Upiór w operze

The artists who today can honestly be described as ambassadors of Polish culture in the world include several individuals whose careers I have followed from the very beginning. Agnieszka Budzinska-Bennett occupies a unique position among them: primarily because she has triumphantly followed the same path I began to tread tentatively in the early 1990s. The beginnings of a female medieval music ensemble which I co-led with Aldona Czechak for nearly a decade were as crazy as the whole era. I have said that it was beautiful but difficult. Experience gained at masterclasses in the West – where we were able to go with money scrimped and saved, borrowed or scrounged from institutions and foundations – were more often the subject of derision rather than genuine interest in Polish musical circles. I still find it hard to believe that we nevertheless notched up several important successes: first of all, abandon the „imitative” model of historically informed performance, common in Poland at the time, in favour of an engaged model requiring source research, work on manuscripts, comparative studies of vocal traditions and development of conscious improvisation skills. However, it so happened that I took up music criticism at more or less the same time. The conflict of interest grew. I gradually moved away from performance. Or maybe I simply lacked the determination, diligence, charisma and talent – all the qualities that have taken Agnieszka to the top and made her one of the leading specialists in this narrow and difficult field. By European, if not global standards.

I remember when she contacted me for the first time, while she was still a musicology student at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She had already participated in several prestigious courses, including those with the British sopranos Evelyn Tubb and Emma Kirkby, for years associated with The Consort of Musicke. At the time I was involved in a research programme focused on the oeuvre of Hildegard von Bingen, initiated by Barbara Thornton and supported by Benjamin Bagby of the legendary ensemble Sequentia. I spent nearly two years shuttling between Poland, Belgium and Germany, gathering knowledge and experience, which we confronted every few months during intensive sessions at Barbara and Benjamin’s home in Cologne. Agnieszka – in love with the Middle Ages since childhood, engrossed in recordings by pioneers of period performance since high school, and confronting her life’s passions with the musicological knowledge at the university – inquired about everything in minute detail. Her passion, determination and a sense of self-worth as steadfast as it was justified made an electrifying impression on me. This exotic-looking, bright, energetic girl was a force of nature. I thought to myself that if she managed to take part in the courses taught by Sequentia’s co-founders, she would benefit a hundredfold more from them than I ever would. She managed to do that twice. And my intuition did not fail me.

Years later we started calling each other “sister”. This is because the beginnings of our foray into early music were surprisingly similar. From the beginning Agnieszka was fascinated by cooperation, teamwork. Although she conscientiously went through all levels of musical education in her hometown of Szczecin and received a diploma in piano at the end of her high school education, she never became friends with the three-legged black giant. She felt lonely at the keyboard: she was fascinated by the world of medieval dragons and heroes, courtly love and sophisticated poetry, over which she had been poring with dictionaries since childhood, absorbing the magic of foreign-sounding words and the melody of forgotten languages. She read Scandinavian sagas and Nibelungenlied, and then confronted them with Wagner’s Tetralogy. She devoured Beowulf as if it were the best crime novel. To this day she still has a weakness for fantasy literature and quirky television series, including Ragnarok, a Norwegian tale with more than one moral, the authors of which have brilliantly reinterpreted Norse myths to attract modern teenage viewers uncertain of their own identity. We recently shared our impressions of several episodes on Messenger, laughing uproariously and making sure no one was looking over our shoulders.

I spent years honing my reviews, essays and columns, while Agnieszka devoted herself wholeheartedly to musical archaeology and increasingly successful attempts to bring this world to life in performance practice. After the last semester of Poznań musicology, in 1997, she began her studies in Switzerland, at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, one of the most important centres of medieval music studies and the bastion of period performance. SCB students included Gustav Leonhardt and Jordi Savall; Sequentia, the fruit of Thornton and Bagby’s joint graduation concert, was also born within SCB’s walls; singing was taught there by the charismatic countertenor Richard Levitt, a member of the legendary Studio der frühen Musik, and a favourite teacher of Agnieszka, Andreas Scholl and… Sting, who used his advice when preparing an album of Dowland songs. It was there, in Heidrun Rosenzweig’s class, that Agnieszka mastered the basics of playing the medieval harp. It was there that in 1997 she founded the all-female ensemble Peregrina – or Wanderer – the name of which refers not only to a “pilgrimage” of musical ideas across medieval Europe, but also to the biographies of the ensemble’s members, who had come to Switzerland from the United States, United Kingdom and Finland in search of the musical Holy Grail.

Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett. Photo: Laelia Milleri

Along the way, in passing, as it were, Agnieszka learned six languages, including Latin, indispensable in her work. She completed a programme in Scandinavian studies, and a post-graduate course in musicology at the University of Basel. While working as an assistant at the Microfilm Archive of the Institute of Musicology there, she met her future husband Lucas Bennett, and thus happily married the worlds of medieval and contemporary music (Lucas, a theorist and musicologist, specialises in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works; his father, the composer Gerald Bennett, a longtime collaborator of Pierre Boulez, whom he helped found the famous IRCAM in Paris, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on computer and electroacoustic music). Agnieszka sealed her impressive education with an honours degree in vocal ensemble conducting from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and a doctorate, defended in Poznań, on subtilitas, that is what can and cannot be heard in motets of the ars antiqua period. That was in 2010.

Peregrina already had two albums to its credit at the time: Mel et lac with twelfth-century Marian hymns and Filia praeclara with chants of the Poor Clares from Stary Sącz, for which I nominated Agnieszka for the first time for the Polityka weekly’s Passport Award. The nomination went unnoticed. The following year I mustered a small lobby, thanks to which Agnieszka made it to the top three “for her passion as a researcher who prepares concert and recording programmes through painstaking musicological, philological and historical work. For the excellent Crux album of Parisian Easter music from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century”. The Passport eluded her again. In 2012, with a persistence worthy of Cato the Elder, I urged the award jury members to open their ears to the artist’s new achievements, submitting her nomination “for another excellent album, Veiled Desires, an anthology that recounts the life, spirituality and sexuality of medieval nuns by means of music of that era. For her ability to embed artistic activity in a broader social and historical discourse. For the reliability of her source research, which is an essential part of the work of musicians performing early music”. Made it to the final again, passport denied again. Agnieszka hugged me backstage and asked me politely but firmly not to nominate her again.

I complied. However, I missed no opportunity to preach about Saint Agnieszka of Basel and her solid craftsmanship, which needs no passports. I appreciated the fact that in 2016 she was entrusted with the artistic supervision of a huge project of recording all the Melodies for the Polish Psalter by Mikołaj Gomółka with the Polish Radio Choir, but I still thought there was not enough response in Poland to what was closest to the hearts of both of us: medieval music. Music that is free of splendour, only seemingly easy, but in fact requiring maximum precision and concentration from the performers – in some ways similar to the Japanese Zen gardens, which encompass the entire universe, where gravel is raked into waves for hours, and a few stones are placed within a tiny space in such a way that it is impossible to take them all in at once.

Not everyone likes monochromatic landscapes of sand, moss and rock chips. Nor does everyone feel safe in them. So Agnieszka decided to rake, arrange and water her beloved music all the more calmly to give the listeners space and help them extract as much meaning from it as possible. She herself once recalled a mesmerising performance by Benjamin Bagby, who improvised an extensive passage from the Old English epic poem Beowulf, accompanying himself on a six-stringed lyre. His monologue went on for more than an hour, only some intelligible words could be extracted from the text, and yet, according to Agnieszka, everyone guessed at which point the monster “moved the third claw of its left hind paw”.

Agnieszka with Ensemble Dragma. Photo: Alejandro Lozano

With time similar things began to happen at her concerts. It is as if each one begins, as in Beowulf, with the famous cry of “Hwaet!”, which is usually translated as “Listen!”. In fact, it literally means “wait” and so the listeners obediently wait. Until a meaning emerges, until an image is outlined before their eyes, until hundreds of sounds, inconspicuous as couch grass flowers, form a symbolic pattern. The more inquisitive among the listeners will later start looking for contexts. The less inquisitive – or those simply tired of the chaos of the modern world – will be content with the sheer beauty of the composition.

Agnieszka is fully aware that it is impossible to impose on the audience one correct model of listening. Medievalist-musicians sometimes spend months preparing a short piece. They have to decipher it on several levels: read and understand the text, accurately interpret the notation, place the composition in a social, historical or liturgical context, combine it with the appropriate instrumentation if necessary. If doubts arise, they have to resolve them in the archives or ask colleagues for help. Once everything is ready, they have to check, if it can be played or sung at all. If not, they have to go back to the beginning and start all over again. They go to a lot of trouble and the listener may still turn a deaf ear to such an inconspicuous trifle. It thus takes a skill to arrange a programme, which in the case of medieval music is much more susceptible to the vagaries of acoustics, interior architecture and the general nature of the space.

This is why when I set off to attend the Swiss concerts under the “Kras 52” project, carried out by Agnieszka in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, I asked the organisers to let me listen to the same programme twice: in the late-Gothic Calvinist church in Biel in the Canton of Bern and the following day in the fifteenth-century Haus zum Hohen Dolder in Basel, the former seat of a medieval society from the monastery village of St. Alban, whose duties included overseeing local vineyards, settling border disputes and fire protection of the monastery’s estates.

A manuscript marked by the mysterious signature Kras 52 was once kept in Warsaw’s Krasiński Library in Okólnik Street. It ended up there in 1857, as part of the legacy of Konstanty Swidziński, a bibliophile, art collector and patron who before his death had amassed a collection larger than that of the Ossoliński Library at the time. More than half of the collection – including the building – went up in smoke in October 1944, in a fire set by the occupiers after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. The manuscript was miraculously found three years after the war in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, where Karol Estreicher recognised it by its light-coloured leather binding and ornate inscription “Manuscript from the fifteenth century”. In addition to the sermons of Jacobus de Voragine, Gesta Romanorum collection and a treatise on the expulsion of demons, it contains more than forty works in black mensural notation with music by composers of the late ars nova period and early Franco-Flemish polyphony, as well as seven of the nine surviving compositions by Mikołaj of Radom, and other musical relics associated with Kraków and the court of Władysław Jagiełło.

Photo: Alejandro Lozano

The first part of the project, entitled Regina Gloriosa, is based on a Marian repertoire – a fascinating testimony to the interpenetration of Italian, Avignonian and local influences, as well as the earliest Polish, still tentative experiments with Western polyphony. Agnieszka, this time with Ensemble Dragma – made up of her regular collaborators – presented one of the most subtle and sophisticated programmes of recent years. Divided into four parts (Marian Mass, music for Christmas and Epiphany, music for the Presentation of the Lord, and Marian prayers separated by the Magnificat), and performed with only five musicians, it not only revealed the light texture of these works, translucent like parchment, but also, with its thoughtful arrangement and a few wisely chosen additions from other sources, effectively sustained the attention of the entire audience. Without flamboyance, but with the tried-and-tested method of delicate contrasts – Agnieszka’s sensual soprano with Tessa Roos’ angelic, focused voice, intriguing dialogues between the harp and Marc Lewon’s lute, conversations carried out in such an expressive whisper of the instruments that whenever Jane Achtman and Elizabeth Rumsey’s vielles and Lewon’s gittern joined in, the medieval ensemble gave the impression of total completeness.

The same music – which rose like a pillar of light towards the vault of the Calvinist church – heard in the tiny hall of the Haus zum Hohen Dolder with its squeaky boards spoke directly to the listeners, sometimes from a distance of less than a metre. And once again I was able to experience the quality of these performances, just as I experience the mastery of opera singing in modest five-hundred-seat theatre. In such conditions musicians stand before the audience exposed as they were at birth. Ecce homo. Ecce mulier. Any deficiency in the technique would have resounded in this chamber with the power of the trumpets of Jericho.

When it was all over, when – like in the good old days – we cleaned the room together and washed the dishes, Agnieszka’s family invited me to dinner at a restaurant the name of which I will not reveal. Look for yourself where to eat the real braised brawn and ossobuco in Basel. Because what I also have in common with Agnieszka, her husband Lucas, her beloved father-in-law Gerald and his partner Pam is that we like to eat well and sip good wine to go with the feast. We also love to cook, finding in this a delight similar to browsing through ancient archives. Next time we will make ourselves some Spanish salsify with red lentils or spicy chicken with pumpkin. Perhaps I will be able to rival Agnieszka in this particular art.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

When it became clear that the number of premieres of this year’s season at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera would come down to a total of three – a certain co-production that we will see four years after its opening in Salzburg lambasted by the critics; yet another staging of one of the most popular operas in the repertoire; and a world premiere of a work that I don’t quite see returning to any stage – I again became jealous of the Czechs. Czech opera companies offer a true embarrassment of riches, there are plenty of rarities in their repertoires and the interest of international critics is huge. This is hardly surprising: the Czechs don’t need to fill their casts with foreign stars of dubious quality, nor do they lack great directors or competent conductors. Besides, they don’t go to the opera once in a blue moon, but on a regular basis and they are really knowledgeable about it.

What has certainly contributed to this state of affairs is the bourgeois egalitarianism of our southern neighbours, who, unlike Poles with their sabre-wielding longings, have opera in their blood. Yet when I went to the Janáček Theatre in Brno for day-to-day performances of Strauss’ Salome and Dvorák’s comic opera Jakobín, completely unknown in Poland, I did not expect that in both cases I would be confronted with a theatre that was open and modern, and, at the same, time stemming from a tradition dating back at least to the beginning of the previous century.

Suffice it to say that David Radok, director of the Brno Salome, is the son of Alfréd, a legend of twentieth-century Czech theatre, co-creator – with Miloš Forman, among others – of the famous Laterna Magika, and a member of the D34 theatre company founded by Emil František Burian. Emil František, in turn, was the son of Emil Burian, one of the first performers of the role of the eponymous Jacobin in Dvorák’s opera. Emil’s younger brother Karel Burian sang the role of Herodes at the premiere of Salome at the Semperoper. When I began to investigate what the young Lucie Kaňková, Terinka in the Brno Jakobín, meant when she claimed to come from a family of respected Prague musicians, I discovered that on her father’s side she was a great-great-granddaughter of Jan Nepomuk Kaňka, Beethoven’s composer and lawyer friend, and on her mother’s side – a great-granddaughter of the violinist Jindřich Feld, whose students included Rafael Kubelik. I postponed further research, so as not to be influenced by anything. What if the apples did fall far from the tree this time?

Salome. Linda Ballová in the title role, and Jaroslav Březina (Herodes). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Born in 1954, David Radok emigrated with his family from Czechoslovakia after the defeat of the Prague Spring. He learned his craft in Gothenburg, primarily at the Folkteater, where his father Alfréd found refuge. He made his debut as a director at the local opera house with a staging of Menotti’s The Medium. In fact, he has continued his collaboration with Scandinavian companies to this day: he is the man behind the Peter Grimes production, dusted off after nearly thirty years and very well received in Copenhagen, which in May saved the honour of the Operaen, when a co-production with Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera fell through for reasons that are yet to be explained. He has dozens of productions to his credit, primarily of Baroque and modernist operas. His stagings are clean, but dark, precise and marked by a uniquely Czech brand of black humour. This was also the case of Salome, although the action, set on an almost empty stage enclosed on three sides by a brick structure reminiscent of the interior of the ruined Basilica of Maxentius in Rome (set design by Dragan Stojčevski), unfolded rather sluggishly at first. I suspect that the director may have intended to build tension in this powerful one-act opera by means of the Hitchcock method, but the earthquake started only with the confrontation between Salome and Jochanaan. When the prophet emerged, dripping with water, from the trapdoor – with a black sack over his head, hauled out of the palace cistern in chains – the audience shuddered with horror for the first time. Radok’s concept proved coherent: Herodes’ palace was a universal metaphor for totalitarian violence and decay of all values. Hence the bizarre hotchpotch of costumes (designed by Zuzana Ježkova), ranging from operetta-style liveries, uniforms and suits, silk gowns and déshabillés, to the slightly over-the-top idea of having The Page of Herodias wear a Muslim niqab; hence the repulsive austerity of the sets and the terrifying indifferentism of the protagonists. There are only monsters roaming around the stage. Had the footmen not rushed to wipe the blood on the floor, Narraboth’s suicide would have gone unnoticed. Orgies and scheming take place somewhere in the background, almost imperceptibly, behind the semi-translucent glass of the palace’s living room. Paradoxically, the character that turns out to be the most human in the drama is the weak, demoralised Herodes – shouting that he will not allow the saviour of the world to raise the dead, because that would be horrible; frozen in humiliation when Salome, in the finale of the Dance of the Seven Veils, pushes his face into her crotch; vomiting with fear and disgust, when his stepdaughter gets her way and has the servants bring Jochanaan’s severed head on a silver platter. My perception of the Brno production may have been influenced by the current events in Poland – but I have to admit that the downfall of the grotesque tetrarch made a much bigger impression on me than the dilemmas and frustrations of the utterly spoiled Salome.

It is more likely, however, I was a bit disappointed by the performer of the title role, the Slovakian Linda Ballová – an excellent and extremely convincing actress as a psychopathic Lolita Salome, but possessing a soprano that I cannot, for the life of me, associate with a “sixteen-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde” as Strauss himself suggested. Ballová’s voice, relatively small, artificially darkened and characterised by a persistent, uncontrolled vibrato, pales in comparison with the luminous, truly girlish sopranos of Destinn and Cebotari, and above all the phenomenal Olive Fremstad, who sang Salome in the American premiere of the work at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907. Despite the powerful orchestration, those singers easily cut through the dense tutti: Ballová continuously struggled with the matter, at times departing from the musical text, and even the famous low G flat on the last word of her monologue was lost in the flood of instrumental chords.

Salome. Linda Ballová. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

However, the other members of the cast did a great job, led by the phenomenal – also acting-wise – Jaroslav Březina in the role of Herodes. Warm words of praise should go to Vit Nosek, who sang Narraboth with a rounded and ardent tenor, although he was not fully able to cope with the tasks entrusted to him by the director. The vengeful Heriodias was successfully portrayed by the experienced Eva Urbanová, a singer endowed with a powerful and superbly controlled soprano; Jochanaan was convincingly sung by the German baritone Birger Radde, a technically superb, extremely musical singer with a voice that is exceptionally noble, beautiful and rich. Marko Ivanovic led the whole thing with an assured hand, but at times paying too much attention to polishing individual details – at the expense of the agitated, kaleidoscopic narrative of this remarkable score.

After such intense impressions of the previous evening, the meeting with Jakobín obviously took place in a completely different atmosphere. The fruit of Dvorák’s second collaboration with the librettist Marie Červinkova-Riegrova – after the mediocre success of the 1882 production of Dimitrij – proved to be the first real triumph in the composer’s operatic career. The story of Bohuš, son of Count Vilém – who returns to his homeland incognito, together with his wife Julie, only to discover that his father is still convinced that his first-born has allied himself in France with the Jacobins and married a woman of ill repute in Paris – runs parallel to the love story of Terinka, daughter of the choirmaster Benda, and Jiří, gamekeeper at the count’s estates, jealous of burgrave Filip, who is courting his fiancée. Dramaturgically, the thing struggles a bit, musically it dazzles, both with the lyricism of the vocal parts and the sumptuous orchestration as well as references to, on the one hand, Czech folklore and on the other – Italian comic opera and the opéra à sauvetage, a genre popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the example of which was also Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Jakobín. Pavla Vykopalová (Julie), Jan Šťáva (Filip), and Roman Hoza (Bohuš). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

This convoluted story was tackled by Martin Glaser, a director a generation younger than Radok, but nevertheless faithful to the Czech tradition of engaged theatre, imbued with the spirit of satire and, at the same time, with the poetic magic of old school plays, which, in the words of Jan Komenský, were to entertain in a way that would make “our games a preparation for serious matters”. In his delightfully colourful Jakobín we can find not only inspirations from eighteenth-century Hanakian opera, but also less obvious, perhaps not entirely conscious references to the oeuvres of other directors from this part of Europe (I’m thinking of, for example, the undulating wooden platforms known from Nekrošius’ productions, with which Glaser builds the landscape of an imaginary town just as evocatively as he creates the interior of the count’s palace). How I miss such stagings: beautiful, clean and clear, human in the most literal sense of the word, provoking laughter and emotion, perfectly coupled with the composer’s idea.

This makes it all the more gratifying that the main contributor to the success of Jakobín was the Janáček Theatre team. The singers permanently affiliated with the Brno company were completed by just two artists: Lucie Kaňková, a singer blessed with a luminous, colourful soprano beautifully opened at the top, and Aleš Briscein as Jiří, an indefatigable and reliable tenor, who brings to mind Klaus Florian Vogt – the difference being, however, that, unlike the German star, he has a truly beautiful voice and uses it with admirable musicality. A lovely pair of the main protagonists came from Pavla Vykopalová (Julie), whose soft soprano had already delighted me in The Greek Passion, and the extraordinarily versatile baritone Roman Hoza (Bohuš), who had clearly worked diligently during his master classes with Christa Ludwig. The indisposed Petr Levíček heroically faced adversity and won over the audience with his bravura portrayal of the choirmaster Benda. The two priests from the production of Martinů’s opera I had seen – David Szendiuch and Jan Šťáva – showed themselves at their best as Count Vilém and the grotesque burgrave Filip. The role of the disreputable Adolf, who tries to seize Bohuš’s inheritance, was entrusted to Tadeáš Hoza, Roman’s younger brother, who possesses a baritone equally well placed, albeit a bit brighter and open more widely in the upper register. Jakub Klecker conducted, making good use of his extensive choral and choirmaster experience in this singing score.

Jakobín. David Szendiuch (Count Vilém). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Given the lack of operatic excitement in Poland, I will have to visit Brno more often. If I were to die in an isolation hospital, like field chaplain Matyáš from The Good Soldier Švejk, no one would be pulling their hair out in despair after me. My record is clean: even if I borrowed one thousand eight hundred crowns from someone, I gave it back long ago.

Translated by Anna Kijak