Wędrówki operowe/Operatic Journeys

When Gottfried Keller lost his father and found himself alone in this world with his mother and younger sister, he was only five years old. Rudolf – a turner, self-taught builder and head of the Keller family – died of tuberculosis shortly after turning thirty, having previously buried four of his six children with wife Elisabeth. In many respects he was an extraordinary man: as a teenage journeyman he travelled across Europe, returning to Zurich not only as a comprehensively educated craftsman, but also a mature, freedom-loving citizen. Before he departed this world, he had given his wife detailed instructions on how to instil his ideals into his only surviving son. The widowed Elisabeth was barely able to make ends meet, but she did do all he could not to disappoint her husband’s ambitions. Little Gottfried was brought up in a household free from any prejudice and carefully watched the reality around him. After the failure of the November Uprising Polish émigrés seeking refuge under Mrs Keller’s hospitable roof became a permanent part of this reality. What the future writer and poet gained from those days were not just beautiful memories of friendship – memories he referred to in his autobiographical novel Green Henry, but also a lasting interest in the cause of political refugees and their fight for their lost statehood.

More waves of émigrés from Poland came to Switzerland after the Spring of the Peoples and the failed January Uprising. In 1863 Gottfried Keller – at that time already the secretary of the Canton of Zurich – founded, together with Count Władysław Plater, the Central Committee for Aiding Poles. First, they financed the purchase of weapons for the insurgents and after the fall of the independence uprising they organised all kinds of support for nearly two thousand emigrants. Although there were some impostors among true heroes, nothing would shake Keller’s sympathy for the newcomers from a distant country in the east of Europe. Even if he did admonish them, he did so delicately and with compassion – like in the short story, written more or less at that time but published only in 1874, Kleider machen Leute (which can be freely translated as “clothes do make the man”). Its protagonist is a young tailor, Wenzel Strapinski, who has just lost his job and has set off “on an unpleasant November day” to seek luck elsewhere. He had to content himself with just a few snowflakes for his breakfast and had only a thimble in his pocket – but he looked beautiful in his handmade Sunday best, a velvet-lined cape and fur hat. Perhaps this is why the coachman from a coach he passed on the way offered him a lift to a nearby town, introduced him to everyone as a Polish count and then disappeared before the young man had time to protest. Confused, Wenzel assumes the role of an aristocrat – first unwittingly, then deliberately, when he wins the affection of the daughter of the city council chairman. Although he will be exposed by a jealous rival, all will end well: his beloved will declare that she does not have to be a countess,  that it will be enough for her to become the wife of a true master tailor.

Photo: Serghei Gherciu

Keller’s short story enjoyed great popularity in the German-speaking world at the time, also in Austria-Hungary, where many imperial subjects built their status with methods similar to Wenzel’s. The subjects included Zemlinsky’s father – a Viennese-born son of an Austrian Catholic mother and a father from Žilina, Hungary – who added the noble preposition “von” to his surname and before marrying Klara Semo, daughter of a Bosnian Muslim woman and a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, converted to Judaism. Thus little Alexander was born as a fully-fledged member of the Viennese Jewish community, but he left it as early as in 1899 following the Dreyfus affair and the growing wave of anti-Semitism. He began composing the comic opera Kleider machen Leute in 1907, after the earlier successes of Sarema and Es war einmal, and the failed premiere of Der Traumgörge, which was planned at Vienna’s  Staatsoper under Mahler’s baton, but which did not take place after Mahler resigned as the company’s music director shortly before the first performance. The libretto to Kleider machen Leute – as in the case of the unlucky Traumgörge – was written by Leo Feld, who significantly condensed the narrative and made it somewhat lighter than in Keller’s original. The premiere of the first, three-act version took place in 1910 at Vienna’s Volksoper. The critics cool reception prompted Zemlinsky to introduce major changes into the libretto and the score. After a few failed attempts to have the revised two-act version of the opera staged, Kleider machen Leute was revived in 1922 at the Neues Deutsches Theater, the current home of the State Opera in Prague.

The work, rediscovered only in the 1980s, arrived in the Prague theatre in February 2023, as part of the huge four-season Czech-German project “Musica non grata”, the main aim of which is to bring back from obscurity the oeuvres of artists active in inter-war Czechoslovakia who were eliminated from musical life after the Nazis came to power: eliminated because of their origin, religion and political views, as well as their gender and sexual orientation. Launched in 2020 under the aegis of Prague’s National Theatre and financially supported by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, the project can already be regarded as one of the most successful initiatives of this kind in Europe – geared towards introducing forgotten works into the cultural bloodstream permanently, rather than towards a one-off, superficial effect that caters to a less sophisticated audience.

Photo: Serghei Gherciu

Hence the idea to stage Kleider machen Leute with mainly local musicians, led by two artists whose collaboration had previously been appreciated, when Janáček’s Katia Kabanova was staged at Komische Oper Berlin: the Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen and the Lithuanian conductor Giedrė Šlekytė. Mijnssen represents a theatre-making style typical of her country, pared-down in terms of the means of expression, drawing at times on Willy Decker’s austere minimalism. In her interpretation the action of Zemlinsky’s opera takes place primarily on the proscenium, within a space delimited by Herbert Murauer’s symmetrical, tripartite sets (ingeniously lit by Bernd Purkrabek), the main element of which is a semicircular wall placed on the revolving stage. The sets are complemented by simple pieces of furniture, sometimes serving as far from obvious props (an example is Wenzel’s journey in a coach made up of several chairs, showing the protagonist in a different grotesque position with each turn of the revolving stage). The director balanced out the sparseness of the sets with an exaggerated, almost expressionistic theatrical gesture – generally to good effect, although Zemlinsky’s dancing score could have done with more choreographic work (Dustin Klein, who was responsible for the stage movement, opted instead for pantomime, spectacular in, for example, the slow-motion scene featuring the pursuit of the exposed fake count). However, the most important error in the staging lay in the insufficient highlighting of Wenzel’s innate elegance. With the exception of his fur hat, the young tailor did not stand out in any way from the crowd of characters dressed by Julia Katharina Berndt in costumes from the inter-war period – from straw pork pie hats from the wild 1920s to the jazzy zoot suits characteristic of  Polish Bikini Boys from a later period.

Yet Mijnssen’s clean and precise direction went side by side with the dramaturgy of the work, although it did lead several soloists into an acoustic trap – their voices, emphasised on the proscenium, often sounded unnatural, standing out excessively from the orchestral fabric. Those who emerged unscathed from this predicament were the two lead singers – Joseph Dennis as Wenzel, an artist boasting a strong, resonant and perfectly controlled tenor, and Jana Sibera as Nettchen, a singer with a soft, beautifully saturated and very sensuous soprano (especially in the particularly well-sung aria “Lehn deine Wang’ an meine Wang’” with Heine’s text at the beginning of Act II). Fine moments also came from Ivo Hrachovec in the bass part of the Innkeeper and the baritone Markus Butter singing the role of Melchior Böhni, a rejected suitor for Nettchen’s hand. Other members of the huge cast of a dozen or so singers were less successful in battling the capricious acoustics. It is hard for me to judge to what extent this could have been prevented by Giedrė Šlekytė, who, apart from failing to control the capricious acoustics, led the State Opera ensembles very efficiently and energetically, with a perfect sense of the mosaic style of this composition, which combines late Romantic inspirations by the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss – and, by extension, also the young Schönberg – with a truly Mozartian bravura in the shaping of group scenes, and the ever-present lightness of Viennese operetta.

Photo: Serghei Gherciu

Kleider machen Leute is not a masterpiece on a par with Der Zwerg or Eine florentinische Tragödie. There is no doubt, however, that it deserves love: as does the modest and shy Wenzel Strapinski: a fake count, true, yet still endearing in his large, black velvet-lined capes, with a pale, noble countenance of a Polish émigré.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It was October 1977. At the Ruch Muzyczny editorial office six critics were summing up the Warsaw Autumn Festival. When the conversation moved to the Polish premiere of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, the commentators split into two camps. The winners were the opponents, senior by virtue of not only their age but also authority. Ludwik Erhardt accused the composer of being boring and primitive. Olgierd Pisarenko snapped dismissively that to “designate a genius means great satisfaction and little risk”. Tadeusz A. Zieliński argued that Górecki – by exposing raw emotions and reducing “everything else” to a minimum – inadvertently committed a reduction ad absurdum. The advocates defended themselves timidly. With the exception of Andrzej Chłopecki, not yet thirty at the time, who blurted out without a second thought: “A masterpiece putting its composer among geniuses”.

Those feeling offended by the “traitor to the ideals of the avant-garde” did not change their mind even after the success of the Nonesuch 1992 recording featuring Dawn Upshaw in the solo part and the London Sinfonietta orchestra conducted by David Zinman. They were unimpressed by the fact that in the UK charts Symphony No. 3 was ranked ahead of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Sting’s latest album. They thought the whole thing was a pop culture phenomenon and did not wonder how it was possible that this long, slow piece appealed to the taste and sensibility of grunge and post-punk fans. However, something began to change. More interpretations and recordings followed. The shamelessly beautiful composition was ahead of its time. Year after year it grew more and more in tune with the multifaceted, anxiety-ridden present.

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs also got to be adapted, with the adaptations often being unsuccessful, ignoring the inseparable textual layer of the work. That is why it was with interest, but also anxiety, that I watched the preparations for a staging of Górecki’s work at the English National Opera, in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. I was afraid that there would be empty seats in the auditorium. I was afraid that there would be naive references to the ongoing war in Ukraine and, on the other hand, allusions to the outrageous decision of the Arts Council England, which put the ENO on the brink of extinction by withdrawing its annual funding and proposing instead some dubious „remedies”. After numerous protests by music lovers and music professionals, the parties reached a fragile compromise, but it is still uncertain what will happen next.

Photo: Clive Barda

Even if the ENO survives as an institution, it might lose its beloved home: the famous Coliseum, where it moved in 1968, still as Sadler’s Wells Opera Company. The construction of the theatre, the most impressive in the West End to this day, was commissioned by Sir Oswald Stoll, a theatre manager and later producer of silent films, who decided to make it a “people’s palace of entertainment” worthy of the age. Designed by Frank Matcham, the building, with its tower topped by a characteristic openwork globe, concealed a lavish auditorium and state-of-the-art theatrical machinery. When it opened, it boasted the world’s only triple revolving stage and a number of revolutionary technical solutions, from the installation of lifts taking visitors to the upper floors of the auditorium, to the suspension of the balconies on steel supports in order to avoid pillars obstructing the audience’s view. The inauguration in December 1904 was a complete fiasco, despite the fact that its programme featured a reenactment of Derby Race with live horses and real jockeys racing on the revolving stage. The theatre did not get going for good until two years later, but when it did, it was hugely successful. Its offer was varied: from musicals and dramas, ballets and pantomimes, to cricket matches and film screenings. After becoming the home of Sadler’s Wells Opera – soon renamed English National Opera – it presented dozens of world premieres and hundreds of other performances, made successful by artists of the calibre of Charles Mackerras, Bryn Terfel and David Pountney, to mention just the first three names that come to my mind.

Naturally, there were ups and downs, the latter more frequent recently owing to ill-judged managerial appointments. However, we were still dealing not so much with the second London stage after Covent Garden, but with a theatre with a completely different profile, different target audience, presenting performances almost exclusively in English, geared more towards promoting young talent than filling the auditorium thanks to star performers (incidentally, the ENO has more seats in the auditorium than the Royal Opera House). The musical world expected sensible changes, not a decision – rightly protested against – to break up the company and squander its valuable artistic, social and educational initiatives.

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs was planned as the last premiere of the season. This was another source of my worries: that everyone would see the production as a filler, especially given that one week before the ENO had premiered Blue, a new opera by Jeanine Tesori telling the story of the fight of Harlem’s black community against the systemic violence of the police. Both productions were presented at the ENO almost simultaneously, six performances each in late April and early May. Blue proved attuned to the public feeling and elicited a lively response from the critics, who grumbled about the quality of the score, but did not question the theatrical values of the work. How did the staging of Górecki’s static music fare in comparison, given that, according to many musicologists, it cannot be happily united with any other form of art?

Photo: Clive Barda

I went to London to see the last performance, so I had managed to read several interviews with the director, Isabella Bywater, and to take a look at the surprisingly favourable reviews. However, I was amazed by comments on the ENO’s fanpage, where admiration was mixed with questions about whether anyone had a ticket to spare for any date. I saw with my own eyes that the house, with its more than 2300 seats, was indeed full. Filled with an audience hungry primarily for theatre, because thirty years after the commercial success of Symphony No. 3, few people knew that the unsettling music in The Crown, in the scene where Princess Margaret’s fiancé cheats on her with a West End dancer, is the third of Górecki’s “sorrowful songs”.

After an hour-long confrontation with raw, gut-wrenching emotions, shown with a powerful theatrical gesture in a perfectly organised space, I came to agree with both the critics and the stunned audience. Bywater is primarily a set designer, which led to a wonderful rapport with the lighting director Jon Driscoll and with Robert Vitalini, the author of the abstract projections that were visionary in their simplicity. As a director Bywater also knows how to collaborate thoughtfully with Dan O’Neill, responsible for stage movement.  Her Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is a coherent tale of the hell of a mother’s grief, the purgatory of longing for a lost child and the heaven of reconciliation with death – not achievable for every mother.  The first movement, to the sounds of a Marian lament, depicts an arduous and failed journey from hell to heaven. A woman crawls onto the stage, brings out a long swathe of cloth from its depths, twisting it like an umbilical cord and rolling it up into a form resembling a swaddled newborn baby, then sits down with it on a chair and begins to fly upwards. She fails to reach her son’s body suspended on a bier, falls from the flies, tumbles over a time as infinite as the song, getting tangled in folds of white cloth – a multifaceted symbol of her tragic motherhood.

In the slightly less vivid second part of the triptych Bywater presents the same tragedy from the point of view of a dying child, supported in agony and rocked into the next world by a double figure of tender death – personified by actors accompanying the soloist. The third part takes place on a battlefield, a bit like from Goya’s engravings, a bit like from medieval depictions of the Last Judgement – with the mother looking for her fallen son in the trenches, among spectres of maimed soldiers, only to rise towards light like a Bosch angel, this time without falling. But without ascending into heaven either: remaining in this world with all the motherly grief, though now made familiar.

Photo: Clive Barda

Can you talk more emphatically about the madness of the contemporary world than by using the universal language of orphaned mothers and the fate of their children taken by war, heartlessness and violence? Can you sing it better than Nicole Chevalier with her dense, sensual soprano, a sensitive singer as much as an outstanding actress? Can you conduct it more subtly than Lidiya Yankovskaya, precise in every gesture, sensitive to every flutter in this ocean of sounds, building tension without resorting to unbearable pathos? You probably can, but I’m not sure whether you should. The girl sitting next to me surreptitiously wiped away tears throughout the performance, and a blind elderly gentleman on my right reacted in a similar fashion, relying only on the music and the energy emanating from the stage.

History will judge whether Górecki was a genius or only a clever magician playing with the listeners’ emotions. For the moment history should judge members of the Arts Council England, who with such thoughtless cruelty are trying to crush the Londoners’ beloved company.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

If Vasco da Gama had not charted a sea route from Europe to India, the legendary Dutch captain Hendrik Van der Decken would not have found enough hubris in himself to force his sailors to battle a storm around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1487 the crew of a fleet led by Bartolomeu Dias refused to travel any farther to the east, and the rocky headland became known as the Cape of Storms. Yet King John II of Portugal, called the Perfect Prince, decided to reverse the explorers’ losing streak. The stretch of land jutting out into the ocean acquired a new name, “cabo da Boa Esperança”. As it turned out, the king was right. Vasco da Gama’s first expedition, financed by John’s successor, Manuel I the Fortunate, crossed the crucial point on 22 November 1497 and several weeks later found itself on the waters of the Indian Ocean. It returned to Lisbon in September the following year. The captain, despite losing over two-thirds of his crew and having to burn one of his ships in order to stop an on-board epidemic, was generously rewarded for his efforts. King Manuel made him an admiral and in an act of thanksgiving for opening access to the Indian treasures, he ordered the construction of a Hieronymites monastery near the port of Restelo.

It was from there that Vasco da Gama’s ships set sail. Sailors prayed for the success of the groundbreaking expedition in the local church, on the site of which the monastery with a new church, Santa Maria de Belém, was later erected. It was by the will of King Manuel that after the explorer’s series of successes the famous Torre de Belém was built in the Tagus riverbed, becoming a landmark for adventurers returning to the port and a symbol of Portugal’s maritime power. It was there that the huge building of the Centro Cultural de Belém was constructed to mark Portugal’s Presidency of the Council of the European Communities in 1992, including, in addition to conference and exhibition space, two concert halls with all the facilities. The bigger hall, with nearly 1500 seats, is a venue for operatic productions which cannot be presented – due to the large forces needed to perform them – in the historic Teatro Nacional de São Carlos.

Tómas Tómasson (Dutchman). Photo: António Pedro Ferreira

Before Van der Decken committed blasphemy in the middle of a storm off the coast of Africa and brought a curse upon his ship, he must have sailed around Portugal – perhaps even calling at the port on the outskirts of Lisbon, where the age of great discoveries began. I couldn’t shake off that thought as I travelled to a performance of Der fliegende Holländer half way between the anchorage where Vasco da Gama’s three-masters stood, and the sarcophagus holding his mortal remains. However, I went to Portugal primarily because of my personal fascination with the British approach to Wagner’s oeuvre. I wanted to confront my impressions of Negus’, Farnes’ and Elder’s interpretations with the interpretation of Der fliegende Holländer by Graeme Jenkins, a student of Norman Del Mar, a conductor who began his career as a French horn player and with time became famous for his solid and very insightful interpretations of Richard Strauss’ music. I was also looking forward to Peter Wedd’s belated debut as Erik, to another encounter with Peter Rose’s Daland and, last but not least, to live contact with the charismatic Icelander Tómas Tómasson as the Dutchman. I had previously heard him only once, in a performance of Tristan so dire that even his Kurwenal could not make much impression on me.

Jenkins is an extremely versatile opera conductor with experience in the Wagnerian repertoire. Associated with the Dallas Opera for nearly two decades, he prepared over fifty premieres for the company, including a production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a project he embarked on when he was not yet forty. Jenkins knows the score of Der fliegende Holländer inside out. In 2014 he opened the season with it at Vienna’s Staatsoper: the production, which he conducted in place of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, went down in history because of Bryn Terfel’s phenomenal portrayal of the tormented wandering sailor. However, from what I heard in Lisbon, something keeps eluding him in this work, keeps leading him astray, into a labyrinth of intriguing textures and honed details from which no convincing picture of the whole emerges. Admittedly, Jenkins led the musicians with a relatively light hand, in calm, nicely measured tempi. He knew how to set the various parts within logically constructed sound structures, how to highlight meaningful motifs, to give room to the singers. Yet he was unable to maintain the pulse of the musical narrative, which in truly masterful interpretations of this opera resembles the rhythm of an exhausted heart: it flutters, faints, suddenly stops only to surge forward again in a moment to the point of breathlessness. Jenkins’ smooth, meticulously polished Holländer lacked contrasts. It was impossible to sense the sombre horror of immortality or the naive charm of redemption. Everything unfolded as if behind a foggy veil, in greyish twilight dulling not only the blackness of the ocean but also the sparkle in Senta’s eyes.

Scene from Act 3. Photo: António Pedro Ferreira

Perhaps I’m being unfair, perhaps Jenkins’ distanced interpretation simply did not match my sensibility, was against my idea of the true values of this ultra-Romantic opera. Under his baton the Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa played with evident enthusiasm, although – paradoxically – Jenkins was able to elicit more lyricism and subtle agogic hues from the wind instruments rather than from the strings, less sensitive to the conductor’s gesture. There was some excellent singing from the combined choirs of the Teatro Nacional, under the direction of Giampaolo Vessella, and the Coro Ricercare prepared by Pedro Teixiera. However, the narrative was carried primarily by the soloists. I have to admit that Peter Rose – still in fine vocal form – is becoming my favourite Daland, poignantly human in his weaknesses and authentic, though foolish love for his daughter. Excellent performances in the supporting roles came from Maria Luisa de Freitas (Mary) and Marco Alves dos Santos (Steersman), especially from the latter, a singer endowed with a lovely tenor, perhaps not sufficiently open in the upper register, but dos Santos was nevertheless able to use it to create a vivid portrayal of a young sailor, a little lost in the world of landlubbers. Peter Wedd, singing with a voice brighter than usual, but still perfectly supported and undoubtedly heroic, portrayed Erik as a brute, a man-boy immature for love, balancing on the fine line between aggression, manipulation and submissiveness. At times that portrayal was genuinely harrowing. Gabriela Scherer, who possesses an extremely lovely, meaty and colourful soprano, used lightly and with a great sense of phrase, at times felt constrained in her role as a passive Senta, which resulted in some minor intonation slip-ups and a somewhat dull sound in the middle register. As expected, Tómas Tómasson turned out to be the star of the evening, though, truth to tell, I would prefer to have heard him in the role a few years ago. His “black”, genuine dramatic baritone is already showing some signs of wear and tear, though it still manages to touch the very heart of the listeners. It is a powerful and yet subtle voice, perfectly even across the registers, wisely extended upwards from the bass range and not the other way round, as is the case with most of today’s Wagnerian bass-baritones. In addition, Tómasson has the looks for the role and is very convincing as an actor. In Lisbon he created a character as if straight from a film by Murnau, dark, exciting, with a great power of expression.

Gabriela Scherer (Senta) and Peter Wedd (Erik). Photo: António Pedro Ferreira

This year’s programme of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos featured only two performances of Der fliegende Holländer, in a production by a young director, Max Hoehn, who got his first professional experience as an assistant to Graham Vick and David Pountney. A few months ago I grumbled about Paul Curran’s concept presented in equally difficult conditions of Bologna’s EuropAuditorium. I think I have to give him credit. When you have a limited budget, it is better not to have ideas than to have too many of them. Hoehn littered the space with a plethora of tacky props, equally tackily lit and complemented by downright infantile projections (set design and lighting direction by Giuseppe di Iorio, costumes by Rafael Mapril, projections by Amber Cooper-Davies). The whole seemed like a school play staged by a group of pupils at odds with each other. Instead of Daland’s ship – an oversize paper boat. Instead of a storm – chorus members doing a Mexican wave with chairs in their hands. If Erik is a hunter, let him run around the stage with a double-barrelled shotgun slung over his shoulder. If Senta is to leave with the Dutchman, let her wait for him in the port with a cardboard suitcase. Only twice did all this smell of real theatre: when the appearance of the spectral galleon was suggested by a red-lit sail suddenly dropped from the flies, and in the dream scene of Erik, who spun his monologue with a vacant face, sitting motionless behind a table. The audience received the production coldly, but did not hide its enthusiasm for the performers. And rightly so, for the Lisbon Holländer was staged with an excellent cast and the conductor’s concept could at least be debated.

I, too, joined the applause. The Flying Dutchman steered clear of Lisbon for nearly forty years. Let this production be a sign of good hope. This time it was not possible to sail around the Cape of Storms, but the fleet returned safely to the port. We are waiting for Vasco da Gama.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Father Fotis, the priest of the Greek refugees from Kazantzakis’ novel Christ Recrucified, once dozed off for a moment and in a dream short like a flash lived at least a thousand years. He dreamed about a canary-like yellow bird which he had begun to pursue as a little boy. In his old age he understood that he would continue to pursue it until his death. He also felt deep down in his soul that the yellow bird, which “sometimes whistled as if it were making fun of him and sometimes, with its head raised towards the sky, sang like mad”, was not, in fact, a canary, but a powerful symbol of faith, hope and determination.

It was Kazantzakis who persuaded Martinů to give up the idea of composing an opera based on Zorba the Greek and to go for his later morality novel. The original Greek title, Ο Χριστός Ξανασταυρώνεται, has a slightly different meaning than “Christ recrucified”. It refers to Christ who has not ceased to be crucified despite the fact that two millennia have passed since his death. The action of the novel takes place in 1921, during the Greco-Turkish War, in a fictitious Greek village in Anatolia where a Passion Play is staged every seven years – featuring actors chosen from among the members of the local community. The villagers traditionally prepare for their roles for months: but this time the process of their identification with the New Testament figures rapidly accelerates. A crowd of hungry, sick refugees from another Greek settlement arrives in the village. Soon an authentic tragedy of agony and death will unfold. The widow Katerina will turn out to be a genuine Mary Magdalene, her lover Panait – Judas incarnate, while Manolios will die like the biblical Christ.

At that time Martinů was approaching the end of his own way of the cross. He left Paris, a city where he had spent nearly twenty years, in 1940, shortly before its capture by the Nazis. First he found refuge in Aquitaine, at the home of the conductor Charles Munch, and then via Spain he reached Portugal, from where he emigrated to the United States. He never truly settled there and intended to return to Czechoslovakia after the war, especially as he continued to receive news of the tragic fate of friends and relatives left behind. In 1946 he suffered an unfortunate accident at his home in Massachussets. The injuries he sustained led to a complete loss of hearing in one ear and irreversible problems with balance. Martinů’s plans were ultimately thwarted by the communists’ takeover of power in his homeland. The ailing composer eventually gave up and applied for American citizenship.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

He began to write The Greek Passion in 1954 – the year when Kazantzakis’ novel was published. He worked on the opera for three years and submitted the final version, with his own libretto after an English translation of the novel, to the managers of London’s Royal Opera House, where his compatriot Rafael Kubelík was music director at the time. Despite a favourable decision of the management the premiere did not happen: the allegedly defective score was rejected following an intervention by the composer Arthur Bliss, who was associated with the company. Martinů revised the work thoroughly, making numerous cuts which – paradoxically – destroyed the cohesion of the narrative. He did not live to see the Zurich premiere, as he died two years before it, in 1959. The orphaned Greek Passion soon found its way onto Czechoslovak stages, first in Brno, in 1962, and then in Prague and Bratislava. The work was also staged in several other European countries. The popularity of Martinů’s last opera surged in the 1980s, after the famous Cardiff staging under the baton of Sir Charles Mackerras, who almost simultaneously recorded the entire work with British soloists, the Czech Philharmonic Choir and the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra. It was not until 1999 that the original version was reconstructed, under Aleš Březina’s supervision: the “second” premiere of The Greek Passion took place at the Bregenz Festival. Martinů experienced satisfaction from beyond the grave: the following spring the same production was presented by the ROH.

In many respects Brno can be considered the Czech cradle of The Greek Passion, although not necessarily in the form intended by the composer. The Czechs became accustomed to the Zurich version with the libretto translated into their mother tongue already after the 1961 premiere. They received the reconstructed “London” version with mixed feelings, surprised by the fact that they were dealing basically with a different opera. The creative team of the latest staging at the Janáček Theatre chose a middle way, that is the Zurich version with the English libretto, which again generated some controversy – especially among the advocates of the communicativeness of stage works – justified in so far as the solo parts were cast almost without exception with Czech singers. Yet the premiere was eagerly awaited: owing to the involvement in the venture of Jiří Heřman, a director who already in 2015, shortly after becoming artistic chief of the Brno Opera, had staged The Greek Passion at the Aalto-Musiktheater Essen – with considerable success in the eyes of both the critics and the audience. The pandemic put music lovers to an additional test of patience. The Passion, originally planned for Martinů’s double anniversary, was not staged until November 2021. This year it appeared in Brno on three occasions. I managed to see the last performance.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

And it was worth it, if only to marvel again at the visual beauty of Heřman’s concept (which also included light design) prepared in collaboration with set designer Dragan Stojčevski and costume designer Alexandra Gruskova. Heřman “smuggled” into the production several solutions previously tested in Essen – including a huge bell suspended above the stage and a forest of burning candles on the proscenium – yet the Brno staging is far more coherent and bears more marks of the director’s unique style. The colour scheme fluctuates, as usual, between fathomless blacks, broken blue hues and unexpected yellow: that last colour plays the most prominent role in the performance, which is preceded by an extensive quotation from Father Fotis’ dream referred to above. Yellow is the colour of the fire of the paschal candles, the colour worn by both the boy chasing the canary-like bird and Manolios preparing for the role of Christ. Black is the colour of the night of hypocrisy and ignorance, embodied by the attitude of the priest Grigoris, who argues to the village community that if an injustice done to an individual benefits the masses, then it is right. Blue – though at times bordering on grey, at time on green – is the colour of everything that is not obvious. Above all, trees growing with their crowns down, digging their roots into the foundations of houses, as if afraid to go with their shoots outwards, into a world divided by the Greeks into the days before and after the great fire of Smyrna, which ultimately sealed the defeat of their army in 1922 and buried their fantasies about annexing Asia Minor in the dust. What becomes a sign of freedom, faith and hope is the life-giving water on which Manolios walks like Christ – it is admirable how Heřman uses this simple theatrical trick in most of his productions, multiplying the shimmering water in mirror projections in the background.

Heřman’s staging is deeply symbolic, as is Martinů’s opera, in which the composer leaves less room for a play of characters than for a general parable about the power of good and evil, a parable devoid of any historical and political references present in Kazantzakis’ novel. Heřman decided to present The Greek Passion as a universal story set in a vague context, free from any current allusions. I completely understand his decision, especially given the fact that in the light of the latest events the hapless refugees led by Father Fotis would have brought to mind the Russians feeling from the Crimea. In a way, Christ Recrucified is a narrative about the tragedy of the invaders, an poignant parable about the fate of ordinary people caught up in a conflict unfolding above their heads. However, I wish that Heřman had not contented himself with directing crowds, using metaphors without delving into the motivation of the individual characters, who were left to their own devices, at the mercy of their own vocal and acting abilities. I am a little surprised at the optimism of the director, who saw a ray of hope where it was rather absent: in the score and in the last sentence of Kazantzakis’ book, in which the ill-treated community led by Fotis resumed “their interminable march toward the east”.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

I think that Heřman’s unrestrained imagination would have had much more opportunity to shine in the original version, more theatrical, brimming with emotion, marked by abrupt changes of mood. The Zurich narrative is dramaturgically lame, seems kaleidoscopic, does not let the audience identify fully with any of the protagonists. This paradox was too much for Robert Kružík, who conducted The Greek Passion with a rather heavy hand and massive sound, stressing the alleged monumentalism of the score, which, in fact, is quite close to Britten’s late operas. He accurately accentuated the austerity of the Greek Orthodox chanting, appreciated the sophisticated stylisation of the folk melody at the beginning of Act III and of the rural wedding music, but lost the tension and poignant lyricism of the late style of Martinů, trapped in his longing for the homeland he never returned to. Kružík did not point the way for the soloists, most of whom created rather flat, one-dimensional characters. He did not breathe passion into the transformation of Manolios, who was sung correctly but without much involvement by Peter Berger. He ignored the sensuality of Katerina as portrayed by Pavla Vykopalova with her soft and colourful soprano. He did not make a distinction between the malefactors and the just, as a result of which a more assured and more memorable voice was that of Father Grigoris portrayed by Jan Šťáva rather than that of Fotis – perhaps more important in the opera than Manolios – sung by the young Moravian bass-baritone David Szendiuch. Who knows, perhaps the performance I will remember the longest was that of the phenomenal Ondřej Koplík in the tenor role of the pedlar Yannakos playing the role of Peter, the most important of the apostles – the one who did not admit to people that he knew Christ.

However, all this will not change the fact that over sixty years after its premiere The Greek Passion strikes chords dull to many recipients of the home-page contents of websites. That it brings to light the bitter truth about the tragedy of all refugees, even if their leaders are on the wrong side. That it explains that Satan can enter only hell, an angel can enter only Paradise and a human being can choose. In spite of everything it does let us hope that human beings will finally make the right choice one day.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

“Basel tickt anders” – Basel “ticks” differently from the rest of Switzerland. This picturesque town in a Rhine bend, in an area settled by the Celts in the middle of the first millennium BC, still lives today in its own quiet rhythm – at a crossroads of borders and eras. No great imagination is required to travel back in time here. To a historical as well as mythical past – also to a Wagnerian landscape with a foreshadowing of the twilight of the gods, Wotan’s broken spear and Brunhilde’s awakening. Even without music – let alone with it, when an eminent expert in Wagner’s oeuvre stands at the conductor’s desk of the Sinfonieorchester Basel and conducts the last act of Siegfried with four soloists carefully selected to match his well-though-out and significantly distinctive interpretative vision.

The roots of Basel’s orchestral tradition can be found in the seventeenth century and the concerts organised by the local Collegium Musicum – in collaboration with professional instrumentalists, whom the burghers rewarded with bread and wine from their own cellars. In the 1820s – with a decision to build the Stadtkasino, a new public building in Barfüsserplatz – the Concertgesellschaft, successor to the old Collegium, was established. A permanent orchestra was launched in 1876, when a genuine concert hall was opened in the building.  The inaugural evening featured Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 conducted by Alfred Volkland, the first boss of the Basler Sinfonie-Orchester. At the beginning of the twentieth century the directorship of the ensemble was taken over by Hermann Sutter, whose repertoire featured – alongside his beloved Bruckner’s symphonies – works by Stravinsky, Bartók and Honegger. Over the following seasons artists standing on the conductor’s rostrum in the municipal Musiksaal included Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Felix Weingartner.

Derek Welton (Wanderer), Simon O’Neill (Siegfried), and Sir Mark Elder conducting Sinfonieorchester Basel. Photo: Benno Hunziker

The decision to demolish the antiquated building and replace it with the current edifice of the Stadtkasino was taken at a rather inopportune moment, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. The institution’s crisis was not overcome until 1947, when the orchestra returned to Barfüsserplatz from its temporary residence in the Volkshaus. Its renown in the international music world grew with each passing year. In 1997 it was combined with the local radio orchestra, acquiring its present name, Sinfonieorchester Basel. Fifteen years later it emerged from under the wing of its long-time patron, the Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft, and established its own subscription concert series. Since 2016 Ivor Bolton has been the orchestra’s boss, serving at the same time as Music Director of Madrid’s Teatro Real. Both institutions have extended their contracts with Bolton until the 2024/25 season.

British soloists and conductors have been frequent guests in Basel during Bolton’s directorship. They include Sir Mark Elder, who will soon end his collaboration, lasting nearly a quarter of a century, with the famous Hallé, the oldest professional orchestra in the United Kingdom. Polish music lovers know him primarily from the Bregenz Festival recording of Szymanowski’s King Roger featuring Olga Pasichnyk as Roxana. Some may remember that he was music director of the English National Opera in its best years, when the company, currently under threat of closure, was led by a triumvirate of Elder, David Pountney and Peter Jonas. Very few people in Poland know that the young Elder – together with several of his peers, including Anthony Negus, mentioned on this website many times – was one of the most fervent admirers of Reginald Goodall’s conducting and then one of the few continuators of his unique Wagnerian style.

Rachel Nicholls (Brunhilde). Photo: Benno Hunziker

In their interpretations of Wagner’s music both Elder and Negus attach considerable weight to textural details, seeking to achieve an intensity and depth of sound similar to Goodall’s. However, they are pursuing these goals via different routes, as I had an opportunity to find out in Basel, during a concert performance of the Third Act of Siegfried. The distinctive feature Negus’ performances is a vivid pulse combined with freedom of phrasing and subtle but expressive shifts of metric accents in the score. Elder usually sticks to typical “Goodallian” slow tempi, but he adds extraordinary lightness to them thanks to a brilliant interplay of motifs. Such an approach works perfectly in Siegfried, full of contrasts as it is, especially in the final act, in which the conductor, wisely meting out tension, must carry the performers and the listeners from the foot of Brunhilde’s rock to the heights of the sublime; must demonstrate the inner transformation of the Wanderer, who renounces his own will for Siegfried to be created anew; must stress not only the evolution of the two protagonists in the love duet, but also the still existing differences between them. In Elder’s approach the musical narrative is characterised by gradually but consistently meted out drama: dense darkness juxtaposed with dazzling brightness, bloom with fall, defeat with triumph, all culminating and being summed up in Brunhilde and Siegfried’s thrice-repeated final cry of “Leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!”.

In Siegfried the Sinfonieorchester Basel felt slightly less at ease than the legendary Hallé, but we cannot forget that Mark Elder does not work with it on the Wagnerian repertoire on a daily basis. Nevertheless, he was able to inspire the instrumentalists to play vigilantly, passionately, with their playing being imbued with the spirit of the story. What also contributed to the success of the enterprise were undoubtedly the two soloists from the original Manchester cast under his baton: with both Rachel Nicholls (Brunhilde) and Simon O’Neill in the title role having had time since to grow into their roles and refine them in terms of pure vocal performance. This applied especially to Nicholls – a truly girlish Brunhilde with a fresh, perfectly controlled soprano, wide open at the top and having an incredibly huge volume. O’Neill’s tenor may not be thick and rich enough for this fiendish role, but I admit in admiration that the New Zealand singer uses it very skilfully, with a masterful sense of phrase and text of the libretto as well as precise diction, intonation and voice production. Erda was sung by the excellent Wiebke Lehmkuhl, whose dark alto shimmering with golden reflections made such an impression on me eight years ago in Berlin, in a harrowing performance of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with the DSO conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. The Wanderer as interpreted by Derek Welton was a bit too “youthful”, also because of some vocal shortcomings in the lower register – fortunately, Welton largely made up for them with the beauty of his voice and sensitive interpretation.

After the concert at the Stadtcasino Basel. Photo: Benno Hunziker

The complete recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen with the Hallé Orchestra under Elder, crowned with Siegfried in 2019, still has not caught the attention of music lovers, drowning in a sea of other, often less valuable interpretations of Wagner’s masterpiece. Negus’ interpretations, for which fans have recently been travelling to the other side of the globe, are known only from live performances. And yet Goodall’s legacy is not going to waste. It continues to function in secret. It goes on in some kind of separate undercurrent, cultivated not by passive imitators but by fully conscious successors who enrich their master’s style with their own reflection and experience. This is the case of Sir Mark Elder, who struck the most sensitive chords in the hearts of not only the Sinfonieorchester Basel musicians, but also the listeners, enchanted by his vision. In a city where everything ticks differently.

Translated by: Anna Kijak