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Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov has been more fortunate, all things considered. With a libretto based on Pushkin’s “Shakespearean” Romantic tragedy (which so pleased the author that in a letter to his friend Pyotr Vyazemsky he admitted that he had read it aloud to himself, clapped his hands and exclaimed, “What a Pushkin! What a son of a bitch!”) and referring to a generally less complicated episode from Russia’s history, it conquered the world’s stages over one hundred years ago and has stayed on them ever since despite numerous interferences by successive adaptors. Khovanshchina, composed at the same time as The Fair at Sorochyntsi, saw the light of day five years after the composer’s death – in a version by Rimsky-Korsakov, who, in fact, turned the whole score upside down. The opera reached Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913 with a new orchestration by Ravel and Stravinsky, or rather in a hybrid version, because Feodor Chaliapin, who sang Dosifey, insisted that “his” fragments be kept in Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement. Shostakovich’s version, most often presented today, had its premiere in 1960, at Leningrad’s Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, which in 1992 returned to its original name and now operates as the Mariinsky Theatre. It was not until 1985 that Khovanshchina, with the libretto in Russian, found its way to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, where it has been produced several times since. Four years later the Shostakovich version (with Stravinsky’s finale) was recorded by Claudio Abbado with the forces of  Wiener Staatsoper.

Ekaterina Semenchuk (Marfa) and Evgeny Akimov (Golitsin). Photo: Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

This makes the high number of productions of Khovanshchina at Milan’s La Scala all the more surprising. They began with the Italian premiere in 1926, followed by six more productions of the Rimsky-Korsakov version, two more – in 1981 and 1998 – of the Shostakovich version and the latest one, directed by Mario Martone and conducted by Valery Gergiev (the Shostakovich version but without Kuzka’s joyful song removed by Rimsky-Korsakov). It seems that Mussorgsky’s unfinished masterpiece is redeemed primarily by the music – in his original libretto the composer condenses events of several months, making the narrative understandable only to those familiar with the complicated history of the feud between the streltsy and the boyars. The action of the opera begins after the famous May Moscow uprising of the streltsy following the sudden death of Tsar Feodor in 1682. In the aftermath of the rebellion Ivan and Peter, two brothers of the deceased from two different marriages, were proclaimed tsars, with their elder sister, Sophia Alekseyevna Romanova, being made regent. Sophia, in fact, ruled the country for the following seven years, taking advantage of Ivan’s mental infirmity and Peter’s young age. In September the haughty and cruel Prince Ivan Khovansky – made commander of the streltsy for his services in putting down the rebellion – turned against Sophia and, hoping to gain the throne, demanded a revocation of Nikon’s reforms, which undermined the order of the Old Believers supporting him. The inconvenient Khovansky was pronounced a rebel and sentenced to death in absentia on 27 September – on the very same day he was captured with his son Andrey thanks to an intrigue of Feodor Shaklovity, a former scrivener raised by Sophia to the rank of a member of the Boyar Duma and, after the execution of the Khovanskys, appointed head of the Streltsy Department. Subsequent fate of the protagonists of Khovanshchina went along rather unexpected lines: in 1689, after Peter had deposed Sophia, the regent’s favourite, Vasily Golitsyn, an Occidentalist and “best educated man of his day”, was deprived of his functions and estate, and then exiled to Arkhangelsk. Shaklovity – after cruel tortures – was executed on 11 October. Power was seized by Peter the Great. Sophia was sent to the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow, where she spent the rest of her life in complete isolation – even the nuns had access to the former regent only for one day a year.

Khovanshchina is a dark opera, exposing the grimmest characteristic of the history of Russia – its dependence on an obtuse mob susceptible to all kinds of manipulation. It is a fresco about the collapse of an order of the world in which individuals, no matter how outstanding, are treated as pawns of no importance on the chessboard of history. Mario Martone, an Italian film director and screenwriter, gave it the status of a global catastrophe and as such illustrated it with images borrowed from post-apocalyptic cinema. His Milan staging – prepared in collaboration with the set designer Margherita Palli, costume designer Ursula Patzak and the brilliant lighting designer Pasquale Mari – features clear and visually beautiful references to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Scott’s Blade Runner, Hillcoat’s The Road and von Trier’s Melancholia. From the very beginning the protagonists of the drama move in a space marked by a sense of doom. A black or grey sky hangs over everything; there is no Red Square, no streltsy quarters, no secluded monastery of the Old Believers in a pine forest. We have to decipher the relationships between the characters from codes closely linked to the present – which may cause some problems for viewers not familiar with the context of the work. However, the overall concept is fairly coherent and features several memorable images. For example, the Scrivener’s dillapidated motorbike loaded with lots of attributes of his trade – typewriters, old computers and outdated laptops – from which an illiterate mob tries to extract some information but has no idea how to use them. Or the magnificent ending to Act Four – beginning with Ivan Khovansky hunting birds and closing with the murder of the prince wearing a snow-white shirt and killed with his own gun to the sounds of village girls singing about a white swan. Or the finale, when the Old Believers are engulfed by the fire or a huge apocalyptic star which, “burning as it were a lamp, it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood”.  Khovanshchina at La Scala ends with the breaking of the Seventh Seal, coming of the last days when God separates good from evil and sends death onto earth. Martone’s idea fits in well with the paradoxically hopeful finale of Shostakovich, who in his version returns to the opera’s opening theme of dawn on the Moskva River: star the Wormwood – or, perhaps, planet Melancholia from Lars von Trier’s film – heralds a “beautiful end of the world”, Good News about liberation from captivity.  The question is whether it fits in just as well with the overwhelmingly pessimistic vision of the composer.

Evgeny Akimov and Mikhail Petrenko (Ivan Khovansky). Photo: Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

Martone’s vision has its gaps and blunders, which, however, recede into the background when confronted with an awe-inspiring musical concept of the whole. Khovanshchina requires exceptional skill when choosing the cast: a singer to tackle the mighty part of Marfa with its Italian origins, three radically different low male voices and singers responsible for the three just as contrasted main tenor roles. The character of Andrey Khovansky’s abandoned fiancée was brilliantly portrayed by Ekaterina Semenchuk – a singer with a dark, meaty mezzo-soprano with a perfect command of dynamics (wonderfully ethereal pianos in the final scene when Andrey is led to the stake). Mikhail Petrenko represents an increasingly rare breed of singers who rivet attention from the very first stage appearance: despite very brief moments of insecure intonation and too wide vibrato, his Ivan Khovansky fully reflected the arrogance, stupidity and animal cruelty of the tragic boyar. Alexey Markov’s noble and, at the same time, ominous-sounding, slightly smoky baritone was perfect for Shaklovity’s demonic character. The beautifully rounded, soft and velvety bass of Stanislav Trofimov (Dosifey) brought to mind Feodor Chaliapin, who sang the role at the premiere of Khovanshchina at Saint Petersburg’s Kononov Hall.  Among the tenor voices the one I was impressed by the most was Maxim Paster (Scrivener) – a fine character singer, sensitive to every word and its place in a phrase. I wished for a bit more expressiveness in the role of Golitsin (Evgeny Akimov), especially in comparison with the passionate singing of Sergey Skorokhodov (Andrey), perfectly even across the registers. I was a little bit dissatisfied with the other female voices: Evgenia Muraveva’s soprano (Emma), slightly constricted at the top, and Irina Vashchenko’s instrument (Susanna), not very attractive in colour and intonationally insecure.

Setting for Act V. Photo: Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

As should be expected, the main hero of the evening was the chorus – perfectly prepared linguistically by Alla Samokhotova, and delivering the text with perfect diction and phenomenal sense of phrasing. The bloodcurdling finale of Act III (the streltsy in a dialogue with old Khovansky) made me all the more frustrated that Mussorgsky did not manage to write the “small piece in the auto-da-fé scene” – I think that the hymn based on a traditional Old Believers’ melody, a hymn that was never written, would have sent us into raptures in this rendition. The orchestra under Gergiev sounded too aggressive at times; I also missed a thoughtful gradation of tension – in Act V, when everything should have screamed in pain and whispered in anguish, the narrative seemed to have got stuck and did not get its colours back until the last several dozen bars of the opera.  Yet this does not change the fact that such a finely honed and simply thrilling Khovanshchina would be hard to find even in Russia. Not to mention Poland, where Mussorgsky’s masterpiece was staged only once, exactly fifty years ago at Teatr Wielki in Poznań.

However, it would be unfair to put the blame for this on the directors of opera companies in Poland – a country whose motto has for decades been “we’ll get by somehow”. Khovanshchina is an opera about great impossibility, about history leading to nowhere. About waters that became wormwood, about people who died of the waters and will never be revived. Perhaps this is why Mussorgsky never finished it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Sir John Denis Forman, Scottish television producer, admirer of Mozart’s piano concertos and author of The Good Opera Guide, summed up La forza del destino as “the one where a marquis is killed by an exploding pistol and his daughter in monk’s costume finds her lover has murdered her brother just outside the front door of her cave”. He was basically spot on, although he omitted Acts II and III as well as the first scene of Act IV, and missed at least one corpse in the finale. Verdi always preferred pure emotions to psychological motivation of his protagonists and in the case of La forza del destino he stressed emphatically that it was an “opera of ideas”. One of these ideas is the titular destiny, which eventually triumphs over all love and dispatches all protagonists to meet their Maker. Stylistically, La forza del destino is an even greater hotchpotch than the earlier Un ballo in maschera. There is a tribute to the Rossinian opera buffa in the baritone part of Fra Melitone; there is the spirit of the Parisian opéra comique embodied by the Gypsy Preziosilla; there are crowd scenes worthy of Meyerbeer; there is a stanzaic ballad of an aristocrat posing as a student; finally, there is a classic “Italian” triangle in which the baritone stands in the way of love between the soprano and the tenor. I need not add that the dramaturgical panache of La forza del destino and its mosaic-like score pose considerable challenges to the performers. In order for the audience to make head or tail of all this and become moved by it to boot, we need a judicious conductor, an excellent cast and a director with extraordinary imagination.

Franz-Josef Selig (Padre Guardiano; left, with red cloak), and Michelle Bradley (Donna Leonora). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

The Frankfurt Opera has entrusted its latest production of La forza del destino to Tobias Kratzer, winner of Der Faust theatre prize for – to put it mildly – an iconoclastic staging of Götterdämmerung in Karlsruhe. The great hope of the German Regieoper is also to direct Tannhäuser for the opening of the upcoming Bayreuth Festival after last year’s debut of Yuval Sharon (Lohengrin), whose staging of Die Walküre, part of the Karlsruhe Ring, demonstrated, in my opinion, much greater skill and better sense of the theatrical magic.  Yet critics mollycoddle Kratzer, who did indeed present La forza del destino as an opera of ideas, but he focused on his on his own idée fixe rather than on conveying the composer’s intentions. The action of Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto, based on Ángel de Saavedra’s play Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (with inserts from Schiller’s Wallenstein) is stretched over time and space. Kratzer jumped at the chance and transferred the whole thing from Spain to the United States, stretching it over time from the American Civil War to the present, and replacing Verdi’s fatalism with destiny determined by American imperialism and racially motivated violence. In both instances he was way off the mark: war in La forza del destino serves as a dramaturgical embellishment, while the Marquis di Calatrava opposes the relationship between Leonora and Don Alvaro not because of the colour of the latter’s skin but because of his social status. According to the caste system of 18th-century Spain, Don Alvaro was a step or two below a “pure” español from the Old Continent. No question of mésalliance: perhaps only a slightly worse match for the Marquis’ beloved daughter, all the more so that the young man was not highly thought of in Seville.

Tanja Ariane Baumgartner (Preziosilla). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Nevertheless, I decided to take it easy – there are few directors these days with time and willingness to delve into the complicated contexts of the opera. In any case, the beginning was promising: a scene in the Marquis’ room with a film running in the background – a stylised Gone with the Wind with a reversal of roles at that: a black Don Alvaro trying to persuade a white Donna Leonora to flee with him, while on stage we had a white Alvaro and a black Leonora. It looked as if we were in for some interesting playing with stereotypes – provided the Kratzer would be precise and consistent in his directing. He was not. Successive acts and scenes made up an overview of important events from the last 150 years of the history of the United States: sloppily thrown together, full of quotes from Kratzer’s (and other’s) earlier productions, crammed with superfluous details. And, above all, marked by the imagination of a film buff who stylises situations to make them look as if they came from The Birth of a Nation (the scene in the monastery turned into a secret Ku Klux Klan “temple”) or Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter (Act III set in – surprise, surprise – the reality of the Vietnam War) or Spike Lee’s films (the finale featuring a shooting at a motel). When it comes to the purely theatrical matter, Kratzer cannot really cope – wooden singers wander aimlessly around the stage, the humour of the character of Melitone is totally lost, and the numerous disguises and qui pro quos are completely unconvincing, occasionally even grotesque, as in Act II, when no one recognises a woman in a voluptuous Donna Leonora wearing a light-blue dress. On the other hand, there was no end to journalistic tricks – in the form of shocking photographs, quotes from speeches and allusions to front-page headlines. However, I have to do justice to the set and costume designer (Reiner Stellmeier), who provided all this chaos with a clean, lucid theatrical space arranged with modest means.

Craig Colclough (Fra Melitone) and Franz-Josef Selig (Padre Guardiano). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Musically, the performance was much better, although Jader Bignamini’s conducting could hardly be called inspired. The version presented in Frankfurt was the original, Petersburg one, with a short introduction in lieu of an overture, a different order of some scenes and an ultra-romantic finale in which Alvaro dies as well – the otherwise precise orchestral playing and polished choruses lacked exuberant energy and panache, which under true masters of the Verdian style make it possible to avoid longueurs in the narrative. The unquestionable star of the evening was Michelle Bradley (Donna Leonora) – a very young soprano with a surprisingly dark and meaty voice, wonderfully even across the registers and with beautifully coloured bottom notes. She still lacks freedom at the top – which was most acutely felt in the “angelic” prayer “Pace, pace mio Dio!” from the final scene of the opera – and the ability to differentiate moods in this big role. But in a few years Bradley may well become one of the best Leonoras in the world. By comparison, Hovhannes Ayvazyan making his debut as Don Alvaro was just decent – a handsome voice and more or less secure intonation are not quite enough to create a convincing portrayal of an outsider torn by emotions. Of the two male protagonists much more impressive was Christopher Maltman (Don Carlo) – an experienced singer but, again, making his debut in the role, a possessor of a baritone voice that may not be very Verdian but is beautifully rounded, resonant and rich in harmonics. The velvety-voiced Franz-Josef Selig was in a class of his own in the double role of Marquis di Calatrava and Padre Guardiano. I am full of admiration for Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, who bravely overcame all the pitfalls of the role of Preziosilla – dazzling but fiendishly difficult, because it is written high and is full of uncomfortable shifts between the registers. I was disappointed by Craig Colclough, vocally insipid and not at all funny as Fra Melitone – I suspect, however, that the director is largely to blame for this state of affairs.

All in all, a musical job well done, which Tobias Kratzer’s disorderly concept, which went against the libretto and the score, did not manage to thwart. It will be interesting to see when this kind of theatre – in some respects conservative, as it meets specific expectations of the audience – will go out of date. At some point in Act III, a memorable quote was projected upstage: “Somehow this madness must cease”. I’ve always said that Martin Luther King was a very wise man.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

There is no joking around with Die Zauberflöte. At least in Germany, where every self-respecting opera house has this masterpiece in its repertoire. To date, Berliners have been able to choose among August Everding’s canonic staging with scenery alluding to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s designs from 1816 (Staatsoper), Barrie Kosky’s madcap version in the silent film convention (Komische Oper), and Günter Krämer’s elegant and clear concept playing at the Deutsche Oper since 1991. The youngest audiences begin their education with Die Zauberflöte. Adult opera lovers treat it as one of the nation’s sanctities. Theatre directors use it to open the most important seasons. Student Benno Ohnesorg, a participant in a demonstration against the Shah of Iran’s visit, died taking a bullet from the police on 2 July 1967 in front of the Deutsche Oper building in Berlin – where Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, unaware of the tragedy in progress outside, was enjoying a performance of Die Zauberflöte.

Musicologists and theatre connoisseurs have been trying for years to solve the mystery of Mozart’s last opera – with its libretto so incoherent that at moments it barely holds together, but nonetheless captivating in the panache of its compositional genius. To make the matter even stranger, the score of Die Zauberflöte is also anything but homogeneous. The work includes everything: tragedy and buffo of the most diverse varieties, stanzaic songs and a Lutheran chorale, showpiece arias, grand choruses and masterfully-constructed ensembles. Despite its evident affinities with folk theatre and the Zauberoper convention fashionable in Vienna at the time, it is dogged by rumors that it is really a Masonic parable with a hidden message. Researchers point in vain to other sources of inspiration: chivalrous romances, Abbé Terrasson’s fantasy novel Sethos, Christoph Martin Wieland’s educational fairy tales from the Dschinnistan series. In the opinion of defenders of Mozart’s honour, the image of the composer laughing his head off at productions of the Freieshaustheater in suburban Vienna and, together with Schikaneder, writing a comedy for the enjoyment of the rabble somehow does not befit the dignity due to a masterpiece of this stature.

As a child, I was led astray. It happened at a certain artists’ house where we often went in the off-season, for my father had a laid-back attitude toward his children’s compulsory education. For lack of children my age, I filled up my time independently and made friends with the lady who ran the local library. There were only two kinds of books there: academic publications in the field of art history, and crime novels. The librarian – figuring that the former were too difficult for me – enthusiastically introduced me to the world of Sherlock Holmes stories, American noir fiction and Agatha Christie mysteries. Thanks to such an early initiation, I still have a weakness for thrillers and crime novels. This is why I have observed with growing interest the collaboration of Scottish composer Stuart McRae with Glasgow-resident writer Louise Welsh, who debuted in 2002 with a dark novel entitled The Cutting Room and quickly gained renown as a master of the psychological thriller. To date, the tandem has realized three suspense operas: the barely 15-minute Remembrance Day (2009); the one-act Ghost Patrol (2012), nominated for the Olivier prize; and an opera in four scenes entitled The Devil Inside (2016), based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp – unanimously considered one of the biggest events of the season at the Scottish Opera.

Paul Whelan (Captain Ross). Photo: James Glossop

We did not have to wait long for the next fruit of their collaboration. This time, McRae and Welsh decided to create a real opera: over two hours in length, comprised of three acts, with eight soloists and a quite sizeable orchestra. The main source of inspiration for Anthropocene – which had its world première a week ago in Glasgow – was the feature-length Danish documentary Expedition to the End of the World, directed by Daniel Dencik. The film, which is breathtaking in its imagery, tells the story of an unusual expedition to the fjords of northern Greenland. Aboard the traditional three-masted schooner were not only scientists, but also artists. Dencik recorded their conversations, which at a certain moment morphed into an amazing debate on human nature and the place of humanity in the natural environment. Welsh was fascinated, above all, by the motif of the ship as an enclosed micro-world, a peculiar miniature of societal life and the rules that govern it. The romantic sailboat was replaced by an ultra-modern research unit named ‘King’s Anthropocene’, on which a married couple of academics (Professor Prentice and her husband Charles) in quest of ice samples for research sailed in the company of the endeavour’s narcissistic sponsor Harry King; his spoiled daughter Daisy, an amateur travel photographer; a journalist and sensation-hunter named Miles; the ship’s engineer, Vasco; and Captain Ross, the ship’s commanding officer. The plot’s point of departure is a sudden break in the weather at the end of the Arctic summer. Three people who have disembarked onto the ice sheet to take samples are delayed in returning to the ship, which is consequently immobilized in the frozen fjord. The stragglers finally reach the ship and come back on board, dragging with them a huge block of ice with a human body frozen inside. At night, in a blaze of northern lights, Daisy detects some kind of motion above the surface of the ice block. Vasco crushes the block to pieces. From inside, a young woman wrapped in white breaks out in convulsions. Indubitably alive.

In the further course of the narrative, there appear Biblical threads, allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Inuit mythology and several Shakespeare plays, chief among them The Tempest. The sharply-drawn characters – disoriented by the presence of the mysterious being, condemned to a long wait for rescue, or perhaps even death amid the ice – helped the creators to build tension and bring the matter to a cruel, simultaneously pessimistic finale. Before we discover that the girl – called simply Ice – is in fact a beloved daughter sacrificed by her parents to deliver their fellow countrymen from bondage to the frost, a tangle of tragic events will take place aboard the ship. The researchers will understand too late that, in freeing Ice, they have brought her sacrifice to nothing. For ‘King’s Anthropocene’ to return home, blood must again be shed. Except that Ice was once sacrificed in a feeling of love. At the heart of the new ritual will lie hatred. The ice will melt, Ice will escape from the dangerous ‘tribe’ of conquerors, and those who remain alive will await deliverance not with hope, but with fear.

Jennifer France (Ice). Photo: James Glossop

This sounds like the synopsis of a thriller script rather than an opera libretto. And the entire endeavour could have ended in catastrophe, were it not for the phenomenal collaboration of all of the artists involved. Stuart McRae is an experienced, word-sensitive composer of stage music, and an unparalleled master of orchestral colour. Each of the protagonists of Anthropocene was provided with a different vocal language: the tenor part of Harry King (the superb Mark Le Brocq) at times resembles a vivid Baroque aria; the mistrustful Captain Ross (the somewhat bland-sounding Paul Whelan) speaks in the short sentences of a character taken, as it were, straight from the ‘marine’ operas of Britten; the velvet-voiced Vasco (Anthony Gregory) in the flirtation scene with Daisy (the convincing Sarah Champion) falls into a pastiche of Elizabethan song. Ice (the phenomenal, crystal-clear and cool-timbred soprano Jennifer France) alternates between spinning out unearthly vocalises in the top register – flowing, as it were, from another dimension – and emitting short, breathy phonemes that ring with the torment of a being restored to life against her will. The warm and passionate soprano of Jeni Bern (Prentice) forms a clear contrast with the commanding baritone of Stephen Gadd in the role of her husband Charles. The character of the arrogant journalist Miles – the accidental killer of Vasco, in the finale sacrificed by Prentice – was taken on with bravado by Benedict Nelson, to whom McRae entrusted a role thick with conflicting emotions. Compared to the Scottish composer’s earlier works, the music of Anthropocene conveys the impression of being a bit more conservative, but nonetheless consistent in terms of dramaturgy: ideally balanced between modality and tonality; in the northern lights scene, brilliant in the lightness of the shimmering orchestral texture; in the final storm, crushing with its mass of ambiguous sonorities moving towards the culmination. The most beautiful fragment of the opera, however, turned out to be Ice and Prentice’s duet from the penultimate scene of Act I: a true theatrum doloris, as it were from a 21^st-century Pergolesi, full of painful tensions between dissonance and consonance, built on a background of ostinato figures in the strings and harp.

Jeni Bern (Professor Prentice). Photo: James Glossop

Unfortunately, the staging did not always keep pace with the text (which was flawlessly declaimed by the singers) or with the music as a whole, which was under the care of the dependable, as usual, Stuart Stradford. Stage director and lighting designer Matthew Richardson, who has been working with the McRae/Welsh tandem since the première of Ghost Patrol, followed an otherwise justified path to convey the boundlessness of the Arctic with large sweeps of white; in so doing, however, he lost the mystery of this inhospitable land. Polar white sparkles in a thousand shades – in Richardson’s concept, however, it brought to mind rather associations with the sterility of hospital interiors, which he did not manage to overcome even with an image of the northern lights. The individual costumes and elements of the stage design (Samal Blak) – legible in the symbolic layer and sometimes very expressive as a theatrical symbol (the ghastly dummy of a skinned seal hung up head downward; the signs marking communication routes on board the ship, in Act II replaced by streaks of blood) – are not arranged coherently in space. So it is with all the greater admiration that I found the dramatic tension of the narrative could be felt and heard even with my eyes closed – thanks to the ideal combination of word with sound, and the masterful construction of the score.

Several melodies and phrases from the libretto – especially in the role of Ice – are running through my head to this day. That ‘Father’s knife [which] screamed against the whetstone’. The final words of the departing Ice, which sound like a curse (‘You are not my tribe’). Is the Anthropocene – the time of humanity’s reign – really supposed to turn out as the final, shortest era in the history of life on Earth? It might end up that way if we do not ponder in a timely manner the pitiful fate of Doctor Frankenstein and his contemporary imitators.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

Everything began to deteriorate in 1906, with the passing of Giuseppe Giacosa – the co-creator (together with Luigi Illica) of Puccini’s greatest operatic successes: La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Two years later, a scandal broke out: Elvira Puccini accused her husband of a romance with their youthful servant girl, Doria Manfredi. It seemed that she had strong arguments in hand. The composer had already previously earned himself a reputation as an incorrigible ladies’ man, and Doria completely idolised him. When Elvira started a rumour that she had caught the two in flagranti, the girl committed suicide. The autopsy showed that Doria had died a virgin. The servant’s family brought a lawsuit, Elvira was found guilty, Puccini negotiated with the lawyers for the conviction to be set aside, and paid Manfredi a princely sum in damages. The tragedy of Doria tormented him to his life’s end. The composer, who had always made it his goal for the audience to cry at performances of his operas, had himself fallen victim to an intrigue that deceptively resembled Illica and Giacosa’s earlier libretti. And he was horrified to realise that the world, on the brink of the Great War, had occupied itself with other matters. ‘It is very difficult to write an opera now,’ he complained in a letter to Illica. The American success of La Fanciulla del West, created in collaboration with other librettists, turned out not to be reproducible in Europe. La Rondine – after its world première in 1917 – quickly fell into oblivion. Subsequent ideas for pieces based on motifs from works by Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Kipling and Tolstoy landed in the circular file.

Finally, Puccini decided to set forth into the unknown. In 1919, he invited Italian journalist, theatrical critic and playwright Renato Simoni – who was friendly with Giuseppe Adami, the librettist for La Rondine and Il Tabarro, written a year later – to Torre del Lago. Simoni proposed that Puccini take a journey into the land of myth. ‘And Gozzi? What if we just returned to the œuvre of Gozzi?’ The composer agreed to the writer’s suggestion. He asked a certain lady who had seen a famous production by Max Reinhardt at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater back before the war to send him photos from that show. He decided the matter was worth his interest – on the condition that the intrigue be simplified and shown through the prism of the contemporary audience’s sensibilities: ‘Simoni’s, Adami’s and mine’.

Andrea Mastroni (Timur), Gregory Kunde (Calaf), and Yolanda Auyanet (Liù) – with Joan Martín Royo (Ping),  Vicenç Esteve (Pang), and Juan Antonio Sanabria (Pong). Photo: Javier del Real

The libretto of Turandot diverges far from its prototype. It even conflicts with Schiller’s Romantic, moralizing adaptation produced in Weimar by Goethe in 1802. One could risk the assertion that Puccini’s last opera is an homage to poor Doria, who took on the form of Turandot’s Liù – unhappily in love with Calaf and faithful unto death – who brings to mind associations with the female leads in the composer’s earlier works: the crueler the fate prepared for them together with the librettists, the more Puccini pitied them. Both the soulless princess and her unyielding admirer – unlike Liù – impress the viewer as beings not of this world, to whom only the final ‘transfiguration’ can impart more human characteristics. And that was precisely Puccini’s downfall. He struggled with the protagonists’ final duet for months, unaware that his own days had been numbered by throat cancer. He agreed only to the fourth version of the last scene, sent by Adami in October 1924, after four years of work on the piece as a whole. Next to a barely-sketched melody from Turandot’s part, he made an intriguing note: ‘poi Tristano’ – ‘then Tristan’. Researchers are wracking their brains to this day, wondering what he had in mind. To finish the opera with an allusion to Wagner’s masterpiece? Or perhaps – more probably – to throw down the gauntlet before Wagner, to describe the princess’ transfiguration by love in a completely different sonic language, to blaze completely new trails for Italian opera, which over the past century had become ossified? We shall never find out. At the world première, Toscanini lay down his baton after Liù’s death scene.

Turandot is one of the 20^th century’s unfinished masterpieces. A mysterious work – on the one hand, literally boiling with melodic imagination, as if Puccini, sensing his impending death, was trying to fit in material for several operas which would no longer have the chance to be written; and on the second, surprisingly innovative, combining references to Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and the French Impressionists with allusions to the form’s tradition filtered through a fin-de-siècle sensibility; and on the third, a brilliant failure, a musical expression of powerlessness in conflict with a subject as tempting as it was risky for an artist lost in the land of fairy tales. And like most 20^th-century operatic masterpieces – including those that are finished – it requires a cast that is all but impossible to put together, a highly competent conductor and a stage director gifted with extraordinary imagination.

Gregory Kunde. Photo: Javier del Real

The decision to entrust the new production of Turandot at Madrid’s Teatro Real to the care of Robert Wilson turned out to be more than appropriate. The aesthetic language of this avant-garde classic’s productions arises out of the most noble traditions of Japanese theatre – clarity of space, an economy of acting closely bound up with the symbolic sphere, sensitivity to colour and the tiniest changes in lighting. Wilson creates a theatrical illusion with simple means: through the use of a cyclorama, movable panels, abstract projections, simple props that all the more bring out the gestural language he has elaborated – superficially foreign, but sufficiently precise and suggestive that its figures soon combine into a coherent semantic whole. He conveys the characters’ emotions with micro-movements of the body; he paints physical sensations with fields of light and color. After a moment of disorientation, even the untrained viewer begins to associate trembling fingers with Calaf’s anxiety; the flashes of red taking over the entire stage, with the pain of Liù under torture; the grotesque dances of the three Mandarins, drawn from the commedia dell’arte, with the inhuman etiquette of Turandot’s court. The entire concept is dazzling in its visual beauty, which despite this does not eclipse the individual scenes; among others, the symbolic death of the little slave girl, who slowly bows her head over folded hands – like Buddha sinking into Nirvana – after which she literally departs into non-existence, reeling, less and less visible, among the members of her own funeral procession.

Wilson’s staging is also supportive to the singers – for most of the show, they are set facing the audience, unencumbered by superfluous props, creating their roles in a comfortable acoustic space. The pre-première period did not pass without certain turbulences in the cast – Nina Stemme, laid low by illness, withdrew from the role of Turandot; there was also a last-minute substitution in the role of Liù. My fears notwithstanding, Irene Theorin built a convincing character of the cruel princess – with a voice of sometimes rather unpleasant colour, but intonationally secure (despite a wide vibrato), rich in overtones and skillfully diversified in expression (e.g. the superbly shaded phrase ‘Principessa Lou-Ling’ in the aria ‘In questa reggia’). I was somewhat less impressed with Yolanda Auyanet, who is very musical and technically competent, but possesses a soprano too dark and dense for the role of Liù. The extraordinarily well-favoured, subtly-delivered bass of Andrea Mastroni was perfect in the role of Timur. My sincere admiration goes to the three Mandarins – Vicenç Esteve (Pang), Juan Antonio Sanabria (Pong), and especially the phenomenal Joan Martín-Royo (Ping) – ideally matched in vocal terms and, unlike the rest of the cast, saddled by the stage director with a whole host of complex acting tasks, in which they acquitted themselves impeccably. But the true hero of the evening turned out to be Gregory Kunde (Calaf). This singer is unstoppable: after a forty-year stage career, the bel canto master is more and more often taking on heroic roles – and that, with superb results. His tenor, although it has become slightly duller in the lower register, is still impressive in its large range, extraordinary culture of phrasing and freedom of vocal production in the highest notes.

Irene Theorin (Turandot). Photo: Javier del Real

Nicola Luisotti led the orchestra of the Teatro Real with vigour, at very brisk tempi, but too often emphasizing juiciness and power of sound – at the expense of nuances in colour and texture. It also sometimes happened that the sound of the chorus was drowned out by the massive orchestra, which in the case of Turandot – which is exceeded in its masterful painting of the crowd’s moods probably only by the operas of Mussorgsky – should be considered a serious interpretative flaw. All of the above notwithstanding, the fact remains that the ‘Gira la cote, gira, gira!’ scene sent shivers up and down my spine.

The Madrid Turandot was performed with the finale by Franco Alfano, who conscientiously collected the dead composer’s notes and, based on them, whipped up a completed version that was correct but far from Puccini’s unfulfilled intention. That intention was also missed by Luciano Berio, the author of a considerably more interesting and much more rarely-played reconstruction from 2001: he took the indication ‘poi Tristano’ to heart and ended the opera with an almost literal quote from Wagner. The longer I compare the two versions, the better I understand Toscanini, who presented the work in its unfinished form at the world première. Out of respect for Puccini, who thought about the solution to his Turandot’s final riddle for so long that death finally overtook him.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

Thus reads the diary of the Queen’s Westminster 16^th regiment for 25 December 1914. On the Western front, a positional war was in progress – the parties to the conflict were facing each other in a continuous line of trenches, shelters and barbed wire entanglements. The night before – near Ypres, where the first major battle of the Great War had played out a month earlier – a little group of privates and non-commissioned officers had made a spontaneous attempt at fraternization. The initiative had come from the Germans, who had decorated their trenches with lights, and then begun to shout out holiday wishes to the Welshmen dug in on the other side. Shortly thereafter, they began singing carols together. Then the soldiers moved on to the sadder part of Christmas Eve – they buried their fallen in a common grave on neutral ground, finishing the ceremony with a performance of Psalm 23 accompanied by a bagpiper from the Gordon Highlanders 6^th battalion. The officers proclaimed a truce until dawn of the second day of the holidays, commanding their subordinates to remain in their trenches. The soldiers did not obey – for the whole next day, they exchanged provisions, alcohol and little presents in the strip between the fortified lines. Reportedly, they even played a football match. After the truce was over, they didn’t even think of returning to battle. At some points on the front, they managed to extend the cease-fire up to 3 January. The idyll in the trenches was cut short by snipers shooting at anyone who tried to get through to the enemy side. From that moment on, the commanders moved their divisions from place to place more often, in order to prevent further incidents of fraternization with the enemy.

This truce really did happen, and has been commemorated in dozens of plays, songs, novels and films. Kenneth Branagh wove it into the action of the cinema version of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, which was transported into oneiric scenery from the Great War. In 2005, it served as the basis for the war film Joyeux Noël directed by Christian Carion. A few years later, Mark Campbell refashioned the film script into the libretto for the opera Silent Night, commissioned by the Minnesota Opera in a co-production with Opera Philadelphia. The music was composed by Kevin Puts, a just under 40-year-old graduate of the Eastman School of Music and Yale University. The world première in November 2011 at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in Saint Paul, Minnesota was received with thunderous applause. A year later, Puts’ debut opera received a Pulitzer Prize. In 2014, it saw a staging in Wexford. Three weeks ago, as part of musical celebrations of the 100^th anniversary of the armistice in Compiègne, it came to Opera North, presented in a semi-staged version in the auditorium at Leeds Town Hall, a building which – in the opinion of Zygmunt Bauman – imitated simultaneously ‘pharaohs’ palaces, Greek temples and princes’ courts’.

Geoffrey Dolton (Ponchel) and Quirijn de Lang (Lieutenant Audebert). Photo: Tristram Kenton

Yes, Puts’ music is rather a brilliant pastiche than the product of the composer’s original creative imagination. It is true that Campbell’s libretto rehashes an array of cultural and literary stereotypes. But nevertheless, the one combined with the other is electrifying – it touches the most sensitive strings of the viewer’s heart, reflexively bringing before the eyes a picture of the war that destroyed the bodies and souls of millions of people, trivialized violence and brought to life the demons of totalitarianism. Puts masterfully builds up and then stratifies the narrative. The pseudo-Mozartean duet in the prologue, when the decision to invade Belgium and France interrupts a show at one of Berlin’s opera houses, drowns in a massive orchestral sound that brings to mind associations with the scores of Stravinsky and Varèse. In the extraordinary aria of French lieutenant Audebert – who cannot concentrate on counting up the losses in his division, broken as he is by longing for his wife and their baby born in his absence – one hears ominous echoes of Pelléas et Mélisande. The sonic atmosphere in the German trenches is dominated by references to the idiom of Richard Strauss; and in the British ranks, to the œuvre of Britten. What emerges from an apparent chaos of wartime lullabies, sung simultaneously in three languages, is a masterful, charmingly peaceful polyphony.

If this work were staged without conviction, it would border on kitsch. However, the soloists and ensembles of Opera North treated it in a manner consistent with its creators’ intentions: as an homage to a Europe that no longer exists and has passed into oblivion, taking with it polished forms, conventions and styles. Silent Night talks about this Europe in a language that would easily have reached the hearts of the men going into the trenches like cattle to the slaughter, and the women left at home quaking at the sound of each knock on the door. Stage director Tim Albery got this and resisted the temptation to ‘literalize’ the battlefield scenes, focusing instead on very precise definition of the characters and collective protagonists. The soldiers gathered on the auditorium stage are separated by a distance symbolic rather than physical – highlighted by the differences in uniforms and accessories (superb costumes and very economical stage design by Hannah Clark), the language barrier, the peculiarities of body language. The space dividing up the individual groups of choristers and orchestra musicians brings to mind associations with a dense network of ditches and trenches. There is neither blood nor spilled guts, but even so, one can see who is dead (the wonderful scene in which a few soldiers lie down onstage as if to sleep; a moment later, their comrades in arms come to bury them). The rest is filled out by suggestive lighting (Thomas C. Hase) and fragments from historical film chronicles projected onto the façade of the City Hall organ.

Stuart Laing as a German soldier with Richard Burkhard (Lieutenant Horstmayer). Photo: Tristram Kenton

Essentially all of the singers – except perhaps for Máire Flavin, whose soprano is not sufficiently focused and beautiful to be convincing in the role of great opera diva Anna Sørensen – managed to create memorable characters. Gifted with a clear, highly resonant tenor, Rupert Charlesworth phenomenally conveyed the transformation of Nikolaus Sprink from an idol of Berlin’s stages to a soldier broken by the cruelty of war. Dutch baritone Quirijn de Lang, impressive in his subtle and cultured phrasing, turned out to be ideal in the role of the melancholic Audebert. Richard Burkhard and Adrian Clarke were perfect in the other two baritone roles: Lieutenant Horstmayer and Father Palmer. The audience’s heart, however, was stolen by Geoffrey Dolton in the role of Ponchel, Audebert’s orderly, who made the best coffee in the world, carried an alarm clock in his bosom so as not to forget about his family home, and finally fell victim to friendly fire while returning from a secret visit to his mother behind the German front line. The entire musical narrative was deftly taken in hand by Nicholas Kok, who united the Opera North orchestra and several choral ensembles under his baton.

Alex Banfield (Jonathan Dale), Christopher Nairne (William Dale), and Rupert Charlesworth (Nikolaus Sprink) with the Chorus of Opera North, Students of the Royal Northern College of Music, Opera North Youth Chorus, and the Soldiers’ Chorus – Community Singers. Photo: Tristram Kenton

In one of the final scenes of Silent Night, Ponchel dies in Audebert’s arms and passes the message to him that his newborn son’s name is Henri. A moment later, the furious French general disciplines Audebert and, as punishment, sends him to another military operation post. Audebert is the general’s son. His father sends him to Verdun – a place even a lame dog has never heard of, where the lieutenant will have no opportunity to fraternize with the enemy. Thus ends this opera about a short reconciliation with tragic consequences. Thus ends hope that the melancholic lieutenant will ever return from the front and meet his child. Thus begins the bitter irony of the Great War that was meant to put an end to all wars.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

A certain enterprising culture manager and former director of several leading opera houses in Poland went on a trip to Bilbao, after which he contended that there is no opera there. At least that is the conclusion to be drawn from his column of four years ago, in which he did not resist the temptation to make biting comments about a certain director who happened to succeed the author in one of his more important director’s posts.  The columnist marched off to the Teatro Arriaga, found some ‘dramas, comedies, musicals, operettas and zarzuelas’ in the repertoire, but as far as operas were concerned, spotted only two unfamiliar titles. The problem is that the gorgeous Neo-Baroque building on the banks of the Nervión River was never a real opera house to begin with. The heart of opera in Bilbao beats somewhere completely different. The columnist’s hated competitor has collaborated with the local ABAO-OLBE association and directed at least three productions in the capital of Vizkaya province, among them Szymanowski’s King Roger with Mariusz Kwiecień in the title role and Łukasz Borowicz on the conductor’s podium.The existence of all of the aforementioned parties cannot be denied; neither can that of Artur Ruciński, who sang the role of Marcello in La Bohème no more than a month ago – and this was by no means his first performance in Bilbao.

It all began in 1953, when four opera enthusiasts – José Luis de la Rica, Guillermo Videgain, José Antonio Lipperheide and Juan Elúa – formulated the statute of the Asociación Bilbaína de Amigos de la Ópera and went out into the world to find performers for their first post-war season. The program included five titles (Tosca, Aida, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Favorite), under the baton of Giuseppe Podestá and with casts comprised mostly of soloists from La Scala Milan. The festivals took place annually until 1989. The shows were accompanied by recitals of true stars: Maria Callas herself performed on 17 September 1959 with the orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu. In 1990, the association opened its first opera season, comprised of six productions – among others, Stefania Toczyska and Alfredo Kraus shone as Léonor and Fernand, respectively, in a revival of La Favorite. Until 1999, the Bilbao Opera was headquartered at the Coliseo Albia theatre, which presently houses an elegant restaurant and a casino. A year later, the shows were moved to the brand new Palacio Euskalduna, built according to a design by Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios – the reddish steel construction in the shape of a grounded ship was erected in the place of the former shipyard, not far from the famous Guggenheim Museum. The palace boasts the largest opera stage in Europe – over 600 m² larger than the supposed record-holder, namely Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera. The ABAO-OLBE association gives a total of about 50 shows per season; for over ten years now, it has had no debt, and over half of the financing for its productions comes from own coffers. As far as performance quality is concerned, critical opinion places it among the top three opera houses in Spain, alongside the Teatro Real and the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Let us add that over 20 opera ensembles are active in the country.

Tiji Faveyts (Rocco), Mikeldi Atxalandabaso (Jaquino), Anett Fritsch (Marzelline), and Elena Pankratova (Leonore). Photo: E. Moreno Esquibel

And so, in the course of 60-odd years, they accumulated 999 shows. ABAO management decided to celebrate their 1000^th night at the opera with a staging of Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, about which I once wrote that it had de facto three premières, four overtures and two titles, but even so, the composer was not satisfied with its successive corrections and revisions. This peculiar and, in many musicologists’ opinion, internally broken masterpiece gained new life after World War II. Considered (not entirely rightly) as a universal apotheosis of peace, freedom and marital love, it was heard already in September 1945 on the stage of Berlin’s Theater des Westens – the only house to survive the wartime turmoil. Ten years later, Karl Böhm re-inaugurated the Wiener Staatsoper’s operations with a production of Fidelio. In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the audience of a new staging in Dresden received the prisoners’ chorus with applause that, at each successive showing, began increasingly to resemble a political demonstration. The première in Bilbao – the largest city in the land of the Basques, a people without a country – was set for the day before the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. A year previously, the stage of the Palacio Euskalduna had hosted a production from the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, with stage direction by José Carlos Plaza and stage design by Francisco Leal. I arrived in time for the next, 1001^st show.

Plaza and Leal have been collaborating with each other for years – in 2000, they created a riveting vision of Penderecki’s The Devils of Loudun for the Teatro Regio in Turin. Their Fidelio is equally ascetic, awakens the imagination in the same way and is painted with light in a similarly suggestive manner. Almost throughout the show, the stage is dominated by a rough cuboid – a symbolic wall between the prison and the outside world – which alternatingly opens slightly, rises, hangs just over the head of Florestan, and in the finale, at last gives way to a somewhat foggy and still ominous-looking distant panorama of Seville. In the purely visual plane, the staging works impeccably. The theatrical gesture and drawing of the characters left a bit more to be desired – the director gave the performers a limited number of tasks, which were played over and over again without any special conviction.The otherwise interesting idea to show scenes of violence in modern prisons (from the torturers of the Franco regime to the bestial electroshock tortures at Abu Ghraib), in the background in slow motion, somewhat disturbed the musical narrative in Act I. Jaquino – without regard for the libretto and at variance with the composer’s intentions – was created as a thoughtless brute, triumphing in the finale over Marzelline, who has been cruelly mocked by fate. Leonore raising a shovel at Don Pizarro – instead of threatening him with a pistol – triggered a paroxysm of laughter on my part that, while short, was hard to stop. But these are details, all the easier to forgive in that – on the huge stage of the Palacio Euskalduna – the production team managed to create an oppressive, stifling mood of prison claustrophobia and a feeling of gloom that nothing would chase away.

Peter Wedd (Florestan) and Elena Pankratova. Photo: E. Moreno Esquibel

I did not expect, however, that the Basque Fidelio would make such an impression on me in musical terms. The indisputable hero of the evening was Juanjo Mena, who – leading the Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonikoa with clockwork precision, at balanced tempi, with Classical moderation – brought out considerably more nuances from the score than one finds in ‘proto-Romantic’ perspectives that suggest not-entirely-justified associations with the later œuvre of Meyerbeer and Wagner. While Mena – following Mahler’s example – decided to insert Leonora III before the finale of Act II, he did not try to convince us that he was thereby recapitulating the whole. Rather, he focused on the purely colouristic values of this overture, which were brought out with the same solicitous care as the often-neglected episodes in Act I (chief among them the phenomenally played out quartet ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’, in which each of the protagonists shows completely different emotions: enchantment, fear, jealousy and generous consent). With equal awe, I observed how Mena led the soloists – in the, despite everything, difficult acoustics of the Palacio Euskalduna. Elena Pankratova (Leonore) repeated her success from Seville – with a dramatic soprano balanced throughout its registers, free and beautifully rounded at the top. Anett Fritsch created a deeply moving character of Marzelline, captivating in her lyrical phrasing. She was decently partnered by the intonationally secure, comely tenor of Mikeldi Atxalandabaso (Jaquino). An experienced performer of the role of Don Pizarro, Sebastian Holecek sometimes charged ahead a bit too much, but in the duet with Tiji Faveyts (Rocco) in Act I, both singers managed to scale the heights of interpretation. Egils Siliņš breathed an unexpected warmth into the episodic role of Don Fernando. Peter Wedd created probably the most convincing Florestan in his career to date – with a secure, at the same time dark, consciously harsh and very mature voice. His singing now contains echoes of the later interpretations of Jon Vickers; I think it is high time that opera house directors try him out in the heavier Britten repertoire – above all, the title role in Peter Grimes.

Finale. Photo: E. Moreno Esquibel

Opera exists in Bilbao. It makes itself known much more confidently and wisely than not a few vainglorious and too generously-financed houses in Europe. It understands convention, it appreciates that Fidelio is a reflection of ideas, a musical picture of demons with which the composer himself struggled. It takes such masters as Juanjo Mena and his collaborators for the ideas to speak to us louder than the people.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

Every year with an eight at the end – the so-called “osmičkový year” – is a time of important anniversaries for the Czechs. Mostly bleak anniversaries. In May 1618 two imperial envoys and their secretary were thrown out of a window of the Hradcany Castle. The victims of the second Defenestration of Prague (or, in fact, the third, because the second one, of 1483, is hardly mentioned by Western historians) did not suffer much, but the incident led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. In March 1948 the body of the then Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, was found next to the building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – a month earlier the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had seized power in the country, following a coup d’état. An official investigation delivered the verdict of suicide, but the Czechs knew better and, as it turned out, they were right. The accident during which Masaryk “jumped out of the top floor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, closing the window behind him”, was regarded as a political murder and became known as the third defenestration. August 1968 was marked by the beginning of Operation Danube, a fraternal invasion of the Warsaw Pact forces, which put an end to the Prague Spring.  In August 1928 Janáček went on a trip to Štramberk with Kamila Stösslová and her son, caught a cold, then went down with pneumonia and died – in Doctor Klein’s sanatorium in Ostrava. Ten years later Czechoslovakia was forced to accept the terms of the Munich Diktat, as a result of which Germany seized the Sudetenland and northern Moravia, while Poland took Zaolzie.

It might seem that it is difficult for the Czechs to celebrate even the centenary of their independence, as the state proclaimed on 28 October 1918 has long ceased to exist. Fortunately, our southern neighbours have both a sense of humour and distance from their own history. When Ostrava was preparing for a parade of historic vehicles and was building a replica of a city district from the 1920s, the city was decorated with posters advertising the Leoš Janáček Music Marathon featuring a long-distance runner with the composer’s head, headphones in his ears and starting number 100 on his tank top. The programme of the four-day festival, launched by the local Philharmonic, featured sixteen concerts (including three outside Ostrava) and one opera performance – in total, forty works by the patron of the festival performed exclusively by the natives. For our southern neighbours have another pleasant character trait – they are authentically proud of their musical heritage, have magnificent performing traditions and no complexes whatsoever. In other words, when an important jubilee approaches, they do not have to inaugurate it with a concert featuring foreign stars. They will play and sing their Janáček themselves – and will usually do it better than many imported musicians of international renown.

Photo: janacek2018.cz

This is all the more remarkable given the fact that the Ostrava Philharmonic Orchestra does not even have a decent concert hall. It will have to wait for it until at least until 2023, after a competition, whose entrants include the Katowice-based architectural Konior Studio, has been decided. In the meantime the orchestra works and performs in the local Culture Centre (DKMO) – a gloomy relic of a bygone era, erected in the late 1950s after a socialist realist design by Jaroslav Fragner, an otherwise excellent architect, who parted with the aesthetics of functionalism for good after the war. Chairs in the auditorium are placed as needed, the organ case is installed diagonally by one of the walls, sound travels as it wishes – and yet the six concerts at the DKMO played to a nearly full house, while the performers and organisers worked miracles to curb the capricious acoustics of the interior.

I came to Ostrava to attend the whole marathon and listen to as much Janáček as I could. The regrettable absence of this composer from Polish opera houses and concert halls is something I write about whenever I can (let the Czechs not be misled by the guest appearance of Poznań’s Teatr Wielki at this year’s Janáček Brno Festival: Jenůfa was added to the repertoire of the Poznań company primarily because of Alvis Hermanis’ famous staging). The situation is much better in other countries, but no one has come up with the idea of organising a separate festival devoted to Janáček with a programme featuring compositions rarely performed even in the Czech Republic (e.g. juvenile pieces for string orchestra and Žárlivost, still “Dvořákian” in spirit, which was initially intended as an overture to Jenůfa). Even the best staged and musically perfect operas will not seduce the listeners with the unique melody of the Czech language, which can be conveyed only by Janáček’s compatriots. The same applies to songs, choral works and oratorios. Less obviously, the Czechs do not give in to the temptation to “prettify” his instrumental oeuvre, which in most foreign interpretations sounds too smooth, too rounded, without properly highlighted colour effects and textural contrasts.

Tomáš Kořínek (right) and the Czech Philharmonic Chorus from Brno. Photo: Martin Kusýn

I will long remember the performance by the Pavel Haas Quartet, especially their interpretation of String Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata” – aggressive, sometimes violent, using broad bow strokes to paint a musical picture of a conflict between corporeality and need for true affection. The mastery of the four Prague musicians found an excellent acoustic setting in this case: the concert was held in one of the buildings of the former Hlubina coal mine in Dolní Vítkovice, a huge industrial site  included in the UNESCO World Heritage list. Once again I was able to see that the best conductors are recruited from among truly versatile musicians – Ondřej Vrabec, who conducted the Ostrava Youth Orchestra and the wind Marathon Ensemble during two concerts at the DKMO, is also an eminent French horn player, a soloist with many orchestras, including the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as a member of the PhilHarmonia Octet and Brahms Trio Prague. I was able to admire the enthusiasm and youthful virtuosity of Jan Mráček, who two days after his dazzling performance in Dvořák’s Violin Concerto led the Janáček String Orchestra from the pulpit in Idyll and Suite, the patron’s youthful works; I also admired the profound emotionality and architectural mastery in the playing of Jan Bartoš, a brilliant interpreter of Janáček’s piano legacy. What brought me the greatest joy, however, was Czech singing. At a concert at the Church of St. Wenceslaus the tenor Tomáš Kořínek and the Czech Philharmonic Chorus from Brno, conducted by Petr Fiala,  treated me to a very interesting polonicum: five-part Otčenáš inspired by a painting cycle by Józef Męcina-Krzesz, who was so mercilessly mocked by Boy-Żeleński in his A Word or Two (“Whole Poland on this day rejoices afresh / While singing loud praises to Kręcina Mesz”). After his slightly underwhelming performance in The Eternal Gospel at the opening evening, Ľudovít Ludha, an experienced tenor, bowled me over completely in Zápisník zmizelého with a performance that was spot-on when it came to Janáček’s vocal idiom. Kateřina Kněžíková, a singer with a bright, beautifully open soprano, and Roman Hoza, who added to it his velvety, very lyrical baritone, gave a magnificent concert of Moravian and Hukvaldy poetry in songs – I was consumed with envy, because, listening to two Czechs, I could understand more than when listening to Karłowicz’s songs interpreted by many Polish singers.

Osud at the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre. Photo: Martin Popelář

There was also a moving trip to the nearby village of Hukvaldy, where the composer was born. We were accompanied by Jiří Zahrádka, the curator of the Janáček collection at the Moravian Museum in Brno and author of many critical editions of his works, including Osud. I saw this three-act opera for the first time last year at Opera North. Despite an excellent cast and fine orchestral playing I was inclined to agree with most musicologists that it is one of weak items in Janáček’s oeuvre. In Ostrava I began to appreciate the unique dramaturgy of the piece – more thanks to the music than the conventional and not quite polished staging by Jiři Nekvasil at the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre. After less than ten days from the premiere the soloists had not yet eased into their roles (especially Josef Moravec singing the fiendishly difficult part of Živný) and the orchestra, conducted by Jakub Klecker, did occasionally stumble – but it was a genuine Janáček, without unnecessary alterations, swinging between drama and grotesque, with a plethora of brilliantly drawn characters and excellent dialogues. I have long been saying that Polish directors do not tackle Janáček, because none of his operas can be dismissed as a silly story.

The marathon ended on the centenary of the proclamation of Czechoslovakia’s independence. The Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Jiří Rožeň, a young and promising conductor. There was the national anthem, there were the official speeches – short, to the point and not read out – there was Taras Bulba (not played in Poland also for patriotic reasons) and at the end a truly rousing rendition of Sinfonietta, one of the greatest masterpieces of musical modernism.  I really envy the Czechs: they can celebrate their jubilee with a piece known to any cultured citizen of the world, if only from reading Haruki Murakami.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

At the age of 25 Louis-Désiré Véron became a doctor of medicine and went on to work in Paris hospitals for a few years. But he did not enjoy a great career as a doctor. One’s position in the medical world at the time was determined not only by knowledge and skills (Véron wasn’t lacking in this department; he even published a monograph on the treatment of oral thrush in infants), but primarily by wealth. Véron did not come from a rich family, nor did he have an endearing appearance. But he did have a flair for business. After the death of an apothecary, he took over the patent for making cough candies and made quite a fortune.  In 1829 he founded the literary magazine Revue de Paris, whose collaborators included Eugène Scribe, a master of pièce bien faite, one of the most talented, influential and prolific librettists in the history of opera. Two years later Véron acquired a franchise for the Paris Opera, privatised by the government of the July Monarchy. He admitted openly that he knew next to nothing about music. But he knew whom to ask for advice and, above all, he had an excellent sense of public feeling. The five years of Véron’s directorship is regarded as the beginning of the golden era of grand opéra – a time when the Parisians’ collective imagination was moved by the compositions of Auber, Meyerbeer and Halévy, the dazzling set designs of Henri Duponchel and the phenomenal voices of Adolphe Nourrit and Cornélie Falcon. It began with the premiere of Robert le diable, after which Chopin announced the birth of a masterpiece of a new school, while Słowacki enthused in a letter to his mother, “never in my life have I seen such a big church like the one created by the theatrical illusion”. Encouraged by this success, Véron commissioned Meyerbeer to write another opera, Les Huguenots, loosely based on Prosper Mérimée’s Chronique du règne de Charles IX.

Work on the piece lasted nearly five years. At that time Meyerbeer was well-established as a composer and had amassed a considerable wealth, so he could afford the luxury of unprecedented source studies (he began with in-depth studies of 16th-century musical manuscripts), hiring two librettists, Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps, and consultations with Gaetano Rossi, with whom he had earlier worked on his Il crociato in Egitto (1824). The premiere took place after Véron’s resignation as director of the Paris Opera, on 29 February 1836. It was an even bigger triumph than that of Robert le diable: even envious fellow composers not always well-disposed towards Meyerbeer proclaimed Les Huguenots to be the crowning achievement of the genre, although Berlioz could not resist a snide remark that the score resembled a “musical encyclopaedia” and that there was enough material for ten separate operas. Three years later the work was presented on the other side of the Atlantic. It was staged all over the world, sometimes with different titles to avoid religious conflicts. After several productions in the Soviet Union a suggestion was made to adapt the libretto and turn Les Huguenots into an opera about the Decembrists, but the idea was never put into practice. In the 1890s the opera was presented at the Metropolitan Opera as a “night of the seven stars”, with the cast including the likes of Lilian Nordica, Sofia Scalchi, Reszke brothers and Pol Plançon. The thousandth performance at the Paris Opera took place in May 1906; over the next three decades the opera was performed 118 more times and then it disappeared from the capital for over eighty years.

Les Huguenots at the Opera Bastille. Photo: Agathe Poupeney

Why? It is commonly believed that staging this monster requires an incredible amount of effort, while finding a decent Raoul borders on the impossible. Indeed, we are well past the glory days of grand opéra, a time when the principal tenor earned twenty-five thousand francs a year, the principal conductor three times less, and the minor members of the corps de ballet had to resort to prostitution in order not to starve. Indeed, the last tenor capable of singing all the high notes in the main role of Les Huguenots cleanly, freely and in full voice may have been the late lamented Franco Corelli. Yet this does not change the fact among all the composers of the genre Meyerbeer has suffered the most at the hands of history, and his operas began to return to the stage only in this century. It seems that this was caused not only by musical factors – but also by a systematic rise of anti-Semitism in France, from the Dreyfus Affair to the establishment of Vichy France.  After the war grand opéra declined rapidly and is only now recuperating. Meyerbeer’s turn came last – it is good that his famous Les Huguenots opened the 350th anniversary season at the Paris Opera, organically linked as it is to the very term of grand opéra.

The staging was entrusted to Andreas Kriegenburg, the famous self-taught German director (a carpenter by profession and former member of the technical staff in Magdeburg), who acquired most of his directing experience in drama theatre. He got into opera more or less ten years ago, but has been quite active in the field, recently mainly in Dresden and Munich. Kriegenburg regards himself not as a deconstructionist but as a storyteller, although – as he confessed in a conversation with Iwona Uberman – “I don’t want to be just a servant to the author, I prefer to decode the spirit of the play and present it on stage, looking at it from my perspective and through myself as a person. In fact, I always try to get closer to a work, even when I seemingly go further and further away from it.” It sounds a bit non-committal – as does, in a way, the Paris production of Les Huguenots. Apparently played out in a not too distant future (at least as that is what is suggested by the director’s prologue before the curtain rises), but, in fact, it happens everywhere and nowhere, in Harald B. Thor’s minimalist decorations and Tanja Hofmann’s historicising costumes. There would be nothing wrong with this, if Kriegenburg had not overdone the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt and instead had gone a little deeper into the meaning of the work.

Yosep Kang (Raoul), Lisette Oropesa (Marguerite de Valois), Ermonela Jaho (Valentine), Paul Gay (Saint-Bris), and Florian Sempey (Nevers). Photo: Agathe Poupeney

The result? The director’s cold, calculated vision clashed painfully with the powerful emotions of the score. Kriegenburg likes to work with the bodies of the actors and re-enact certain situations ad nauseam with the persistence and tenacity worthy of Marthaler – so he has turned Les Huguenots into a nearly four-hour abstract ballet, pushing into the background not only credible psychological portraits of the protagonists but also the narrative itself. Before I sussed out who was who at the great feast at Count of Nevers’, I was half an hour into Act I. Act III began quite coherently, but ended grotesquely: the Catholics and the Protestants whacking each other looked more like school girls from good families fighting with their dainty umbrellas. The idea of turning cold steel in the famous Blessing of the Daggers scene  (“Gloire, gloire au grand Dieu vengeur!”) into a phallic symbol and making the oath resemble an act of collective masturbation would not perhaps be so stupid, if it were not for one tiny detail – the scene lasts for more than a quarter of an hour. We know Kriegenburg’s penchant for slapstick and convention breaking, but the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in the finale was too suggestive of Peter Sellers and his immortal portrayal of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther.  However, there were some gems as well: for example, the horribly dynamic death of one of the victims of the massacre, who, after being struck with a sword, begins to spin on the upper platform like a balloon, broken free and suddenly pricked. Alas, concepts that work well in postdramatic theatre fall flat in opera – I’m afraid that the spinning girl may have been missed by many spectators.

I have to admit, however, that Kriegenburg’s staging proved fairly innocuous and did not spoil the musical side of the performance. And there were things to worry about, because the production seemed to have been cursed. In August Diana Damrau cancelled her appearance as Marguerite de Valois and less than two weeks before the premiere Bryan Hymel withdrew from the fiendishly difficult role of Raoul. My suspicion is that both replacements were a blessing for the Paris Huguenots, though the results are difficult to compare. With her crystal clear, technically immaculate and very agile soprano Lisette Oropesa brought the entire house down. The audience was less enthusiastic about Yosep Kang, brought at the last moment from Deutsche Oper Berlin – unjustly, in my opinion, because he coped with the role of Raoul well, both when it came to singing and acting, with his ringing tenor heroic in colour and beautifully rounded in the middle register. True, he played it safe with the high notes and they were not always clean, but this stemmed primarily from nerves and overuse of his vocal resources during rehearsals and successive performances. That Kang is well aware of his shortcomings and knows how to mask them cleverly was evidenced by how he phenomenally paced himself in the lovers’ duet from Act IV (“O ciel, ou courrez-vous?”). As Valentine, Ermonela Jaho was less impressive – she was excellent acting-wise, but has a voice that is too light and too lyrical for the role, written for a soprano falcon  (incidentally, Raoul’s beloved was first sung by Cornélie Falcon). Karine Deshayes was a magnificent Urbain. The French singer, who started out in Baroque music, has a lovely, even mezzo-soprano that deserves far more appreciation from international opera companies. It was more difficult to find real stars among the men: those deserving an honourable mention were certainly the bass-baritone Nicolas Testé, who despite some deficiencies in the lower register was convincing as Marcel; the velvety-voiced baritone Florian Sempey as Nevers and the bass Paul Gay as Saint-Bris, perhaps not expressive enough but with a very elegant sound. Worthy of note is also Cyrille Dubois, a singer at the beginning of his career: a fine actor and typical “French” tenor, who appeared in the episodic roles of Tavannes and First Monk.

Nicolas Testé (Marcel) and Ermonela Jaho. Photo: Agathe Poupeney

The man in charge of the last performance was Łukasz Borowicz – his appearance at the conductor’s podium at the Bastille should be remembered as historic for at least two reasons. Firstly, no other Polish conductor had led the orchestra of the Paris Opera before. Secondly and, in my opinion, more importantly – Borowicz, despite participating in the seven-week rehearsals before the premiere, working diligently with the soloists, conducted the performance having had not a single orchestral rehearsal. Michele Mariotti, the music director of the production, must have trusted him immensely – irrespective of Diana Damrau’s earlier recommendation. I cannot really compare the conducting of the two gentlemen, but after what I heard during my one-day visit to Paris, I am convinced that Borowicz has an excellent feel for Meyerbeer’s idiom. He led the soloists and the Opera’s fine chorus and orchestra with a firm hand, not for a moment losing the inner pulse and brilliantly highlighting the constant play of contrasts in the work as well as its sometimes not very obvious innovations (for example in the Blessing of the Daggers scene, in which the voices of six soloists alternately come together and emerge in smaller ensembles, cutting through the orchestral fabric with a cappella fragments only to push through the orchestral tutti with a powerful chorus in the reprise. I hope this was not Borowicz’s only appearance at the temple of grand opéra.  Waiting for the next ones, I will happily watch him in other productions of Meyerbeer’s masterpieces, especially my favourite Robert le diable.

One thing worries me, though: that I will have to leave Poland to do that. I like travelling. But I’m fed up with having to escape from the daily mediocrity of our domestic opera companies.

Translated by: Anna Kijak