{"id":7453,"date":"2023-06-24T12:21:15","date_gmt":"2023-06-24T10:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=7453"},"modified":"2023-06-24T16:29:10","modified_gmt":"2023-06-24T14:29:10","slug":"fine-trills-make-fine-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=7453","title":{"rendered":"Fine Trills Make Fine Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 a turner, self-taught builder and head of the Keller family \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u00e9migr\u00e9s seeking refuge under Mrs Keller\u2019s 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 \u2013 memories he referred to in his autobiographical novel Green Henry<\/em>, but also a lasting interest in the cause of political refugees and their fight for their lost statehood.<\/p>\n

More waves of \u00e9migr\u00e9s from Poland came to Switzerland after the Spring of the Peoples and the failed January Uprising. In 1863 Gottfried Keller \u2013 at that time already the secretary of the Canton of Zurich \u2013 founded, together with Count W\u0142adys\u0142aw 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 like in the short story, written more or less at that time but published only in 1874, Kleider machen Leute<\/em> (which can be freely translated as \u201cclothes do make the man\u201d). Its protagonist is a young tailor, Wenzel Strapinski, who has just lost his job and has set off \u201con an unpleasant November day\u201d 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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,\u00a0 that it will be enough for her to become the wife of a true master tailor.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Serghei Gherciu<\/p>\n

Keller\u2019s 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\u2019s. The subjects included Zemlinsky\u2019s father \u2013 a Viennese-born son of an Austrian Catholic mother and a father from \u017dilina, Hungary \u2013 who added the noble preposition \u201cvon\u201d 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\u00a0Kleider machen Leute\u00a0<\/em>in 1907, after the earlier successes of\u00a0Sarema\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Es war einmal<\/em>, and the failed premiere of\u00a0Der Traumg\u00f6rge<\/em>, which was planned at Vienna\u2019s\u00a0 Staatsoper under Mahler\u2019s baton, but which did not take place after Mahler resigned as the company\u2019s music director shortly before the first performance. The libretto to\u00a0Kleider machen Leute\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 as in the case of the unlucky Traumg\u00f6rge\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 was written by Leo Feld, who significantly condensed the narrative and made it somewhat lighter than in Keller\u2019s original. The premiere of the first, three-act version took place in 1910 at Vienna\u2019s 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\u00a0<\/em>was revived in 1922 at the Neues Deutsches Theater, the current home of the State Opera in Prague.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cMusica non grata\u201d, 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Serghei Gherciu<\/p>\n

Hence the idea to stage Kleider machen Leute<\/em> with mainly local musicians, led by two artists whose collaboration had previously been appreciated, when Jan\u00e1\u010dek\u2019s Katia Kabanova<\/em> was staged at Komische Oper Berlin: the Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen and the Lithuanian conductor Giedr\u0117 \u0160lekyt\u0117. 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\u2019s austere minimalism. In her interpretation the action of Zemlinsky\u2019s opera takes place primarily on the proscenium, within a space delimited by Herbert Murauer\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 generally to good effect, although Zemlinsky\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 from straw pork pie hats from the wild 1920s to the jazzy zoot suits characteristic of\u00a0 Polish Bikini Boys from a later period.<\/p>\n

Yet Mijnssen\u2019s clean and precise direction went side by side with the dramaturgy of the work, although it did lead several soloists into an acoustic trap \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u201cLehn deine Wang\u2019 an meine Wang\u2019\u201d with Heine\u2019s 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 B\u00f6hni, a rejected suitor for Nettchen\u2019s 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 Giedr\u0117 \u0160lekyt\u0117, 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 \u2013 and, by extension, also the young Sch\u00f6nberg \u2013 with a truly Mozartian bravura in the shaping of group scenes, and the ever-present lightness of Viennese operetta.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Serghei Gherciu<\/p>\n

Kleider machen Leute\u00a0<\/em>is not a masterpiece on a par with Der Zwerg\u00a0<\/em>or Eine florentinische Trag\u00f6die<\/em>. 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 \u00e9migr\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Translated by: Anna Kijak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 a turner, self-taught builder and head of the Keller family \u2013 died of tuberculosis shortly after turning thirty, having previously buried four of his six children with wife … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-7453","6":"format-standard","7":"category-posts-in-english","8":"category-wedrowki-operowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7453"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7462,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions\/7462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}