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Some say that Kirill Serebrennikov is a Meyerhold for our times. He is certainly the most recognisable dissident among Russian artists: after spending nearly two years under house arrest for allegedly embezzling public funds, after a truly Kafkaesque trial that ended with a fine, a three-year suspended prison sentence and a ban on leaving the country, and, finally, after losing his position as artistic director of the Gogol Centre, which he has turned into one of the world’s most vibrant centres of independent theatre in less than a decade.

Serebrennikov left for Berlin in March 2022, following a decision to overturn his sentence issued a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He openly condemned the war started by his country already in May, when Tchaikovsky’s Wife was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In Russia some of his productions were immediately removed from the repertoire, while others had his name erased from them. Still, he has had more luck than Meyerhold, who was accused of collaborating with Japanese and British intelligence, tortured for months and executed in 1940. Both Meyerhold and Serebrennikov became involved in complicated deals with the government, althought it would be hard to call either of them an opportunist, at least in today’s sense of the word. And yet such attempts are made, also in Poland, where the process of erasing Russian culture has gone the farthest of all European countries (for reasons that are quite understandable). Attempts to explain the dramatic choices and complexities of the career pursued by Serebrennikov – a gay man who does not hide his orientation, the son of a Russian Jew and a Ukrainian woman of Moldovan descent, born in Rostov-on-Don, where in 1942, in the Snake Ravine near the city, the largest murder of Jews in the USSR’s wartime history was carried out – are viewed in some circles as a faux pas similar to trying to defend the princess from Rousseau’s Confessions for her dismissive attitude toward the hungry peasants.

Yet a comparison between Serebrennikov and Meyerhold is valid in many respects. The legendary reformer of Soviet theatre was also an extravagant rebel; he, too, shocked audiences, shattered conventions, drew on the most diverse styles of theatrical production. He demanded absolute commitment and incredible physical fitness from his actors. Meyerhold’s stagings aroused either admiration or fierce opposition: they left no one indifferent. The same is true of Serebrennikov, who some believe to be a brilliant visionary, while others regard him as an outrageously overrated director who continues to capitalise on his relatively recent persecution by the Putin regime.

Hubert Zapiór (Don Giovanni). Photo: Frol Podlesnyi

What I find seductive in his theatre is the pure acting element as well as an ability – long forgotten in Poland or perhaps never highly regarded – to soften pathos with the grotesque, to relieve tension by means of irony and black humour. True, Serebrennikov’s stagings are generally overloaded with ideas, sometimes not very coherent, full of incomprehensible allusions and tropes leading nowhere. But even if they annoy, it is impossible to take your eyes off them and then to get rid of the reflections whirling in your head.

That is why I went to Berlin for the premiere of the last part of the so-called Da Ponte Trilogy, produced by Serebrennikov with the Komische Oper for over two years. I decided to miss the first two parts, because I had had enough of both Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro for the moment. However, the story of the punished rake promised to be provocative even when compared with the director’s previous ventures. First of all, Serebrennikov announced the whole thing as Don Giovanni / Requiem, which smacked of Teodor Currentzis’ earlier Mozart experiments. Secondly, he decided to imbue the narrative of the opera with references to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Thirdly – to replace Donna Elvira with a male victim of Don Giovanni’s conquests, Don Elviro, portrayed by the Brazillian sopranist Bruno de Sá.

It promised to be at least a beautiful catastrophe, but what did come out of it was a production thrilling with its pace, teeming alternately with horror and wit, interrupted again and again at the premiere by applause and bursts of laughter from the audience. Yes, it is another excessive production, drawing liberally on both Serebrennikov’s previous stagings (including, not surprisingly, that of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies, staged at the Gogol Centre when the director was already under house arrest) and “all the means used in other plays”, as in Meyerhold’s case. Once again, it is a production that leaves us with more questions than answers, unknown perhaps even to Serebrennikov himself. It contains the most recognisable elements of the Russian artist’s theatre – from dreams and ravings, the sometimes unobvious multiplication of characters, to disjointed narrative.

And yet it is watchable – probably because Serebrennikov, despite seemingly turning everything inside out, still highlights the most essential aspect of the title character’s story. It is not a story about promiscuity or obsession, it is a story about the mechanisms of power and its links to sex. Thus, the homoerotic subtext of the introduction of Don Elviro recedes into the background: the age, gender and orientation of the “victims” do not matter at all to Don Giovanni, just as they did not matter to Casanova, the greatest lover of all time. Yet Serebrennikov completes this spectacle of power with a surprising conclusion: that the descent into the hell of agony can give even a villain a chance and influence the fate of the world. Hence the reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Jungian archetypes. Hence the idea to explain everything from the end and start the action already to the sounds of the overture, with a daring scene of Don Giovanni’s supposed resurrection at his own funeral.

Photo: Frol Podlesnyi

This is an arch-Russian scene, played out on several planes, with sets simpler than in Meyerhold’s productions, based on boxes of raw pinewood that perfectly organise the space (arranged in diverse configurations, they will stay with us until the end of the performance). A group of grotesque mourners bid farewell to the protagonist as if he were a Soviet dignitary. To kiss the deceased, they have to lean over the edge of the open coffin, sometimes climbing the steps to do so, then perform a suitable show of despair in front of the rest of the congregation. Meanwhile, in an adjacent box black-clad bodyguards (excellent choreography and stage movement by Evgeny Kulagin) are desperately struggling with the Commendatore’s corpse, trying to pack it into a black body bag. In the midst of this pandemonium Don Giovanni begins to show signs of life and, to the evident frustration of the mourning-faking participants in the funeral, is immediately transported to the hospital.

The rest of the production is made up of a series of snapshots of the real agony of the protagonist, who goes through the successive states of the Buddhist bardo – from life, through dream-like ravings, moments of tranquillity, the painful process of dying and, finally, to a state of readiness to be reborn. Don Giovanni will be guided on this journey by the Commendatore – in the dual form of the spirit of the murdered man (the actor Norbert Stöß) and one of his past or future incarnations (the singer Tijl Faveyts, made to look like a Buddhist emperor, as if taken straight from Robert Wilson’s theatrical visions). He will be accompanied by Leporello, who soon turns out to be himself, or, more precisely, the doubting aspect of his dissociated self (which Serebrennikov, somewhat in the style of early Castorf, emphasises by means of two neon props with the words “SI” and “NO”); the pregnant nurse Zerlina and her wimpish partner Masetto, a work colleague (the only reasonably real characters from Don Giovanni’s ravings); and phantoms of the past – the demonic Donna Anna, torn between her hatred of the assassin and her own father, the helpless Don Ottavio, the genuinely heartbroken Don Elviro, and his mute friend Donna Barbara (the actress Varvara Shmykova), who at some point will also become the object of the Great Rake’s designs. Everything culminates in perhaps the most spectacular “hellscension” scene I have ever seen in the theatre – in a convention reminiscent of both the great ball at Satan’s from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (with Don Giovanni having a bit of Woland or Wotan in him) and naive plebeian theatre created by the simplest of means.

And then silence will fall for a while, followed, instead of the final sextet, by the first notes of the Requiem. An aging Don Giovanni, portrayed by the phenomenal dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, will embark on the final leg of the journey and reach its end – and, at the same time, a new beginning – gradually regaining his balance and climbing up a vertical wall of pinewood.

There was too much of everything. There were questionable ideas – such as adding Ilya Shagalov’s projections that contributed little to the plot, or interrupting the musical narrative with excerpts from the Book of the Dead recited by Stöß. There were superfluous, though irresistibly funny, elements, including those in the feast scene, when Donna Anna, Don Elviro and Don Ottavio sneaked into the palace in ceremonial Masonic attire. There were moments that dragged on and too many symbols in the fragments of the Requiem crowning the whole. There were gestures that were too journalistic – when a banner appeared on stage stating that the aria “Il mio tesoro” would not be performed due to the cuts in Berlin’s culture budget. In fact, it was not performed because the creative team opted for the so-called Viennese version of the opera – with all the consequences of that decision, including the inclusion of Leporello and Zerlina’s duet “Per queste tue manine” in Act II.

Tommaso Barea (Leporello) and Bruno de Sá (Don Elviro). Photo: Frol Podlesnyi

It certainly was not a Don Giovanni for beginners, but neither were we dealing with a fashionable but inept Regietheater, in which the production team members treat music only as an excuse to pursue their own vision, detached from the work. Musically, it was a performance of surprisingly high quality – also taking into account the difficult acoustics of the Schiller Theater, where the Komische Oper company has moved while its home is being renovated. James Gaffigan conducted the whole in tempi that were very brisk, but corresponded to the concept formulated by Serebrennikov, a director with great sensitivity to the nuances of the score, which he demonstrated in, for example, the perfectly acted out recitatives. The most publicised soloist of the evening, Bruno de Sá, handled the part entrusted to him stylistically and technically better than many women singing Donna Elvira today: only at times did his beautiful soprano fail to sufficiently cut through the sound of the orchestra. I have more reservations about Adela Zaharia (Donna Anna), who has a powerful soprano with a decidedly dramatic tone, but one that is too wide for the part and too often overwhelming the singer’s stage partners. Penny Sofroniadou, who sang Zerlina, was much better when it came to controlling the surprisingly large volume of her voice. Among the male cast I was a little disappointed with Tijl Faveyts, whose bass was not expressive enough for the role of the Commendatore. Philipp Meierhöfer, on the other hand, was very convincing, also in terms of acting, in the role of Masetto. Augustín Gómez, who has a fairly small, but agile and handsome tenor, presented a rather stereotypical figure of a weak and passive Don Ottavio – I continue to dream of a staging in which the director would put enough emphasis on the second of the essential aspects of Mozart’s masterpiece: faithfulness against all odds. In the solo parts of the Requiem the voices of Sofroniadou, Gómez and Faveyts were joined by the alto of Virginie Verrez, thick but with a bit too much vibrato.

Perhaps the greatest asset of the production was the superbly matched duo of Don Giovanni and Leporello – Hubert Zapiór and Tommaso Barea, respectively, singers bursting with youthful energy, bravely tackling their excessive, at times acrobatic acting tasks. Most importantly, singers with a similar type of voice, a very masculine, deep and yet colourful baritone, in Zapiór’s case lightened up by a distinctive “grain”. Mozart and Da Ponte would have been over the moon: if the whole thing had been for real, only this minor detail would have made it possible to distinguish the master from the servant in the general confusion of the identity-swapping episode.

This was the closure of the Berlin Da Ponte Trilogy, which, in fact, is not a trilogy. At the Komische Oper it was brought together not only by the librettist and the director’s controversial, fiercely debated vision, but also by the vocal talent – backed by excellent acting skills – of Hubert Zapiór, the performer of the main roles in all three productions. He is a young and very promising artist. If we want to enjoy his performances in Poland, it is time to look around for a musical stage director, a suitable theatre and a conductor sensitive to singing.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

One does not live on Wagner alone. But a lack of any coherent policy of familiarising the Polish audiences with his oeuvre is harder to stomach. Probably no European country – including Italy, which has a rather peculiar Wagnerian tradition – stages and presents his works as infrequently as we do. True, The Flying Dutchman or Tannhäuser will occasionally make an appearance on stage. Or there will be a few performances of Parsifal here and there. After a hiatus of nearly half a century since the premiere of the abridged version in Poznań, Warsaw will tackle Tristan: I’m not sure why, for the 2016 Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera production was a disaster in every way.

We had only one production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg after the war, at Poznań’s Teatr Wielki, a production that was all right at best. Der Ring des Nibelungen was staged in Poland twice after 1945: in the late 1980s in Warsaw and twenty years ago in Wrocław. The three conductors responsible for the musical side of these ventures – Gabriel Chmura in the case of Die Meistersinger, and Robert Satanowski and Ewa Michnik, who prepared the Warsaw and Wrocław Rings, respectively – deserve praise for their persistence in pursuing ambitious dreams, especially in such unfavourable conditions. Yet these were in many ways too ambitious dreams.

Meanwhile, the 150th anniversary of the premiere of the entire Ring at the Bayreuth Festival is approaching and the entire music world has been preparing for it for a long time. In Poland the anniversary will go unnoticed, in contrast to the celebrations currently being prepared beyond our Western border (which is rather obvious), but also in the Czech Republic, where Wagnerians will be able to encounter the Tetralogy at least twice, including in a new staging by Sláva Daubnerová, planned for the three stages of Prague’s National Theatre. Incidentally, the sets for this show – produced in stages, beginning with the premiere of Das Rheingold in February 2026 – will be designed by Boris Kudlička, the new director of Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera as of next season, and the costumes by Dorota Karolczak, a Bydgoszcz-born artist who for years has been working almost exclusively abroad (I wrote about her excellent designs for the Rodrigo production at the Göttingen Handel Festival six years ago).

Thus, lovers of Wagner’s oeuvre have no choice but to travel all over Europe in search of gems that will never be experienced in Poland by at least another generation of music lovers. Yet I went to Copenhagen for Die Meistersinger full of apprehension – after the musically disappointing and very unevenly cast premiere of Laurent Pelly’s staging at Teatro Real, co-produced with Den Kongelige Opera and Národní divadlo in Brno. I knew the Madrid production only from a broadcast. Visually, I liked it a lot, but I was completely unconvinced by Pablo Heras Casado’s interpretation: shallow, at times downright boring and entirely devoid of expression.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Copenhagen. Johan Reuter (Hans Sachs). Photo: Miklos Szabo

In this case, however, the man behind the conductor’s desk was Axel Kober, a seasoned Wagnerian, who roused the Copenhagen Opera’s well-prepared orchestra from the very first bars of the overture, conducted lightly, in lively but not rushed tempi, with just the right dose of necessary pathos, though without an ounce of the grotesque. I was stunned with delight when I heard the chorus’ singing: meaty, dynamically nuanced, impeccable in its intonation, with perfectly delivered and evidently thought-out text. And then it got even better – Kober’s mastery was evident not only in the way he revealed the characters of the various protagonists, but also in his wise highlighting of the score’s contrasts: between farce and tragedy, monologues alternating between tenderness and hatred, a texture beautifully rarefied in love duets and dense as a silkworm weave in the stunning travesty of Bach polyphony in the finale of Act II.

Die Meistersinger is a masterpiece of “mature style”, an opera full of contradictions and interpretive pitfalls, which both the conductor and the creative team managed to avoid. Laurent Pelly directed the whole in very sparse and beautifully symbolic sets designed by Caroline Ginet, with costumes designed by himself and Jean-Jacques Delmotte. The action takes place in a unified space defined by several monumental platforms and vertical panels that alternately create an illusion of St. Catherine’s Church, the night sky above the tangled streets of Nuremberg and the expansive meadows on the River Pegnitz in Franconian Switzerland. The rest is told by the few props: a gilded frame in which the obsolescent Meistersingers crowd around as if in an old-fashioned portrait; or a canvas with a colourful mountain landscape painting that ominously fades and falls in the finale, like a harbinger of an impending disaster. There are more similar harbingers in this staging. Pelly moved the narrative to the turn of the twentieth century, the time before the First World War, but wove into it signals of later evils. The cardboard houses from which the set designer built the medieval Nuremberg, and which the crowd reduces to ashes at the end of Act II, appear in Act III as a pile of rubbish, pressed deep into the idyllic scenery. When Beckmesser sneaks into Sachs’ workshop, he unexpectedly freezes at the sight of a bundle of shoes hanging from the ceiling, which bring to some spectators’ minds irresistible associations with the ghastly display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

All this, however, reaches the audience as if through a fog, barely suggested by a subtle change of light, defused by bursts of laughter in brilliantly enacted farcical scenes. What attracts attention from the very beginning is the intricate portrayal of Beckmesser, who is transformed from a frustrated scoundrel into a wretched victim – of the crowd’s taunts, David’s aggression, Sachs’ ruthlessness. The credit for this goes not only to the director, but also to the conductor and the highly intelligent singer (Tom Erik Lie), who with his serenade in Act II makes the audience laugh uncontrollably, but when he sings “Morgen ich leuchte” at the tournament, the laughter gets stuck in our throats, and later, when, as the composer intended, he rushes stealthily into the crowd, we feel the bitter taste of shame in our mouths.

Only now have I realised that I start my assessment of the cast from Beckmesser, but I think this was the first time I saw a living, imperfect human being on stage, rather than a grotesque figure of an aging suitor. Another broken character is Sachs, whose final speech begins to resound with chilling tones – all the more emphatically as Johan Reuter’s magnificent, golden-hued bass-baritone seems to be singing about something else entirely. The Danish artist created one of the most memorable portrayals I had ever seen: with a voice that is not large, but masterfully controlled, with an incredible sense of the words and the content they carry. At this point I should start a litany of praises for all the singers, perfectly cast in their roles. May I be forgiven for mentioning only the magnificent portrayal of Eva by the luminous lyric soprano Jessica Muirhead; the uncommonly convincing, also with the beauty of his ardent youthful tenor, Jacob Skov Andersen (David); the mezzo-soprano Hanne Fischer, touching with the warmth of her voice, in the role of Magdalena; and Jens-Erik Aasbø, unobvious, more fragile and lost than impressive with the power of authority, in the bass part of Veit Pogner. Slightly less impressive was Magnus Vigilius, whose Jugendlicherheldentenor is healthy and beautiful in timbre, but not very flexible – although I still believe that the Danish singer is among the top ten performers of the role of Walther in the world.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Finale. Photo: Miklos Szabo

Aware that I needed to stock up on my Wagner experiences, the following day I set off for Prague to see Siegfried, that is another preview of next year’s tour with the entire Ring des Nibelungen on period instruments, conducted by Kent Nagano. I have already written about this for Tygodnik Powszechny, although without going into details that are relevant to the current report. Firstly, the presentation of the individual parts of the Tetralogy begins in the Czech capital, which is not without reason the only Central European city on the itinerary of the Dresdner Festspielorchester and Concerto Köln, and to which the Ring found its way less than a decade after its premiere in 1876. Secondly, the “Ring historisch informiert” project is not just about reconstructing the historic line-up of the orchestra. It is a massive, long-term undertaking, featuring musicologists, theatre historians, linguists and anthropologists. Its aim is to recreate not only the original sound of the Tetralogy, but also its cultural context: the text delivery practice of the day, the way dramaturgy was shaped and the concept of musical time, in keeping with the spirit of the era.

As we can easily guess, from the very beginning the project had as many enthusiasts as fierce opponents – especially among admirers of stentorian, supposedly Wagnerian voices. Admittedly, listening to recordings of the previous instalments of the “historical” Ring, I, too, had doubts, especially about the Walküre cast, in my opinion too “characteristic”, not matching the level of expectations of the composer, who sought his dream protagonists among the most skilful performers of roles from the operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Meyerbeer. However, I have been a devotee of Kent Nagano’s conducting since the beginning of my career as a music critic. He was the one who won me over to Bruckner’s symphonic music – with interpretations that lightened the convoluted texture of these works and freed them from the dictates of the musical “barbarism” so beloved by other conductors. He was the one who amazed me with the versatility of his talent, thanks to which he interprets the scores of Beethoven and Brahms as insightfully as those of Messiaen and contemporary composers.

I was, therefore, not surprised that the main protagonist of the Prague concert performance of Siegfried at the State Opera was the orchestra – by no means homogeneous despite its expanded line-up, highlighting the sonic peculiarities of individual groups, sometimes even individual instruments. From the dense orchestral mass there began to emerge not only leitmotifs, but also less obvious elements of Wagner’s musical rhetoric: broad phrasing, discreet glissandi, strongly accented portamenti. In the quintet the violas, speaking in an almost human voice, finally came to the fore; the winds resounded with the rustle of leaves and the croaking of forest creatures, the percussion – with the whistles and murmurs of the relentless elements. The whole thing acquired quite a different colour – due to a lower pitch, different design and construction of the instruments, and, as a result, details of articulation.

Siegfried in Prague. Christian Elsner (Mime) and Thomas Blondelle (Siegfried). Photo: Václav Hodina

Audiences are slowly becoming accustomed to period instrument performances of nineteenth-century instrumental music; however, attempts to reconstruct the vocal practices of the day still provoke resistance, also in the context of the operatic form. This concerns particularly the so-called Wagnerian singing, which, for all intents and purposes, is an anachronistic construct, developed decades after the composer’s death, partly through a misinterpretation of his original intentions. Wagner wanted a specific timbre and expression, bringing to mind the sound of a natural spoken voice – combined with a technique that today is associated almost exclusively with Italian and French Romantic opera. Above all, the composer required his singers to be able to “tell a story” with music, to build a role in line with the principles observed by theatre actors of the day.

This is where the participants in the Dresdner Musikfestspiele project started and this is what Nagano himself mentioned, emphasising how difficult it was to find singers talented enough, yet willing to give up their desire for showmanship and devote many months to interpreting the text, mastering and integrating old acting techniques with vocal practice. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the project features lesser-known artists, often taking their first steps in performing Wagner’s works. This is the first ever such a large-scale experiment. The musicians, including the conductor, are learning also from their mistakes. I have the impression that in Siegfried they have finally come close to their desired goal. This is evidenced by, for example, the fact that the title role was entrusted to Thomas Blondelle, who has a voice that is not very large, but well placed and attractive in timbre – which, combined with a thoughtful interpretation of his character, enabled him to play Siegfried in line with the letter of both the libretto and the score: as a precocious, yet naïve and at times cruel teenager who is desperately struggling with a crisis of adolescence.

Siegfried. Christian Elsner, Thomas Blondelle, and the boy soprano from the Tölzer Knabenchor (Woodbird). Photo: Václav Hodina

In Act III Blondelle found an excellent partner in Åsa Jäger, a youthful Brunhilde whose sparkling soprano has a powerful but generally skilfully controlled volume. The Nibelung brothers – Christian Elsner as Mime and Daniel Schmutzhard as Alberich – fully trusted the score and did not try to emphasise the moral ugliness of their characters by means typical of character singing. In this way, in spite of the still cultivated performance practice, they created ambiguous characters, marked by a clear tragic note. It was an excellent idea – and in keeping with the conventions of the period – to place Fafner way upstage and give him with a metal tube, as a result of which the dragon’s voice sounded all the more cavernous and ominous (Hanno Müller-Brachmann came out onto the proscenium only for the giant’s last, dying phrases, sung in his natural voice, as if to mark the loss of his magical power). It is a pity that the excellent boy soprano from the Tölzer Knabenchor (Woodbird) was not mentioned by name. I was slightly disappointed only by Gerhild Romberger (Erda), whose mezzo-soprano lacked the richness of tone and contralto depth necessary for the part, but who made up for this somewhat with her excellent acting.

The most magnificent performance of the evening, however, came from Derek Welton. Since the last time I heard him in the role of the Wanderer, his voice has acquired nobility and authority, but what served him well above all was the lowering of the orchestra’s pitch to the original version. The Australian singer is more comfortable in the lower range of his robust and juicy bass-baritone, which used to be associated with a rarefied timbre on the upper notes of this rather high part. This time, under Nagano’s watchful baton, Welton achieved perfection – I had not encountered such a musical interpretation of the Wanderer, well thought-out, derived directly from the text and backed by an impeccable vocal technique, for a long time.

I expect a similar experience, perhaps even more intense, next season – not only in Prague and Copenhagen, but wherever Wagner’s oeuvre continues to be the subject of admiration, inquiry and endless polemics. Fortunately, I like travelling.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The only play by Edmond Rostand still put on by Polish theatre companies is Cyrano de Bergerac. Occasionally Les Romanesques will stray onto one of the provincial stages. Few people remember his L’Aiglon (Eaglet), not performed in Poland for more than ninety years, although this powerful six-act historical fresco, written especially for Sarah Bernhardt, who played the eponymous character of Napoleon’s hapless son at the Paris premiere in 1900, arrived in Warsaw before the Great War and was enthusiastically received. The staggering career of the play, which Cornelia Otis Skinner compared in her biography of Bernhardt to a new victory at Wagram, was one of the greatest cultural phenomena in the theatrical life of the first half of the twentieth century. It earned Rostand a place in the Académie française when he was just thirty-three. In its first season in Paris L’Aiglon ran for at least 230 performances. Immediately translated into other languages, the play was all the rage around the world, from New York to Sofia. In 1924 audiences at Bydgoszcz’s Municipal Theatre forced the company to present additional performances – the poster proclaimed on 15 July that L’Aiglon would be presented “definitely for the last time, by general request”.

Rostand quite seriously considered the possibility of transferring his dramatic works onto the operatic stage. When he died prematurely in 1918, during the Spanish flu epidemic, the idea was picked up by his heirs. Apparently, of all Rostand’s theatrical legacy, only Chantecler was not turned into a musical work. The best librettos based on his plays came from the pen of Henri Cain, co-author of the successes of most of Parisian belle époque composers, including Massenet. Cain also adapted L’Aiglon. However, it took an opera to his libretto a long time to hatch – the proposal to write it was rejected at first by both Jacques Ibert and Arthur Honegger, who had been friends since their time at the Paris Conservatoire. It was not until 1936 that they changed their minds, when they were both approached by Raoul Gunsbourg, director of the Monte Carlo Opera. They saw in L’Aiglon the potential to be a work for new, difficult times. They decided to join forces and create an opera for the masses, a musical manifesto of opposition to the brownshirting of Europe, in line with the cultural policy of the newly formed Popular Front.

Gabriel Rollinson (Fürst von Metternich). Photo: Andreas Etter

Work on the piece lasted from mid-1936 to January the following year. The two composers decided to divide the responsibilities and efficiently implemented their concept, without paying much attention to either the librettist or the theatre’s director. Drawing on the tradition of the French grand opéra, they used a five-act structure, combining the material from the first two parts of Rostand’s play in the first act of the opera. They also reduced the number of characters – by about half, which still means that there are twenty more or less elaborate solo parts in the opera. Yet the work is relatively short, lasting just under two hours, and thanks to its skilful combination of the conventions of opera and operetta, historical fresco and dance divertissements, it does not drag on even for less sophisticated listeners, especially given that the score contains echoes of popular songs and marches, Viennese waltzes, dark sarabandes as well as clever references to the legacy of composers of past eras, including Haydn, Meyerbeer and Verdi. The lyrical framework of the whole – the outer acts – was written by Ibert, the middle acts, carrying a greater dramatic load, are the work of Honegger. Nevertheless, Act Three features a ballet composed by Ibert and the dense orchestration of some passages in Act One betrays the hand of his colleague. This only testifies to excellent collaboration between the two on this hybrid piece, which at times irresistibly brings to mind associations with film music – which is not surprising, given that both Ibert and Honegger had considerable experience in the field (the latter even “Napoleonic” experience, as the composer of the soundtrack to the silent film masterpiece directed by Abel Gance).

The friends showed infallible intuition: the premiere on 11 March 1937 – featuring Fanny Heldy as the Eaglet, Vanni Marcoux as the old soldier Flambeau and the American baritone Arthur Endrèze, highly regarded in France, as the demonic Chancellor Metternich – was a staggering success. A year later L’Aiglon triumphed at Brussels’ La Monnaie. After the war the opera returned to the stages of several French theatres; the 1952 staging at the Paris Opera, conducted by Cluytens, became legendary thanks to the soprano Géori Boué’s phenomenal interpretation of the eponymous character. The twilight did not come until the 1960s, with a general crisis in the popularity of the French repertoire. The revival of L’Aiglon began towards the end of last century – with moderate success. Had it not been for the award-winning live recording from La Maison Symphonique de Montréal conducted by Kent Nagano and published by Decca in 2016, the fruit of Ibert and Honegger’s collaboration might have remained forever in the archives, of no interest to anyone except opera historians.

Alexandra Samoulidou (L’Aiglon). Photo: Andreas Etter

This season L’Aiglon came to the Staatstheater Mainz, which stands on a square built on Bonaparte’s orders at a time when Mainz was the capital of the French department of Mont-Tonnerre. After an excellent experience with the local production of Idomeneo, I returned to the city on the Rhine, motivated more by curiosity than belief in the value of the forgotten adaptation of Rostand. I was very pleasantly surprised – even if L’Aiglon is not a masterpiece, it is definitely nicer to see a wise and thoughtful staging of an opera that is excellently cast, expertly conducted and performed with genuine engagement, than with yet another striking directorial vision of a work from the standard international repertoire, which in Poland rarely goes hand in hand with adequate preparation of the artists involved.

This time, too, the musical side of the production was in the hands of Hermann Bäumer, who will soon take over as artistic director of the State Opera in Prague. Luisa Kautz, born in 1987, a graduate of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, directed the staging, preparing it in collaboration with the set designer Valentin Mattka, the costume designer Tanja Liebermann, the projection designer Judith Selenko and the lighting director Frederik Wollk. In part of her concept Kautz consciously drew on the 1900 theatrical original: she had the Eaglet dressed in a snow-white uniform modelled on Jacques Doucet’s design for Sarah Bernhardt and the scene of his death resemble the finale of the famous Parisian production, in which Napoleon II was dying on a bed standing next to the elaborate cradle of the would-be successor to the French Emperor. This, however, was where the similarities ended. The Mainz production of L’Aiglon – the story of the Duke of Reichstadt, deprived of his father’s name, title and inheritance by the Holy Alliance, brought up at the Schönbrunn Castle as if in a golden cage, followed by the secret police of Metternich, who resolved to deny him accession to any throne in Europe at all costs – is a story of a gradual disintegration of the personality of Bonaparte’s only legitimate offspring, of the anguish of a man-child who tries unsuccessfully to break free from the custody of the Austrian chancellor and then sinks into the abyss of a terminal illness.

The harbingers of his ghastly phantasmagorias appear already Act One, when a precisely drawn diagram of a battle emerges from beneath a kitschy painting of mountains and the spectres of Napoleon’s soldiers descend from the walls. The horror intensifies in Act Two, played out in the almost empty space of a chamber hung with portraits of ancestors. This is when Metternich – in a brilliant scene reminiscent of the confrontation between Baron Scarpia and Tosca – utterly humiliates the Eaglet, showing unabashed contempt for his father, and then reproaches him for his weakness and ascribes to him all the Habsburg vices inherited from his mother. The ballet from Act Three becomes a pretext for the young man’s grotesque journey into the depths of his lost childhood, played out on a tiny stage – visible perhaps only through the eyes of his imagination – to the rhythm of the courtiers’ prancing at a masked ball. In Act Four the Eaglet’s escape is intertwined with a frenzied vision of the Battle of Wagram, experienced again following the death of the faithful Flambeau – in a setting reminiscent of an abandoned warehouse of memorabilia from Bonaparte’s glory days. In the finale the battle cloak of black eagle feathers gives way to a white bedspread lined with chick down that covers the body of the dying prince. “Meine Geburt und mein Tod sind meine ganze Geschichte” – my whole story comes down to birth and death. Luisa Kautz closes the tale of Napoleon’s son with an expressive theatrical gesture, against a background of the Eaglet’s fragmented memories and deathbed delusions.

The fifth act, finale. Photo: Andreas Etter

The title role was convincingly played by the young Greek soprano Alexandra Samoulidou, whose voice is sensual, dark in tone, perhaps too “feminine” at times – but on the other hand consistent with the more than century-old tradition of interpreting Rostand’s protagonist, standing halfway between boyish naiveté and never-fulfilled masculinity. An outstanding portrayal of Flambeau came from the American bass-baritone Derrick Ballard, whose performance was in line with the nineteenth-century buffo caricato convention, usually associated with the roles of braggart soldiers, but in this particular case marked by a strong note of tragedy. Another singer who caught my attention among the huge cast of L’Aiglon was Gabriel Rollinson. His Metternich was all the more sinister, as he poured venom into the Eaglet’s ear in free-flowing, beautifully constructed phrases produced by a baritone voice with a heartbreakingly beautiful sound, so rare these days: melancholic, smoky, resembling the voice of a young Andrzej Hiolski. In fact, each of the soloists in this production deserved separate praise, as did the members of the company’s chorus and the instrumentalists of the local Philharmonischer Staatsorchester, playing vigilantly under Bäumer with a luscious sound and enthusiasm rarely encountered in Polish ensembles, but testifying clearly to the musicians’ excellent rapport with the conductor.

“Droves of people watched,” Zygmunt Krasiński wrote, remembering the Eaglet’s funeral. All that remains to be said is that nearly two hundred years after those events the audience followed the tragic fate of Napoleon II on the Mainz stage in just as large numbers, though perhaps more attentively. The staging of the rediscovered opera by Ibert and Honegger will be presented “definitely for the last time” on 25 May. It is worth going to Mainz to see it, as the world is again turning brown.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Whenever I come to Cambridge, I am astonished by the wealth of music on offer. Bulletin boards and fences of squares are full of posters announcing performances in churches, concert halls and theatres — featuring local ensembles and orchestras, but also visiting artists whose recitals would be hailed in Poland as the event of the season. Not a day goes without a classical music concert; in February there were days when there were as many as a dozen or so. The city has a population of less than 150,000 and yet when it comes to the number of musical initiatives, it beats Warsaw, ten times more populous, hands down.

It also has its own recurring event, the Cambridge Music Festival, founded in 1991 and directed for the past thirteen years by Justin Lee, who previously worked with the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Cambridge University ensembles. The festival is held twice a year. This year’s “spring” edition ended in mid-March, but among those heralding spring were musicians of the excellent Pavel Haas Quartet, the much-loved Jordi Savall and the phenomenal British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor.

And the legendary ensemble Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier, with a lineup of four singers — just as at their first concert in 1990, when they premiered Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe. Seven years later the composer wrote another version of the piece, for choir and string orchestra. The original version — for four soloists and organ — is a concert rarity these days, which is why I took this unique opportunity to hear it conducted by the same artist who at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin brought to live life both the new ensemble and Pärt’s new work, and with the same organist, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, to boot.

Theatre of Voices. Photo: Gerhard Wilting

The concert at Trinity College Chapel was held on the occasion of yet another anniversary — twenty-five years of the Cambridge Music Conference, a series of meetings inaugurated by Elizabeth Carmack at the inspiration of her sister Catherine, who at that time was battling a terminal illness, and focused from the beginning on the idea of healing through music. Quite esoteric at first and carried out in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, the programme of the conference has evolved into a venture combining creativity, music therapy, as well as humanitarian and human rights work. Behind it is a complicated and tragic family history: the sisters’ father was the Canadian pianist, composer and teacher Murray Carmack, who, in a country where homosexuality was a criminal offence, escaped his own orientation by marrying a woman; Catherine died of cancer at the age of 46; the stepson of the mother, who after her divorce married the prominent biblical scholar Roger Norman Whybray, fell victim to AIDS at the height of the epidemic. This string of anguish and misery gave rise to something remarkable — a project resulting in a series of composer commissions and concrete outreach initiatives, with past participants including Mark Anthony Turnage and John Tavener, as well as Tavener’s student Judith Weir.

In addition to Berliner Messe, the programme of the Theatre of Voices’ February concert featured compositions by other artists associated with Elizabeth Carmack’s venture. First came the British premiere of The Tree of Life by Nigel Osborne, who, after studying at Oxford, continued his education with Witold Rudziński at Warsaw’s State School of Music and collaborated for some time with the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio. Since the 1990s he has been using his experience in pioneering methods of working with children marked by the trauma of conflicts: the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Caucasus, the Middle East, East Africa, Myanmar and Ukraine. The Tree of Life is the fruit of his therapeutic work with Syrian refugees in Lebanon — a musical performance consisting of seven stories about objects that accompanied the refugees in their wandering and played an important role in their lives. An olive branch from the father’s orchard; a Muslim misbaha rosary and a Christian rosary from Maaloula, whose inhabitants still speak Aramaic; a red stone the colour of the family house and blood; a casket with two coins minted in the year of the mother’s birth; a yellow balloon and a picture of clouds — in each of these stories, combined by Osborne into a surprisingly light and clear structure, the dominant element is melody oscillating between Western tonality and the microtonality of the Eastern maqam, highlighted by the accompaniment of the Arabic oud lute (Rihab Azar). In the course of the performance it transpired that the sound design of the quartet in its current lineup rested on the foundation of an exceptionally dense bass voice (William Gaunt), gradually thinning out towards the top (tenor Jakob Skjoldborg, alto Laura Lamph, soprano Else Torp). This choice of soloists enabled Hillier to play not only with range, but also with timbre — with excellent results in other works as well.

This is especially true of two arrangements of Callimachus’ beautiful elegy on the death of his friend, the poet Heraclitus — in an English translation by William Johnson Cory, who was expelled from Eton in 1872 for an “inappropriate” letter to one of his students. Murray Carmack used it as a pretext for a kind of musical coming-out, giving his composition a touch of utter sadness and sensual melancholy. The other Heraclitus, by Howard Skempton, was written in 2021, on the 100th anniversary of Carmack’s birth. And it certainly draws on the original, creating a similar mood, although by completely different means — deceptive simplicity of form, consonant harmony, prominence of the melodic element.

Arvo Pärt. Photo: Dorota Kozińska

As an interlude before the Berliner Messe we heard an organ version of Kevin Volans’ Walking Song, performed by Bowers-Broadbent, who gracefully and with ease highlighted the overlapping melodic and rhythmic patterns, which brought to mind irresistible associations with the oeuvre of Steve Reich, who, after all, drew on the same, African sources of inspiration. And then the musical heaven opened.

It would be hard to find a better, more internally diverse example of Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique than the Berlin Mass. The composer named the technique after the Latin term for the bells mounted on pole and placed in Catholic basilicas as a sign of link to the pope. He reduced the material to the form of two voices in a kind of counterpoint: the melodic voice, which wanders around a specific centre, and the “tintinnabular” voice, which highlights the individual components of the harmonic triad. Pärt discovered musical asceticism, a new simplicity, sometimes equated with minimalism. Wrongly, because its essence is not the repetition of a pattern, but the gradual subtraction of the musical material — like the mystical “stillness” practiced by the Orthodox hesychast monks. And this is what happened in the Berliner Messe, which, in Theatre of Voices’ inspired performance, took us into a completely different dimension of feeling reality. The musicians fulfilled Pärt’s will: the first voice of the tintinnabuli sounded like the sum of human iniquities, the second — like a universal redemption of guilt.

After the concert we went out into the courtyard and all looked up, where a parade of planets was just taking place in the night sky. For a moment I thought I heard sounds coming from outer space.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not a tragedy about love. Nor is it a play about the mechanisms of power. If anything, it is about the nightmare of power, the fear inherent in it, the recurrence of evil that was once initiated. As Jan Kott wrote in his famous essay “Macbeth or death infected”, “Macbeth  has killed not only to become king. Macbeth has killed to reassert himself. He has chosen between Macbeth who is afraid to kill and Macbeth who has killed. But Macbeth who has killed is a new Macbeth. He knows not only that one can kill, but that one must kill”. In 1961 the essay appeared in a collection modestly entitled in Polish Szkice o Szekspirze [Sketches on Shakespeare]. Five years later the book was reissued in a slightly different form, under a title borrowed from its French translation – Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. In the preface to the first English edition Peter Brook points out that Kott is the only scholar studying the Elizabethan era for whom it is obvious that at some point everyone will be woken by the police in the middle of the night. Brook’s words exuded respect and admiration, but not everyone appreciated the perspicacity of Kott’s analyses, claiming that it was overshadowed by his experiences during the war and the era of Stalin’s regime. Today few doubt the Polish critic’s claim that Shakespeare’s oeuvre fully deserves to be called universal and “suprahistorical”. That his contemporaneity needs to be played out on a far broader plane than that of any concrete element of everyday life.

This was understood very well by Verdi, whose Macbeth is a child of his culture and era, and, at the same time, a work from which there emerges at every turn a deep understanding of the message of the original as well as the coherence between its insights and the music. What makes this all the more incredible is the fact that the composer knew Shakespeare’s tragedy only from reading Italian translations and that he saw it on stage only after the premiere of his own Macbeth. However, he took the trouble to consult with English theatre habitués, mercilessly rebuked Piave for the libretto’s verbiage and made strikingly apt dramaturgical decisions — including that of replacing the three witches with three choruses of witches, while keeping the original nature of the characters (“triviali, ma stravaganti ed originali”). The version presented at the premiere in Florence in 1847 was enthusiastically received by the audience and treated with some reserve by the critics, who expected Macbeth to be another “fantastic” opera in the spirit of Meyerbeer. The reviewers at the time failed to appreciate the coherence of the narrative, based on a juxtaposition of the comic and tragic elements, typical of Shakespeare’s reception at the time, but innovative from the point of view of the compositional craft: full of abrupt changes of mode from major to minor, contrasts of texture, as well as extravagant turns in the vocal parts emphasizing the meaning and message of the text.

Macbeth. The beginning of Act One. Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Today Macbeth is usually staged in its 1865 Paris version, with an added ballet scene, Lady Macbeth’s aria in Act Two and a choral “hymn of victory” in the finale. The creative team of the latest production at the Theater St. Gallen opted for a hybrid version, with Macbeth’s death scene restored from the original version (“Mal per me che m’affidai”). I travelled to Switzerland relieved and convinced that after Warsaw’s bland Simon Boccanegra, in which the director forced onto the libretto a tale of climate catastrophe (presented with such an abundance of resources that the carbon footprint will follow this production for the next century), I would hear and see a Macbeth played with fire, sung with passion, brought to the stage by people who believed in the greatness of this opera at least as much as Verdi believed in the genius of Shakespeare.

My hopes — which were fulfilled to the letter — were aroused by the impressions I had at La Monnaie after the premiere of the pasticcio Rivoluzione e Nostalgia. As many as three artists involved in the St. Gallen Macbeth worked on that production: not only Krystian Lada, the brains behind the Brussels project, but also Carlo Goldstein, who was responsible for its musical side, and the lighting director Aleksandr Prowaliński. Once again Lada appeared in the triple role of director, set designer and author of projections (another artist involved in the preparation of the visual setting was Lars Uten, while Adrian Bärwinkel designed the costumes). And once again Lada demonstrated that a real opera director should not limit himself or herself to just reading a libretto synopsis, but should painstakingly pore over the score, reach for the literary original, search for the meanings encoded in it, ask questions, doubt and listen — to researchers, the artists involved and, above all, to the conductor.

Lada’s productions are marked by simplicity and, at the same time, clarity of the means used. His Macbeth is set in a world of existential and metaphysical darkness, in which the moon, alternately a silvery light in the black firmament or a dark spot in the bright sky, is always the moon of the terrible Shakespearean night after which no day rises. The stage space is enclosed by a curtain of semi-transparent ribbons of thick film, drawing a blurred line between reality and nightmare: someone sneaks behind it, someone extends a hand, someone disappears to emerge as quite someone else. Witches, murderers, ghastly phantoms, visitors and messengers run around within a circle the perimeter of which is sometimes marked only by the glow of fluorescent lights, and sometimes by a platform raised on a low scaffolding — alternately a place of feasting, torture, a shelter for a child hiding from assassins and a place for a hellish dance of witches.

Group scene from Act One. In the middle: Libby Sokolowski (Lady Macbeth). Photo: Edyta Dufaj

There are just as few props, although each one is memorable: a cut of raw meat sliced by Lady Macbeth will turn out to be a harbinger of the first murder; a bunch of red poppies — an allegory of the blood and memory of the victims; earth spilling from the bags of soldiers returning from the war — a figure of death and the grave. Against the background of the sparse sets the language of costumes speaks all the louder, strongly highlighting the obsession with masculinity, which is ever-present in Macbeth. Its vivid, even grotesque sign is the sporran, a pouch worn on the front of the kilt, which in its “full dress” version, decorated with horsehair or made from the fur of wild animals, will become a symbol of power, status and fertility — a symbol coveted by Lady Macbeth, scorned by the witches, sinister on the naked bodies of the spectral kings. A mix of military uniforms, simple everyday clothes and work outfits allows the chorus members to seamlessly switch between the roles of witches, servants, nobles and exiles.

In some places Lada departs from the opera’s libretto, coming closer to its literary original and even earlier sources of Shakespeare’s inspiration. However, he does so to the benefit of the drama and in keeping with the message of the text — as in the brilliantly directed scene of the murder of Macduff’s sons, in which Macbeth wavers between tenderness, cruelty and feelings of emptiness over his own non-existent children. What also makes an electrifying impression is the performance by Mohammad Al Haji, a Syrian dancer who wears a prosthesis following loss of leg in a rocket attack. In Act Three he plays the role of the protagonist’s double, a Macbeth “reflected in a mirror” These episodes, formally extremely beautiful and yet ambiguous, evoking different but equally painful associations in each spectator, highlight the “contemporaneity” of Shakespeare’s tragedy and Verdi’s opera the most, as does the majestic chorus in the pallid light at the beginning of Act Four (“Patria opressa”). The only thing I found doubtful was the scene with the Birnam Wood, too similar to a bunch of Scandinavian trolls to achieve the desired horror effect.

Vincenzo Neri (Macbeth). Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Even so, the stage was still brimming with energy — of the singers, chorus members and extras, well-prepared, brilliantly guided by the director, utterly committed to the work. Vincenzo Neri was an outstanding Macbeth, both voice- and character-wise. His baritone is not very big, but it is very charming and expressive. I have trouble judging Lady Macbeth portrayed by Libby Sokolowski, whose voice is very resonant, unusually beautiful and exceptionally dark, even sounding contralto-like in the lower register. In addition, Sokolowski is a fine actress, but what I find jarring in her singing is her uncontrolled vibrato and not always secure intonation. Perhaps she just had a bad day, because I must admit that her surprisingly subtly interpreted madness scene aroused my genuine admiration. An excellent portrayal of Banco came from Brent Michael Smith, a singer with a noble, pitch-black and thick, if a bit nasal bass. Once again I was enthralled by the fervent lyricism of Brian Michael Moore’s as Macduff, especially in the poignant aria “O, la paterna mano” from Act Four. Malcolm was well sung by Sungjune Park, an artist full of youthful vigour, while the Lady-in-waiting (whom Lada turned into Malcolm’s pregnant wife) was finely portrayed by the velvety-voiced Mack Wolz. A separate mention should be made of the demonic bass Jonas Jud, who was excellent in the quadruple role of Doctor, Assasin, Servant and Herald, as well as the baritone David Maze, a veteran of the Theater St. Gallen company, this time in the silent, brilliantly performed role of Duncan, as if taken straight from one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. Carlo Goldstein conducted the whole thing with an assured hand, impressing with his unerring sense of Verdian style, invaluable in the context of the unique orchestral textures and colours of Macbeth, meticulously conveyed by the musicians of the Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen.

And once again I left the theatre feeling that Shakespeare, and then Verdi after him, had told me more about the modern world than many a front-page expert. But why do I have to go all the way to Switzerland to see that? Especially now, when the world is really stepped in blood?

Translated by: Anna Kijak

As I wait anxiously, but also with hope, for the long-awaited change of the management of Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera, I have been closely following the activities of our southern neighbours. In both Poland and Czechia the advocates of entrusting leadership positions in national institutions to local artists and managers are still going strong. This, however, is where the similarities end. The Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera has long abandoned the model of a repertory theatre with a permanent ensemble of soloists – which, in my opinion, calls into question the legitimacy of referring to the company as the “National Opera”. At the two most important Czech companies – the National in Prague and the National in Brno – everything seems much more coherent. Both operate under the formula of a large organisational machine encompassing all types of theatre, managed by a general director supervising the artistic and administrative directors of the various “divisions”. In both cities the structure of the national theatre contains more than one operatic stage. The repertoire is huge and clearly focused on cultivating national works, but both the managements and permanent ensembles feature individuals from abroad – especially in Prague, where Filip Barankiewicz has been in charge of the Czech National Ballet since 2017 and Per Boye Hansen, the former artistic director of Den Norske Opera in Oslo, has been at the helm of the National Opera since 2019.

Such a national company – fulfilling its aesthetic, social and educational mission, and, at the same time, powered on a daily basis, and not once in a blue moon, by fresh ideas from outstanding artists and creators from around the world – is something I have long dreamed of in Poland. A company that is able to attract foreign visitors with its offerings and arouse the interest of international critics: in short, a “national” theatre in the most modern sense of the word, without complexes, promoting the culture of its country wisely and effectively, primarily in order to make it part of the international scene for good.

We can always dream, although we should be aware of the fact that it takes time and patience to accept such a state of affairs. Also in Prague, where the Norwegian management’s actions continue come up against resistance from audiences and the more conservative among the critics. The same was true of the January premiere of Cherubini’s Medea at the State Theatre, met with a rather cool reception from the audience, whose expectations were clearly at odds with the musical and theatrical reality of the performance.

Medea in Prague. Svetlana Aksenova in the title role, and Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir as Neris. Photo: Petr Neubert

Last year Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera missed an opportunity to present the work in a well-prepared original version. Médée, an opera or, more specifically, opéra comique with a French libretto by François-Benoît Hoffmann based on Euripides’ and Corneille’s tragedies, was written in 1797 and premiered on 13 March that year at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. The work, in which sung passages are interspersed with recited alexandrine lines, is classical in form and its musical structure stems from the spirit of Gluck’s reform. Yet when it comes to the way the eponymous character is treated, it is a good hundred years ahead of its day, foreshadowing the great operatic psychological dramas of Verdi, Wagner and even Richard Strauss. The title role, fiendishly difficult and full of technical pitfalls, was written for Julie-Angélique Scio, an outstanding soprano and great actress who put so much heart and enthusiasm into it that her health deteriorated and she soon died. The orchestral layer – rich in recurring motifs, dense, yet fluid in its narrative – was beyond the perceptual capabilities of many listeners at the time.

No wonder, then, that Médée soon disappeared from the reportoire. And, as is often the case, it began to be “improved”. Staged in a German translation in 1800, it was quite favourably received by the Berlin audiences. Two years later it reached Vienna with a libretto translated into Italian. In 1855 Franz Lachner threw out the spoken dialogues and replaced them with veritably Wagnerian recitatives, using an abridged Viennese version, but with a German libretto. In 1909 Carlo Zangarini translated Lachner’s version into Italian with a view to having the work premiered at La Scala. This is the form – most familiar to opera lovers today, yet woefully different from the original – in which Medea was “resurrected” in 1953 by Maria Callas, who, after her 1953 performance in Florence, sang it with variable success until the early 1960s.

This is also the version that was chosen in Prague – the idea was quite risky from the beginning given the inevitable comparisons with the vocal art of the Primadonna Assoluta. I have to admit that I, too, had my doubts about how Svetlana Aksenova would cope with this killer role – I heard her in 2018 in the role of Liza in The Queen of Spades and thought her voice was lovely but exceedingly lyrical, even girlish in expression. Since then it has become somewhat dull and less secure intonation-wise, and failed to develop in the upper range – it sounded relatively stable only in the middle. The singer clearly attempted to sing a role that lay beyond the limit of her abilities, and since she also lacked charisma, admirers of the divine Callas may have felt disappointed indeed. Much more impressive was Jana Sibera (Glauce), whose sensuous, sparkling soprano I was able to admire recently in Zemlinsky’s Kleider machen Leute. It was a mistake to entrust the role of Creonte to Marcell Bakonyi – his bass, undoubtedly well-controlled, proved too bright and not noble enough in tone for this royal part. The brightest points of the cast were Evan LeRoy Johnson, an excellent Giasone with a large, resonant, typical spinto tenor and an admirable ability to dynamically shape a phrase; and Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir as Neris – not only does the Icelandic artist possess a beautiful mezzo-soprano sparkling with harmonics, but she is also an excellent actress. I am not surprised that the audience appreciated the work of the chorus (prepared by Pavel Vaněk), but I do not quite understand why it was so unenthusiastic about the conductor responsible for the whole, Robert Jindra, who made every effort to bring out from this “Italianised” score as many elements as possible to demonstrate the uniqueness of Cherubini’s style – peculiarities of texture, dramatic tension lurking in almost every bar, evocative orchestral images foreshadowing Beethoven’s symphonic music, images in which the classical cohesion of form and sound gives way at times to feverish dialogues of the individual instrumental groups.

Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir, Marcell Bakonyi (Creonte), and Svetlana Aksenova. Photo: Petr Neubert

Nor did the Prague audiences like the staging, prepared by the German director Roland Schwab in collaboration with Paul Zoller (set design), Sabine Blickenstorfer (costumes) and Franck Evin (lighting). Schwab, who saved Bayreuth’s honour during the pandemic with his economical and functional concept of Tristan, approached Medea in a similar fashion – with surprisingly good results, in my opinion. Maintaining the classical unity of time and place, he played the whole thing out on two levels – Creonte’s austere palace, stripped of all ornaments, painted only by the light coming in through the high windows, and the dark world of Medea gnawing at it from below – damp, full of black rubbish bags, reeking of decay that would soon start seeping into the Corinthian residence. With each successive scene the palace gets darker and darker – until the house of the would-be newlyweds bursts into flames and Jason carries Glauce’s charred body out of the fire: so blinded by despair over the loss of his beloved that he completely forgets about his sons and only in the finale does he notice their corpses hanging from the ceiling. There was no intrusive psychologising in this staging, nor any attempt to place the classical tragedy in the current political context – the simple contemporary costume only served to make the message clear.

It will be interesting to see if the production will grow over time and get a more sympathetic audience. It fully deserves it in my opinion – compared to other Regietheater proposals, Schwab’s concepts seem exceptionally clear and singer-friendly. Stagings presented in an equally spare and modern stage language have long been a staple in Brno, where they are much better received by both the audiences and the critics. That is why the day after the Prague premiere I went to the Janáček Divadlo to see one of the most talked-about productions of the current season: Rusalka, directed by David Radok, whose earlier Salome made such an electrifying impression on me.

This time, however, I left the theatre a little confused. First, I was confused by Radok’s insufficiently clear declaration that he brought to Brno not so much a new stage concept for Dvorák’s masterpiece, but a reconstruction of the staging he directed in 2012 in Gothenburg with phenomenally beautiful decorations by Lars-Åke Thessmann that made a reference to paintings by the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, author of monochromatic interior views filled with intimate light. Radok, who was also listed in the programme of the Brno production as set designer, admitted that he drew inspiration from Thessmann’s work, but what I saw on the stage of the Janáčkovo Divadlo, however, was an almost literal reproduction of the visual setting from Göteborgsoperan, except perhaps for Act II, where Radok expanded the sets depth-wise, making full use of the space of the Brno theatre. The same is true of Zuzana Ježková’s costumes, which draw unambiguously on Ann-Mari Anttila’s designs – true, they sometimes differ from them in details of colour and cut, but I have seen revivals of legendary productions in which the costume designers dared to deviate much further from the original. I do not suspect the creators or the company’s management of bad intentions, but I would have preferred this kind of information to be clearly stated in the programmes and on the website – especially since this is about a production that caused quite a stir and not only in the small operatic world.

Rusalka in Brno. Peter Berger (Prince). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Secondly, Radok used the same procedure in Brno as he did earlier in Gothenburg: suggesting that Rusalka be read through Jungian archetypes and Freudian psychoanalysis, he decided to remove all folk and fairy tale motifs from the work, which in practice means reducing the cast by throwing out the characters of the Gamekeeper and Kitchen boy, making cuts in the role of Ježibaba and meddling with the rest of the text. Thus, roughly one-fifth of the music and the text was removed from the work. I can understand if the director would have been the first to come up with the idea of a Freudian-Ibsenian Rusalka, but productions staged in this spirit have been seen on the world’s stages for nearly half a century, and the creators of the most successful among them – primarily Pountney and McDonald – have used the “fairy tale element” contained in the opera to great advantage for their concepts. After all, Jaroslav Kvapil’s libretto had its sources of inspiration in both the fairy-tale-naturalistic plays of Hauptmann and the late, symbolist oeuvre of Ibsen. Kvapil tackled the theme of a clash of two world orders in his own plays. He was one of the pioneers of Czech modernist theatre. His Rusalka, masterfully constructed in terms of language and drama, is a masterpiece on its own, betraying an affinity with the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde. Dvořák treated it with almost pious reverence, as is evidenced by his correspondence with Kvapil. Radok, who is a Czech himself, saw only pessimism and decadence in it, completely ignoring the grotesque and black humour, so characteristic of Central European modernism.

Radok’s concept has many advocates, also among the lovers of Rusalka. I – paradoxically – found the narrative dragging on at times; it was monotonous, on one level of emotion, without moments of dramatic counterbalance, which in Kvapil and Dvořák’s work serve not only as interludes, but also as important commentaries that complete the context. Visually, however, it is a truly dazzling staging – a painting-like tale of a thousand shades of loneliness, emptiness and solitude, balancing on the border between two worlds that only seem to intermingle. Harbingers of misfortune are hiding everywhere. The reeds covering the edges of piers linking the indoors to the outdoors are yellowed already in Act I; the room is empty and grey, but in comparison with Act III, where the remains of fallen blades lie around the wet floor, it may indeed seem like cosy shelter. The castle garden is lit by chandeliers hanging under the black sky. Nothing is visible in their light: the weeding guests seem not to notice to Rusalka’s silent despair or Vodnik’s anguish, or what is going on between the Prince and the Foreign Princess. Radok clearly highlights the Wagnerian aspects of the story: the wood sprites’ banter with Vodnik, who is desperate for intimacy, brings to mind the beginning of Das Rheingold and Alberich’s humiliation; the cold and unapproachable Ježibaba has some traits of Erda; the Prince’s death and Rusalka’s return to the world of watery night resembles the finale of Tristan and Isolde.

Jana Šrejma Kačírková (Rusalka). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The performance I saw was excellent in musical terms as well. With her resonant, sparkling soprano Jana Šrejma Kačírková sang all the hope, pain and resignation of the eponymous heroine. Peter Berger once again demonstrated that in the fiendish role of the Prince – heroic, but requiring a large dose of lyricism and, above all, a very wide range – he has no rivals today. Jan Šťáva was a magnificent Vodnik. He is a typically “Czech” bass, impressive with the depth of his sound, phenomenal diction, lightness of phrasing and insight in creating this ambiguous character. Václava Krejčí, a singer with an assured, well-controlled mezzo-soprano, created a convincing portrayal of a cold and principled Ježibaba. I was slightly less impressed by Eliška Gattringerová as the Foreign Princess. Her soprano has a volume worthy of Brunhilde, but at times is too harsh, especially at the top of the range. Some extraordinary musicality was demonstrated by the other soloists: Doubravka Novotná, Ivana Pavlů and Monika Jägerová as the three Wood Sprites, and Tadeáš Hoza as the Hunter. The whole thing – including the company’s excellent chorus – was conducted by Marko Ivanović. His tempi were too steady for my taste at times, but he showed great attention to detail in this intimate, irresistibly sensual score.

I complained, I enthused and I hereby declare that this is a good sign. A real opera theatre is happening across Poland’s southern border. It is very active, and impresses with the breadth of its repertoire, stable musical level and courage in embarking on ambitious ventures that are not always fully successful. A theatre whose productions do not need to be ignored with embarrassment or praised in advance, because at this stage it can also face criticism. How I miss this every day – fortunately, Czechia is not far away.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Charles Jennens, an erudite nobleman, friend of Handel and author of librettos for several of his oratorios (among them Il Moderato, a stand-alone poem with which he brought together into a unified “morality play” arrangements of Milton’s two poems used in L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato), wrote in a letter that he expected Messiah to be a work superior to the composer’s entire oeuvre just as the Anointed himself towered over everything in power and dignity. He compiled the libretto of Handel’s most famous oratorio from verses of the King James Bible and Coverdale Bible, the first printed translation of all Scriptures into English. He took more than half of the text from the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. A devout Anglican and enemy of deism, Jennens turned his Messiah into an extended reflection on the mystery of Christ, as it were. Each of the three parts of the oratorio focuses on a different aspect of this mystery. In part one the librettist presents the prophecy and fulfilment of God’s plan for the salvation of mankind. In part two – the story of the Messiah’s passion and resurrection. In part three – thanksgiving for his salvific sacrifice.

Handel received the finished text in July 1741, set about writing the oratorio a month later and completed it in mid-September, which did not please Jennens, who was outraged by the composer’s “careless negligence” and his refusal to accept any of the librettist’s comments. Jennens also made no secret of his disappointment that Handel had accepted an invitation from William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, to organise a series of charity concerts at the Great Music Hall in Dublin – he had hoped that a work of such weight would be heard for the first time in Englad’s capital. The premiere of Messiah in April 1742 was a great success, and proceeds from ticket sales made it possible to release over a hundred wretched debtors from prison.

Presented a year later at the Covent Garden Theatre, the oratorio was received more coldly primarily for religious reasons. Some argued that theatre was not an appropriate venue for works containing quotations from the Scriptures. Messiah came to be appreciated in London only in the 1750s, when a tradition of annual charity concerts was started in the chapel of the newly established Foundling Hospital for children. From that moment on its popularity continued to grow. It returned to Covent Garden once again before the composer’s death – this time it was greeted with a thunderous applause. Unlike Bach’s Matthew Passion, Handel’s oratorio was not forgotten even for a moment. It changed along with the public’s tastes; new arrangements of the work, not always successful, began to be made already in the eighteenth century – they included Mozart’s version, commissioned by Gottfried van Swieten and compared scathingly by some to stucco on marble. It was more or less in this period that Messiah came to be performed by massive forces, expanded to the point of absurdity over the following half-century (an 1857 concert at the Handel Festival in London featured more than two and a half thousand musicians). The custom of leaping to one’s feet before the “Hallelujah” chorus concluding part two – with its characteristic simple motif in the acclamation, its imitated motet-like structure and references to the Lutheran hymn “Wachet auf” – had become established earlier, supported by a probably made-up anecdote that during the London premiere King George II rose from his seat at the first words of the hymn, prompting the rest of his audience to follow suit. The idea to organise concerts featuring Handel’s Messiah during the Advent season was thought up by nineteenth-century American managers, who rightly assumed that the faithful’s beloved oratorio would ensure a box-office hit for the organisers. Initially, only the first part, supplemented with the obligatory “Hallelujah” chorus, was performed, and only with time were all three parts of the oratorio presented, usually in an abbreviated version and without the da capo passages. The custom of presenting Messiah before Christmas eventually became popular also in Europe, gradually pushing the work out of the standard Lenten repertoire.

Laurence Cummings. Photo: Ben Ealovega

The December concert at the Barbican Hall was led by Laurence Cummings, who conducted the soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Academy of Ancient Music – for the second time since taking over the reins of the legendary ensemble (the first performance was in 2022). Competition in London was, as usual, strong, which is by no means surprising for a work with such a rich and varied performance tradition. Cummings’ responsibility is, however, unusual – that of an heir to the legacy of Christopher Hogwood, founder of the AAM, who in 1979 made the first recording of a complete version of the oratorio on period instruments, a version conceived by Handel prior to its 1754 performance at the Foundling Hospital: with five soloists, a similar instrumental ensemble and the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, composed of men and boys. Although Hogwood was soon followed by others, his interpretation – clean, clear and refreshing – remained a reference point for several generations to come. Also for Cummings, who opted for a slightly earlier London version, limited the number of solo voices to four and headed ensembles roughly half the size of Hogwood’s: an eighteen-strong mixed choir; an orchestra featuring fourteen strings, two oboes, a bassoon, two trumpets and timpani; as well as a continuo (theorbo, two harpsichords and organ).

Nearly half a century after the first AAM recordings under Hogwood, Cummings’ interpretations can seem cautious, seeking a compromise between the restraint of the pioneers of historically informed performance and the irrepressible verve of musicians from the south of the continent. Nothing could be further from the truth: his Messiah is the fruit of a profound internalisation and reworking of previous concepts, music that is more “human”, better balanced, more wisely contrasted – not only in terms of tempo and dynamics, but, above all, in terms of articulation and overall mood. This was already evident in the first part and the conductor’s completely different approach to the overture – played unhurriedly, at times even ceremonially, in line with the theological message of the work – and then in the rocking, “peasant” Pifa from the beginning of the fourth scene of the oratorio. In addition, Cummings pays much more attention to the words and rhetoric of the text, which can be heard especially in the perfectly thought-out choral passages (from the sparkling, melismatic “And he shall purify” to the ecstatic final “Amen”). Nor is the essence of Handel’s message lost in the instrumental parts: in the overture the orchestra gradually and all the more emphatically moved from heavy gloom to the bright light of hope; the trumpet solo in the third part (the brilliant Peter Mankarious) had not yet lifted the dead from their graves, but had already transformed all the living present in the auditorium; the continuo group in the accompagnato recitatives was sensitively supported by Joseph Crouch (cello) and Judith Evans (double bass).

After the performance at the Barbican Hall. Photo: Damaris Laker

The solo singers were somewhat less homogeneous as an ensemble, partly due to the sudden replacement of the indisposed Louise Alder by Anna Devin in the soprano part. Devin’s voice, golden in tone but with too much vibrato, reached full expression only in opening number of part three, the aria “I know that my redeemer liveth”, sung with admirable finesse and serenity. I have to admit that when it comes to the alto part, I definitely prefer women to countertenors, especially those of the English “old school”, represented by Tim Mead – a singer who is highly musical and impresses with his culture of interpretation, but whose voice is less sonorous than that of the other soloists. Nick Pritchard, on the other hand, was excellent with his soft, beautifully rounded tenor, which enchanted me already in first phrase of the “Comfort ye” recitative. The most “operatic” sound came from Cody Quattlebaum, who has a bass of great beauty, but still not sufficiently stable intonation-wise and sometimes uneven across the registers – although, admittedly, he has a great feel for the theatricality of Handel’s music, which he demonstrated in, for example, the beautifully sung yet unsettling beginning of the aria “The people that walked in darkness”.

This was not a Messiah overpowering with might, exuding power to annihilate all enemies. In these Coverdale’s Great BiblCummings offered us a vision of the Anointed who would grow up from the child fed with milk and honey, leading the calf and the young lion, and playing trustingly near the viper’s den. That is why – although the entire audience rose from their seats at the first notes of “Hallelujah” – I was more moved by the finale of the oratorio, in which I genuinely heard heavens roll up and the world come into being in a whole new form.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Idomeneus, one of the suitors of the beautiful Helen, made to pledge by the King of Sparta to rush to the aid of her chosen bridegroom if necessary, commanded a fleet of eighty black Cretan ships at Troy. Fearless and fierce in battle, he returned home happily after the end of the Trojan War. As we read in the Odyssey, all his companions survived as well: “none of his men was devoured by the waves”. It was only in the Aeneid that that we find a reference to Idomeneus being later banished from Crete; Virgil, however, does not specify the circumstances of the hero’s banishment. Over four hundred years later the information provided by the Roman poet was complemented by his commentator Servius, according to whom the Cretan fleet came up against a storm on its way back: in exchange for abating the storm, Idomeneus promised Neptune that he would sacrifice to him the first living thing he saw after coming ashore. As cruel fate would have it, the first living thing he saw was his son. Yet Servius does not say whether the sacrifice was duly performed, and if so, whether this cruel deed resulted in the king’s expulsion from his homeland. Servius even presents another variant of the myth, in which Idomeneus is banished from Crete by an usurper put on the throne after the king has left for the war.

The theme of the “wild” king who made a hasty promise to a deity and just as hastily kept it was used in the late seventeenth century by François Fénelon, tutor to Louis XIV’s grandson and author of the didactic novel The Adventures of Telemachus, in which Idomeneus became an example of a ruler unworthy of imitation, a ruler who fails to act in accordance with law and reason. A side version of the myth, it became a warning to enlightened monarchs and the basis for many subsequent adaptations. The first opera about Idomeneus, with a libretto by Antoine Danchet, based on a tragedy by Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, was written in 1712 by André Campra. An avalanche of more operas, by composers like Baldasare Galuppi and Giovanni Paisiello, among others, was launched by archaeological works around Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In 1778, when Charles Theodore, the new Elector of Bavaria, was transferring the court from Mannheim to Munich, taking with him the Kapellmeister Christian Cannabich and most of his fine orchestra, the twenty-two-year-old Mozart was staying in Paris. He soon returned to Salzburg, but was not particularly surprised when in 1780, on the initiative of his friend Cannabich, he received a commission for a work to open the next opera season in Munich. He decided to entrust the libretto for a new Idomeneus opera to the Salzburg priest Giambattista Varesco, who adapted Danchet’s text, abandoning the tragic finale in favour of a lieto fine, a move that not only weakened the opera’s message, but also disrupted its dramatic logic.

Vasyl Solodkyy (Idomeneo). Photo: Andreas Etter

This, however, did not prevent Mozart from writing a score that sparkles with invention, brilliantly combines Italian, French and German influences, and, at the same time, is extremely demanding for the performers – from the soloists, the chorus singers to the orchestra musicians. The premiere at Munich’s Cuvilliés-Theater, in January 1781, was a huge success, despite the fact that the opera was presented only three times and the announcements did not even include the composer’s name. In any case, Idomeneo, re di Creta has never matched the popularity of Mozart’s later works – its discography is not very impressive, it gets staged sporadically and usually fails to meet the expectations of the critics and the audiences. That is why I decided to see the new staging at the Staatstheater Mainz, expecting a lot of good things from Nadja Stefanoff as Elettra, whose love for Idomeneus’ son is unrequited; and Krystian Adam, who after the September premiere replaced the Ukrainian tenor Vasyl Solodkyy in the title role in several performances.

In fact, there were many more good things, largely thanks to Hermann Bäumer, the music director of the Mainz company since 2011. Bäumer conducted the performance with a great sense of style, in finely chosen tempos, beautifully weighing the proportions between the stage and the orchestra pit. The strings played with a clear, transparent sound, the expanded wind group worked well both in the piled-up dialogues of orchestral colours, contrasted in terms of dynamics and articulation, and in the concertante passages. The singers were provided with a very attentive and supportive accompaniment in the recitatives by Fiona Macleod on the pianoforte. The Staatsheater Mainz chorus – featuring eight coryphaei – was excellent in its fiendishly difficult parts, richly ornamented and full of non-obvious harmonies and spatial effects.

Nadja Stefanoff (Elettra). Photo: Andreas Etter

I was not disappointed by Stefanoff, whose supple and sparkling soprano – combined with impeccable articulation and masterful phrasing – lent not only intensity but also psychological depth to the figure of Elettra (especially in the final aria, “D’Oreste, d’Ajace ho in seno i tormenti”, where the distraught protagonist is on the verge of madness). My expectations were more than met by Krystian Adam, an Idomeneo who was inwardly torn, vacillating between anger and anguish, not losing his royal dignity even in deepest despair. Adam managed to convey this whole range of states and emotions by purely musical means: subtly shaded dynamics, skilfully modulated timbre and great mastery of the coloratura technique, which he showed off in the famous aria “Fuor del mar” from Act II. A fine performance was given by Alexandra Uchlin as Idamante, Idomeneo’s son. Her intonation was spot-on, although her fresh mezzo-soprano proved insufficiently resonant at times. I was much less impressed by Yulietta Alexanyan in the role of Ilia, Idamante’s beloved – a singer endowed with a soprano of great beauty, but produced rather mechanically and often flat. Myungin Lee was rather bland in the tenor role of Arbace. The Oracle of Neptune was voiced by the bass Tim-Lukas Reuter, while the High Priest was sung by the tenor David Jakob Schläger, whom the director additionally gave another highly demanding and substantial role, not included in the original cast.

And here we come to the directorial concept devised by Alexander Nerlich, who decided to show the story of Idomeneus through his war trauma and the hallucinations tormenting him. Not leaving the king for a moment throughout the performance, Schläger is both the dark side of his personality, Neptune controlling his actions, and a sea monster sent by the god. This ghastly shadow, in royal attire but faceless – or, rather, with a face covered in black makeup, which eats into the body like a frayed mask – is, in any case, not the only demon on the Mainz stage. The dramatis personae interact with other faceless figures as well, but these are less aggressive, at times even sympathetic. They bring to mind the Japanese noppera-bō spirits, whose relentless presence torments the living with an illusory resemblance to their beloved dead (the costumes were designed by Zana Bosnjak). The associations with Japanese culture are by no means coincidental. When it comes to the visual layer of the production, Nerlich built his vision on references to the 2011 Fukushima I nuclear power plant disaster caused by an earthquake off the coast of Honshu, an earthquake that was followed by a tsunami. The starting point for Thea Hoffmann-Axthelm’s light and dynamic set design was press material from the destroyed gym at the Ukedo Elementary School, where members of Japanese rescue teams camped out for months in scandalous conditions. In the background we see vivid images of fires, blue skies and the raging sea. Moving walls shape the space of, alternately, the royal residence, palace gardens and the temple of Neptune; in episodes off the coast of Crete, the enclosed scenery gives way to rolling wooden platforms.

Yulietta Alexanyan (Ilia). Photo: Andreas Etter

There is no doubt that Nerlich has extended the chain of the myth’s evolution by adding more links, interpreting Idomeneus’ dilemma through modern threats and disputes over the model of power. However, he has put his vision into practice so discreetly and consistently that the spectators do not feel overwhelmed by the abundance of codes contained in it. The conventional decorations can just as well bring to mind nightmarish memories of the siege of Troy, the storm causes similar terror on the shores of Crete and Honshu, the stylised costumes combine elements of very diverse cultures. Most importantly, Mozart’s Idomeneo returns home happily – welcomed with open arms on successive European stages, listened to carefully, and prompting quite fresh reflection on the experience of war, violence and long separation.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

May Janáček forgive me that once again I could go to Brno for just a few days of his Bienniale and, consequently, once again I faced the difficult decision what to choose from among the festival’s offerings. Two years ago I couldn’t help marvelling how so many musical events could be packed into the festival programme spread over less than three weeks. The organisers winked knowingly, said, “Hold our beer”, and extended this year’s Bienniale by six days, increasing the number of concerts and performances accordingly. And just in case – lest anyone think it’s a one-off excess, associated with the Year of Czech Music celebrations – they announced a tentative schedule for the next festival, which will last more than a month.

Janáček Brno 2024, with the motto “No limits!”, has just come to an end. As many as seven productions were presented in its main operatic strand: a new staging of The Excursions of Mr. Brouček directed by Robert Carsen, with the excellent Nicky Spence in the title role, co-produced with Teatro Real in Madrid and Berlin’s Staatsoper; two productions of The Cunning Little Vixen – one from Ostrava, the other from Brno, both to celebrate the centennial of the Brno premiere at the theatre now called Mahenovo divadlo; Věc Makropulos from Berlin’s Staatsoper (Claus Guth’s 2022 production); a staging of Jenůfa prepared especially for the festival in its original 1904 version, conducted by Anna Novotna Pešková and directed by Veronika Kos Loulová; as well as this year’s Brno production of Dvořák’s Rusalka, directed by David Radok, and the first Czech staging of The Charlatan, Pavel Haas’ only opera, since its 1938 premiere. The festival guests this year included two foreign orchestras, the Bamberger Symphoniker and the Staatskapelle Berlin, conducted during concerts at the Janáček Theatre by Jakub Hrůša, who is just finishing his tenure in Bamberg and next season will be taking over the musical direction of London’s Royal Opera House (he led the Berlin ensemble instead of Christian Thielemann, who had to cancel for health reasons). A novelty in the Bienniale programme came in the form of a series of recitals at Brno’s famous villas: the Art Nouveau Villa Löw-Beer and two icons of modernism, Villa Tugendhat and Villa Stiassni.

Like last year, I decided to organise my four-day stay in Brno around a forgotten opera, in this case Haas’ The Charlatan. Pavel Haas is an exceptionally tragic figure, even in comparison with other modernists whose work has been recently presented in the Czech Republic and Germany as part of the huge “Musica non grata” project, which restores the memory of artists eradicated from musical life after the Nazis’ rise to power. Born in 1899 in Brno, in a family of a Jewish shoemaker and owner of a thriving shoe workshop, Haas began his education with private piano lessons. At the age of fourteen he enrolled in the music school in the Besední dům and after the Great War continued his studies at the newly established Conservatoire. In 1920 he became a student at the master school of Leoš Janáček, who would have a huge influence on his later oeuvre, although, according to Haas, his pedagogical methods left much to be desired.

After completing his studies Haas became a partner in his father’s business, while pursuing a parallel career as a composer and critic. At that time he wrote a lot of music for the theatre and was increasingly toying with the idea of composing his own opera. The first attempts, for various reasons, failed (among the ideas that never materialised was The Dybbuk based on the dramatic legend by S. An-sky). Haas got a second wind only in the 1930s, having established his reputation as a composer of film music. This time his choice was Josef Winckler’s novel Doctor Eisenbart, published in 1929, about an itinerant Bavarian barber from the turn of the eighteenth century, a real-life figure who made a fortune from shows featuring cataract removal and setting of broken bones, staged with a large troupe of musicians, acrobats and mimes.

The Charlatan. Pavol Kubáň as Pustrpalk. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Seeking to have the novel adapted into a libretto, in 1933 Haas approached the author himself, who treated him kindly but with some reserve, aware of what cooperation with a Jewish composer could mean for both sides. Two years later, when the Nuremberg Race Laws came into force, Haas decided to cover up the source of his inspiration and draft the libretto himself, allegedly drawing on the medieval farce Mastičkář (Ointment Seller), from which he took the name of the main character, Pustrpalk. He set the action during the Thirty Years’ War and prudently removed all references to the German reality from the text.

He submitted the score of Šarlatán, completed in June 1937, to the management of the Zemské divadlo in Brno (another name for today’s Mahen Theatre), which staged the opera – with great success – the following April. And then everything began to crumble. In March 1939 the Third Reich seized Czechoslovakia. Two years later Haas found himself in the Terezin concentration camp. In October 1944 he was transferred to Auschwitz along with another transport of prisoners and died in the gas chamber the same day. The family learned about the story of his death from Karel Ančerl, who was miraculously escaped extermination. Yet the memory of Haas did not begin to be revived until the 1990s, after The Charlatan was staged at the Wexford Festival.

This year’s staging from the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava subtly draws on František Muzika’s 1938 sets and highlights all the best features of the directorial craft of Ondřej Havelka, who skilfully weaves his way between the Czech avant-garde and bourgeois theatre, expressionism and folk tradition. The simple, multifunctional sets (Jakub Kopecký) and colourful costumes, referring to various eras and conventions (Kateřina Štefková), effectively outline the space of the drama and emphasise the nature of individual characters. They are the material of vulgar gags, at times turning into an effective tool of illusion (evocative shadow play behind a wooden structure covered by a semi-transparent screen). Havelka masterfully juggles elements of plebeian theatre – with all its coarseness and exaggerated acting gestures. Acrobats doing somersaults, cloth entrails pulled from the bodies of the quack’s clients, two-legged horses without harnesses pulling an alcove transformed into a carriage – the dizzying pile-up of the absurd and the grotesque makes the tragedy of the finale, coming as suddenly as the Nazi darkness that was soon to envelop all of Europe, all the more powerful.

The Charlatan is an opera of crowds, a feature that was perfectly captured by Jakub Klecker, a conductor with vast choral experience, who was in charge of the musical side of things. He sensed the inherent theatricality of Haas’ score, composed – as in Janáček’s works – of short musical ideas combined into coherent, larger systems, rhythmically expressive, with a melody based largely on modal material. Particularly worthy of note in the large solo cast were Pavol Kubáň, singing the title role, an artist possessing a resonant baritone beautifully developed in the upper end of the scale; Soňa Godarská as Amarantha, a singer with excellent acting skills and a rather sharp sounding but very expressive mezzo-soprano; and the bass-baritone Josef Škarka as the wistful old man Pavučina. A separate round of applause should be given to the chorus of the Ostrava company, superbly prepared by Jurij Galatenko.

The Cunning Little Vixen. Doubravka Novotná in the title role. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The infectious enthusiasm of the Ostrava ensembles was also shared by the audience of The Cunning Little Vixen, under the baton of the young Prague conductor Marek Šedivý, who has held the musical directorship of the Moravian-Silesian Theatre for four seasons. The director of the new production is the Israeli-Dutch choreographer Itzik Galili, known for his witty and inventive, and yet compellingly lyrical, dance routines. His distinctive style – underpinned by Daniel Dvořák’s clear, very sparse sets and Simona Rybáková’s gorgeous costumes – worked well in Janáček’s “forest idyll”. Despite the addition of a dozen or so dancers to the cast, stage movement did not dominate the other elements of the production. On the contrary: in the almost empty space illuminated by soft light Galili created an even more emphatic illusion of the magical atmosphere of the forest. Nor did his concept hamper the singers, who clearly enjoyed entering the world of this dancing tale. It’s been a long time since heard such a fresh and sparkling interpretation of the title role – Doubravka Novotná is undoubtedly one of the most talented Czech sopranos of the younger generation, an artist who is versatile and, at the same time, has a rare ability to choose her repertoire wisely. I was a little bit disappointed by Martin Gurbal’ as the Forester. Either he was out of shape that day or his bass is not quite open enough at the top for this essentially baritone part. On the other hand the baritone Boris Prýgl was excellent in the bass role of Harašta. But even so – also thanks to his superb acting – the show was stolen by Jan Šťáva in the dual role of the Badger and the Parson: as the latter he rode around the stage on a kick scooter with a blue headlight in the shape of a large cross. It is also impossible not to mention the excellent child soloists, led by Roman Patrik Baroš in the role of Young Frog, a character that always moves me to tears in the finale, when he explains to the Forester that he has mistaken him for his grandfather. This time the circle of seasons closed more evocatively than usual – this was thanks to the Old Butterfly (Michal Bublík) dying on the proscenium, slowly slipping away throughout the performance.

I arrived in Brno on the eve of the performance of The Charlatan to finally hear Martinů’s Field Mass live. And hear it I did: in a very good performance by the baritone Tadeáš Hoza, the male part of the Gaudeamus Brno choir and Ensemble Opera Diversa conducted by Tomáš Krejčí. However, the biggest discovery of the evening at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was for me Haas’ Psalm 29 for organ, baritone, female choir and small orchestra – a dense and dark piece, combining inspirations from Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass and Honegger’s “polyphonically complex” counterpoint to references to early Baroque art of the fugue. Fifteen minutes of music that helped me delve deeper into the musical fabric of Haas’ Charlatan the following day.

Martinů’s Field Mass at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Tomáš Krejčí and Tadeáš Hoza). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

And then understand that all of the festival concerts – including those seemingly less important – were programmed in a way that would place the patron’s legacy in a broader context. An afternoon with the Brno Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Pavel Šnajdr, devoted to the music of local composers (primarily those from the generation born in the first decade of independence) made me aware not only of their complicated relationship with Janáček’s legend, but also of their overwhelming influence on the artists of later generations. It is good to know that before Martin Smolka’s 2004 Nagano, a wickedly funny opera about Czech hockey players, came less elaborate but equally brilliant parodies of old musical conventions, like Josef Berg’s absurdist micro-opera Snídaně na hradě Šlankenvaldě, with the composer’s own libretto based on a play by Matěj Kopecký, a famous Czech puppeteer from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Once again I must praise Jan Šťáva, the only singer among the actors in this gem, singing the role of the Villager, which Berg – to enhance the comic effect – composed in the classical Haydn style and to a German text at that.

What turned out to be a magnificent musical lecture on the diversity of approaches to arrangements of folk music in song was a recital by the soprano Simona Šaturová accompanied by Marek Kozák at the piano – in the Tugendhat Villa designed by Mies van der Rohe, a dream venue for a performance of works by modernists (in addition to Janáček, Eugen Suchon, Béla Bartók and Klement Slavický, among others). I am glad I went to the Reduta Theatre for a staged concert of folk music from the Moravian-Slovakian borderlands – performed by instrumentalists and singers from Březová, Strání and Lopeník, with commentary in the form of essays by Janáček read by Vladimír Doskočil, an actor born in those parts. In fact, the only item on the programme that did not quite fit in for me with the perfectly thought-out concept of the festival was a recital by the bass-baritone Adam Plachetka and David Švec (piano), promoting their album Evening Songs for the Pentatone label. The songs by Smetana, Dvořák, Suk and Fibich to poems from Vítězslav Hálek’s collection Večerní písně, included in the album, were supplemented by the artists with Dvořák’s Gypsy Melodies, Op. 55, and – pushing it somewhat – a selection from Janáček’s cycle On an Overgrown Path. This, however, is a minor complaint. I was more worried by the fact that both artists failed to grasp the intimate acoustics of the Mahen Theatre and performed the whole thing in a manner more suited to, I would say, a concert or opera: Plachetka with the full volume of his healthy and booming voice, Švec on the piano with the lid open. I left after their recital deafened by the excess of sound, but I fully understand the enthusiasm of the audience, who rarely has an opportunity to see in Brno one of the most highly regarded and internationally recognised Czech singers.

However, in the context of everything I heard and saw over just four days of the Biennial, it would be inappropriate to complain. I am already looking forward to another festival. And I still can’t believe that so much was packed into this joyful, unassuming event without generating a sense of overkill.

Translated by: Anna Kijak