Berger – wild, untamed, and, at the same time, terrifying in both his singing and his acting. Mack Walz was phenomenal as always, convincingly portraying Sheila’s difficult transformation from a hysterical activist manipulated by Berger into a mature woman who tries to bridge the gap between her beloved George and the doubt-ridden Claude. The latter, portrayed by Maciej Pawlak, singing with a soft, melodious voice, was at times overshadowed by the other two charismatic characters. This, however, is not a criticism, for this is precisely what Bukowski is like: a sensitive young man from the provinces, perhaps too prone to self-reflection and thus doomed to failure from the outset. Steffen Gerstle gave a beautiful performance as the good-natured Woof, a bisexual man with a heart of gold he is ready to offer to anyone in need of his affection. Outstanding among the other soloists were, especially, Nichole Cherrie, a silky-voiced Ronny; the incredibly expressive Masengu Kanyinda as Jeanie; and Daniel Dodd-Ellis singing Hud with his magnificent rich bass. The entire ensemble, including the eleven-strong chorus, was brilliantly led by Tobias Cosler, who gave the musicians not only freedom but also the essential sense of security.

They were treated with equal empathy by Lada, who often entrusted them with difficult acting tasks, but never against their bodies, voices or personalities. Despite the limited stage space of the Theater St. Gallen, he did not try to stifle their need to move. What I find the most winning in Lada’s craftsmanship is his attention to detail: a snowstorm conveyed by the simple techniques of shadow theatre; the “warped” reality of the first manned mission beyond Earth’s orbit, viewed by the commune from a television set propped upright on a metal supermarket trolley; the modest yet brilliantly enacted and truly hilarious hallucinatory vision of paratroopers landing in the Vietnamese jungle.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

In the Swiss production a sense of unease seeps into the narrative gradually, almost imperceptibly, through, among other things, the successive projections – including material documenting one of the US government’s most dreadful ideas, the “draft lottery”, and excerpts from speeches by Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon. Especially the latter, who utters slick platitudes with the diction of a Shakespearean actor and the composure of a Roman orator, making the speeches of the current President of the United States come across as ramblings of a crazed old man.

When Claude died just as imperceptibly and the tribal anthem “Let the Sunshine In” rang out from the stage, there was no holding back the tears. We did not go on stage to join the actors, like in the old productions of Hair. But we did sing. Until we were out of breath and lost all hope that someone would finally pluck up the courage to let the sun in.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I have been dealing quite a lot with Monteverdi recently. Even before leaving for London – to attend a concert by the Academy of Ancient Music conducted by Laurence Cummings in a programme comprising pieces from the Madrigali guerrieri, ed amorosi collection – I could not shake off the thought that Monteverdi’s music would have sounded quite different, if he had not been widowed so early and spent the rest of his life alone. Monteverdi decided to get away from his hometown of Cremona at the first opportunity. He dreamed of a career in Milan, but eventually ended up in Mantua, at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga. The duke was an ambiguous figure: he once sent thugs after the young erudite Scot James Crichton. Mad with jealousy of his former lover and the favour shown to Crichton by his father, Gonzaga killed his rival with Crichton’s own sword. When the cornered Scot fell to his knees and, begging for mercy, handed him his weapon with the hilt turned forward, Gonzaga stabbed him right in the heart. Yet Crichton was almost forgotten, while Vincenzo went down in history as one of the most outstanding patrons of the arts and sciences in Italy of that era.

Monteverdi came to Mantua when he was not yet twenty-four. He was taken care of by the court violist Giacomo Cattaneo, who took him under his roof and introduced him to his daughter Claudia. Cattaneo would act as a matchmaker between Claudia and Claudio in what looked like an arranged marriage. Monteverdi became his mentor’s son-in-law and husband of a talented court singer, which could help him further his career. Cattaneo was looking for a successor to take over his duties at the court, guarantee livelihood for his daughter and ensure a peaceful old age for himself.

But then came love and mutual respect. The young couple were brought together not only by family but also by professional obligations. From the moment Claudio was given the position of maestro della musica, Claudia probably took part in most performances of his works. She must also have attended the preparations for the premiere of Orfeo. A few months later she died. As for the rest, we can only make a guess: from the decision of the forty-year-old widower not to remarry, and then, after raising his sons to adulthood, to be ordained a priest. But also from his mature music, in which the zeal of a religious experience is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the ecstasy of love, and the clamour of battle from the storms raging in the hearts of lovers.

It can, of course, be argued that such were the premises of the genere concitato, mentioned for the first time by Monteverdi in the preface to Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, in the eight book of madrigals – although the work was written more than a decade earlier and, in spite of appearances, had its predecessors. Monteverdi’s late works herald the upcoming stylistic changes, although it is worth bearing in mind that the composer was the last great madrigalist – as if he deliberately stopped in the past. He breathed a breath of such powerful genius into the already outdated form that he completely exhausted its possibilities.

Anna Dennis. Photo: Jet

Cummings brought together selected works from the eighth book in such a way as to fully reveal the ambiguity of the “agitated style”. The symmetry of the division of the collection into war and love madrigals is only apparent – compositions marked as “guerrieri” in particular elude this simple classification, as Monteverdi mixes in them both orders or even camouflages the struggles and dilemmas of lovers with the rhetoric of battlefields. Thus the programme of the concert, which lasted just under two hours, made up a great, poignant treatise on love – viewed from the perspective of an older man who knows everything about it, even though he experienced it for such a short time in his life.

There was real theatre happening on the Milton Court Concert Hall stage right from the start. In Altri canti d’Amor, a substantial cantata for six solo voices (with the dominant, very lively bass part sensitively sung by Rob Macdonald), the singers entered one by one among the instrumentalists, like actors making their first contact with the audience before the curtain rises. Then the mood changed abruptly: in the static, almost whispered chords of the opening declamation of the madrigal Hor ch’el ciel e la terra, night fell so evocatively and the wind ceased so suddenly that the audience fell completely silent. This made the clash between the knight Tancred (Rory Carver) and the Saracen maiden Clorinda (Anna Dennis) begin with even greater momentum, accompanied by a virtuoso commentary of the narrator, Ed Lyon – a phenomenal tenor who rendered all the melodic, articulatory and rhythmic complexities of this fiendishly difficult part not only brilliantly, but also with an ease bringing to mind the artistry of the late Nigel Rogers. Monteverdi apparently planned to stage the ballo Movete al mio bel suon, which closes the first part of the collection, with the help of scenery. In this performance there was no need for it.

In the second, love part, after the even more evocative Altri canti di Marte to Giambattista Marino’s “genuine” text (the anonymous Altri canti d’Amore is a mirror image, as it were, of this sonnet), Cummings fully respected Monteverdi’s intentions, building a dramaturgy worthy of the first two acts of Orfeo. First came the charming and carefree Vago augelletto, with a symmetrical structure and crystal-clear texture (this time, too, the AAM boss did not deny himself and us the pleasure of leaving the harpsichord for a moment to sing the seventh voice with the ensemble, facing the audience). Then Cummings left out several pieces from the book – without detriment to the narrative – immediately moving to the madrigal Ninfa che scalza di piede. It was followed by Dolcissimo uscignolo, a madrigal “alla francese”, and then came a sudden twist at the end of the concert. Lamento della Ninfa, performed by Dennis with an intensity many a stage actress could envy, took the audience’s breath away. The abandoned nymph’s lament closed the evening with the eighth book as emphatically as Orpheus’ desperate decision to set off for Pluto’s realm to find his lost Eurydice. This lament may have been even more emphatic, because it contains not a shadow of hope.

Laurence Cummings. Photo: Robert Workman

The perfectly tuned ensemble also featured – in addition to the already mentioned singers – Danni O’Neill (soprano) and Ciara Hendrick (alto). In the instrumental ensemble, consisting of two violins, two violas, bass violin, viola da gamba and violone, the player particularly deserving praise was the concertmaster of the AAM, Bojan Čičić, not only for his sense of idiom and the resulting abilities, such as the skill to choose appropriate ornamentation, but also for his almost childlike sincerity and joy of making music. Separate praise should go to the continuo group: two theorbo players – William Carter and Kristiina Watt; the harpist Joy Smith; and Alastair Rose on the organ and harpsichord. I have written about the extraordinary artistry and charisma of Laurence Cummings, who led the whole from the harpsichord, many times before; on this occasion I will limit myself to confessing that I am already looking forward to his performance at this year’s Göttingen Festival.

Although I grew up listening to old AAM recordings and made no secret of my enthusiasm when, after a few lean seasons, the AAM was taken over by the long-serving artistic director of the world’s oldest Handel festival, I could not have imagined that this concert would overwhelm me with such violent thrills, so many emotions repressed over the years, such unearthly delight. I feel now like Tancred from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered: thus comforted, I wak’d.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

‘I will be a friend to you, and you shall take care of my linen’ – those words, uttered by Mr B. to the beautiful and innocent maid at the beginning of Samuel Richardson’s famous work have been igniting readers’ imagination for almost three hundred years. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was published in 1740. Richardson, writing his debut epistolary novel, considered today to be the first mature novel in English literature, also proved to be the precursor of eighteenth-century ‘conduct books’ – guides to the intricacies of binding social norms. Yet the exceptional nature of Pamela lies not just in the masterful penmanship, but also in the bravura play of contrasts: virtue clashes with lasciviousness, ideal with reality, piety with primitive instinct. Richardson’s book became the first bestseller, in the present-day sense of the word, read with flushed cheeks by maids and gentlefolk alike, in equal measure praised from the pulpit and accused of veiled pornography. Not without reason, judging from the excerpt quoted above. A few dozen pages later, Pamela, hearing suspicious noises coming from Mrs. Jervis’ closet, first undresses before opening the door, through which falls her employer, dressed in nothing but a silk dressing gown. Yet she maintains her chastity until the day of her marriage to Mr B., which for some was proof of her remarkable attributes and for others of her exceptional manipulative skills in seeking the desired goal, namely, social advancement through marriage to a partner of incomparably higher status.

The popularity of Pamela surpassed all conception. The novel sold in hundreds of copies across the whole of Europe, and in 1742 it reached America, where it was published by Benjamin Franklin, one of the future founding fathers of the United States. It inspired artists and launched a fashion for the outfits described in the novel and their attendant ‘gadgets’. It was the object of numerous imitations and adaptations, including the comedy La Pamela, o sia La virtù premiata, from 1750, in which Carlo Goldoni transferred the action to Venice and turned the titular heroine into the unrecognised daughter of a Scottish aristocrat. Later, under the pseudonym Polisseno Fegejo, he turned his play into the libretto La Cecchina, o sia la buona figliuola, in which the maid becomes the gardener Cecchina, the lost offspring of a colonel with the Prussian cuirassiers. Among the composers to turn to Goldoni’s libretto were Egidio Duni and Salvatore Perillo, but their operas met with a rather cool reception in Italy.

The text only found a composer of commensurate talent in the person of Niccolò Piccinni, a Bari-born thirty-two-year-old subject of the Kingdom of Naples. La Cecchina, staged in 1760 at the Teatro delle Dame in Rome, was Piccinni’s fifteenth opera and proved a turning point in his career. First it opened to him the doors of all the major theatres in Italy, and then it set off to conquer Europe. In 1765 it came to Warsaw, where, just twenty years later, it enjoyed spectacular success in Wojciech Bogusławski’s Polish adaptation (Czekina, albo cnotliwa panienka). During the 1770s it apparently reached Beijing, staged at the imperial court by a company of Italian Jesuits.

Francesca Aspromonte (Cecchina). Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

A hundred years later, Verdi, who was already setting about Falstaff, called La Cecchina ‘the first true comic opera’, without which the masterworks of Mozart and Rossini would never have been written. Yet among most present-day music lovers, Piccinni’s name fails to trigger any musical associations. If anything, historical circumstances are evoked, linked to his journey to Paris in 1776, when the composer was drawn into one of the first episodes in the ‘war’ of the Gluckists and Piccinnists – a conflict between advocates of reformed French opera and supporters of Italian opera. The Parisians, who loved a good quarrel, paying no heed to the mutual respect between the two composers, who had no wish to compete with one another, triggered an aesthetic war lasting several years, which occasionally spilled over into fisticuffs. They clashed wherever the opportunity arose: on the streets, in cafes, in private homes, theatres and schools. The dispute rumbled on even after Gluck returned to Vienna in 1780. During its final phase, it assumed the quite grotesque form of a war between the Piccinnists and devotees of Antonio Sacchini, newly arrived from Italy, who with time went from being another representative of the Neapolitan school into a moderate imitator of Gluck.

And then it all fell quiet. La Cecchina disappeared from stages shortly after Piccinni’s death in 1800 – along with more than a hundred other operas of his. Over the next two centuries, it was staged sporadically, mostly in Italy. In 1928 a production was put on in Bari, to mark the bicentenary of the composer’s birth. And it returned to the composer’s home town almost a hundred years later, in January 2026, as part of the preparations for the next jubilee.

I could not pass up such a chance. I travelled to the Apulian capital not just on account of the work, but also for the carefully selected soloists and the conductor, Stefano Montanari, who has been music director of the Teatro Petruzzelli for almost three years. I was curious to see how this collector’s piece would fare in the hands of the Italian actor, screenwriter and film director Daniele Luchetti, familiar to Polish film buffs thanks partly to the drama Lacci, shown at the opening of the Venice Film Festival in 2020.

Paola Gardina (Paoluccia), Krystian Adam (Marquis della Conchiglia), Francesca Aspromonte, Christian Senn (Mengotto), and Michela Antenucci (Sandrina). Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

Well, it fared quite splendidly. Luchetti forged an irresistibly funny spectacle which at the same time takes up an intelligent dialogue with both the convention of the epoch and the output of the most outstanding specialists in the staging of pre-Romantic operas, to mention but Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and his assistant Jean-Louis Martinoty. At first glance, he remained faithful to all of the stage directions contained in the libretto. In reality, he wittily ‘translated’ them for the sensibilities of a contemporary audience, adding anachronistic props to the settings or arranging them in a way that triggered utterly unexpected associations. The band of servants tasked with tending to the physical fitness of the Chevalier Armidoro resembles a company of circus strongmen lifted straight out of Fellini’s La Strada; the Marquis della Conchiglia sets off in pursuit of Cecchina on a comical scooter adorned with rococo tassels; the bravura finale of Act I, amidst bedsheets strung up across the stage, reminds one of the Neapolitan lineage of Piccinni’s opera; every so often, elements from the most famous productions of Britten’s Death in Venice burst into the Venetian landscape of Goldoni’s adaptation. Yet in spite of all these ‘diversions’, Luchetti’s production remains a moving tribute to eighteenth-century theatre: with a subtle play of lights and shadows, intricately painted vedute and proscenium borders (stage design by Alessandro Camera, beautifully illuminated by Marco Filibeck) and remarkably beautiful costumes (Massimo Cantini Parrini) of captivating lightness and finesse and a palette of colours worthy of the greatest Italian masters of the Italian Settecento.

Equally convincing was the musical side of the show, prepared by Montanari with genuine expertise in mature buffo style and a characteristic blend of comical and sentimental elements with the totally ‘serious’, the latter bringing deeper reflection on human nature. There are soubrettes in this opera, as well as the figure of the soldier Tagliaferro, derived from the commedia dell’arte tradition. There are lovers wracked by doubt and also a typical mezzo carattere, in the person of the Marquis, in love with the titular heroine. It is also worth mentioning that the Roman premiere of La Cecchina was performed solely by men – in connection with the still binding edict issued by Pope Sixtus that banned women from performing in theatres in the Papal States. In subsequent performances given during Piccinni’s lifetime, the singers appeared in a great variety of configurations, from mixed casts, in which the soprano and mezzo-soprano parts were sung by castrati arm-in-arm with women, to ‘natural’ casts with a single travesti role (Armidoro).

That only enhances my admiration for the choice of soloists for the Bari show – in a cast consisting entirely of artists experienced in such repertoire and fully aware of the historical context of the first performances of La Cecchina. The titular figure of the buona figliuola was successfully embodied by Francesca Aspromonte, endowed with a warm, soft soprano, highly expressive, though a little dull in the middle range. Taking nothing away from the young Italian singer’s abilities, I must admit that the show was stolen from her by the phenomenal Ana Maria Labin in the part of Lucinda, boasting a soprano voice with an exquisite, silvery timbre, perfectly set and balanced across the registers, which, despite its charming delicacy, carries remarkably well (including in the ethereal pianos of the aria ‘So che fedel m’adora’ from Act III). Contrasting marvellously with the parts of the two female protagonists was the energetic and fruity-sounding soprano of Francesca Benitez in the trousered role of Armidoro. Michela Antenucci and Paola Gardina formed a bravura pair of the malicious maids Sandrina and Paoluccia, investing their parts with so much vis comica that at times I was doubled up with laughter.

Act III, Finale. Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

Just as much joy was conveyed by Krystian Adam in the tenor role of the Marquis della Conciglia, demanding candid lyricism and vocal buffoonery in alternation. In both aspects, he came across splendidly, thanks not just to the beauty of his voice and his exquisite technique, but also to the well-judged ideas of Luchetti, who led this protagonist all the way from being a sweet scallywag, through a gallant disorientated by his nascent feelings, to a man ready for true love. In the casting of the two baritone parts – the poor Mengotto, wooing Cecchina in vain, and the hilarious cuirassier Tagliaferro, who brings news of her real family origins – the contrast between the two characters was judiciously brought out. The mature beauty of Pietro Spagnoli’s voice was ideally suited to the character of the battle-hardened Tagliaferro, while the less seasoned, though equally suggestive, baritone of Christian Senn excellently conveyed the quandary of the miserable Mengotto.

Montanari led the whole performance – with an ensemble of musicians from the local orchestra – with verve, a flair for the idiom and a hint of delicious insouciance. All the more worthy of underlining is that he conducted from the instrument on which he also accompanied the soloists in the elaborate secco recitatives. I feel it my duty as a reviewer to note that it was an eighteenth-century Italian fortepiano (or a copy thereof), ideally suited to the circumstances – an instrument to which it would have been worth devoting at least a few words in the programme book, which was otherwise impeccably prepared.

There are still two years to go until the tercentenary of Piccinni’s birth. The Bari theatre has given us a wonderful foretaste of the approaching jubilee of its native son. It is high time we took an interest in his unjustly forgotten work and perhaps reassessed it against the background of the output of the epoch. Verdi did so a long time ago and, as usual, he was right.

Translated by: John Comber