Upiór w operze

This visit – at the invitation of the North Rhine-Westphalia’s Culture Secretariat, with an eight-strong group of international observers, including my former editor colleague Monika Pasiecznik – was for me like Odysseus’ return to his beloved Ithaca. For thirteen years I have been working almost exclusively as an opera critic. I sometimes forget how much of my professional career was devoted to contemporary music, for example, when I reported on the successive editions of Berlin’s MaerzMusik, a festival I accompanied throughout Matthias Osterwold’s tenure, eagerly following its ups and downs. Year after year I would immerse myself deeply for a week and a half in the latest works, sometimes for over ten hours a day – until the festival began to eat its own tail. After that I would come to Berlin only sporadically and none of the subsequent MaerzMusik curators managed to win me over to their concept. That is why I accepted without hesitation an invitation to two concurrent festivals: the ORBIT biennial of new music theatre, taking place for the third time in Cologne, and the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, celebrating its ninetieth anniversary.

I would venture to say that the programmes of both events – ORBIT, still experimenting and groping its way, and the venerable festival in Witten, which, incidentally, has expanded the formula of its title to include orchestral works and music theatre presentations – if combined into one and spread over time, would produce a festival surprisingly similar to the “MaerzMusiks” from Osterworld’s best years. But these happened nearly two decades ago. If I were younger, this would sound like an complaint. But I am older and I really need something like this: an intense festival of contemporary music that would satisfy both elderly avant-gardist and concert hall regulars, and an audience that still has no idea what to do about it. Listeners and spectators who want to explore such music in the contexts of time, space and other abstract notions. Who prefer to treat new music as a fact of which we know nothing yet, and to set this fact against the harsh reality and the social behaviours associated with it. To listen in darkness, on the go, lying down and while eating. To experience music in the urban space or, on the contrary, to retreat with it into ever changing and less obvious interiors.

What a dream. Meanwhile, Cologne is almost a hundred kilometres away from Witten, and we, as privileged critics, managed to cover almost the entire programmes of both festivals solely thanks to the efforts of the NRW KULTURsekretariat, which enabled us to attend rehearsals and meet the authors of still unfinished projects. Our advantage over the “ordinary” audience was that we knew the aesthetics of many composers from previous encounters. Interestingly, these were not always consistent with our present impressions. “Of all my memories, the saddest are the happiest ones,” confessed Jean Genet, to whom I will return, in The Miracle of the Rose. Well, sometimes it is the other way round: the music of Chaya Czernowin, the focus of this year’s Wittener Tage, which two decades ago I found to be dreadful, albeit technically competent, waffle, this time had me completely engaged. Am I finally mature enough to understand that the various threads of sound in her work alternately intertwine and unravel, run backwards and across the narrative, sometimes disappearing into the fabric only to emerge from it again unnoticed? Or perhaps I was confined in the cocoon of the past and was not keeping up with the voice of the younger generations?

Let us begin at the beginning. Before the ORBIT Festival opened officially, we went to the Ensemble Musikfabrik studio to observe the general rehearsal of Mutants in Music: III. Dreamteam + Playlist of Deaf Dreams, a performance featuring musicians and dancers from the Cologne-based Ensemble uBu. It looked promising: the opening “symphony” of involuntary muscle twitches while falling asleep, enacted by the performers on beds laid out on the studio floor to the rhythm of sounds reminiscent of a children’s music box, failed, however, to develop into a coherent narrative about the art of dreaming together. The drama got stuck until it was carried away by the music, building up gradually from overlapping fragments of a playlist compiled by the deaf artist Matthias Ranner – sung, articulated through instruments, vibrating on low-frequency waves. Only then did I feel like dreaming together with uBu: when Schumann’s Mondnacht emerged from a cloud of clangs, shouts and hums, when Schubert’s Notturno in E flat major began to murmur like a lullaby and when pop-culture texts began to mix gracefully with fragments of avant-garde classics.

Gefängnis ohne Mauern, Schiff ohne Meer. Photo: Sophia Hegewald

The hidden structure of dreams – or rather nightmares – was explored many times by Jean Genet, for example, in his provocative Miracle of the Rose, a semi-autobiographical, non-linear narrative in which the writer loosely drew on his own experiences at the Mettray reformatory for juvenile offenders and his subsequent imprisonment at Fontevrault. The sudden leaps in time and the disorienting blurring of fantasy and reality, characteristic of Genet’s prose, have fascinated numerous composers, resulting in works like Bengtson’s opera The Maids and Eötvös’ Le Balcon, and, before that, Hans Werner Henze’s instrumental “imaginary theatre”, based on motifs from Le Miracle de la Rose. Philipp C. Meyer, a student of Isabel Mundry and Stefano Gervasoni, among others, has decided to use the same material in Gefängnis ohne Mauern, Schiff ohne Meer, a piece of music theatre for one actor (Max Kurth) and seven musicians from Ensemble Garage. Although the set designer Jan Patrick Brandt did indeed create a convincing vision of a supposedly “open” prison (a semi-transparent lightbox at the back of the Roter Saal at the COMEDIA Theater, which both shields the actor entering it and exposes him to public view; illuminated spheres in which the narrator’s distorted face is reflected), and director Miriam Götz intensified the atmosphere of oppression by scattering the musicians across the stage and making their performance seem like intrusive, obsessively repeated actions – the whole thing turned into a drawn-out monodrama with sparingly used background music. True, it was very interesting at times (I was particularly struck by the modulated train whistle, the dreamlike clamour of birds and the crunch of glass being gnawed at by one of the fellow prisoners), but it fell silent at key moments in the narrative, above all in the scene when the mystical rose was discovered at the bottom of the heart of Harcamone, the “holy murderer”. It is a shame, because Meyer is undoubtedly a talented composer and deserved to work with a dramaturge who would have radically shortened the spoken text and woven it more effectively into the musical fabric of the piece.

By contrast, the final performance of Sombre. In the Shadows of Our Time was excellent. It was a moving tribute to Kaija Saariaho, who passed away less than two years ago, made by her husband, the composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière, her son, the director Alexi Barrière, and the composer and sculptor Cécile Marti. The musical material of the production was made up of four chamber pieces by Saariaho (Caliban’s Dream to fragments of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; NoaNoa to a text from Paul Gauguin’s journal; Ciel étoilé; and Sombre to excerpts from Ezra Pound’s Cantos). Marti “replied” to the first two with a composition entitled ‘ŌVIRI to a text by Aleksi Barrière, while Jean-Baptiste Barrière followed Ciel étoilé with Un Tempo di Lampi Senza Tuono to the poem Attesa by Primo Levi. The whole, surprisingly uniform stylistically, was a convincing tale of the fatal consequences of idolatry: in private and artistic, as well as political life. Once again, I was reminded of Maerzmusik and a conversation from twenty-one years ago, after the staged concert Italia Anno Zero, when we fulminated that if we were shown a film featuring Mussolini one more time, we would not be answerable for our actions. In the world we are living in now projections of photographs from concentration camps and filmed speeches by the Duce – interspersed with images of the heavenly beaches of the Hiva ‘Oa island – again make an electrifying impression. Another thing is that this time we were dealing with a very well-produced, if slightly conservative, theatre, which suited the small stage at the Alte Feuerwache perfectly, and, above all, was superbly performed by four instrumentalists (Eija Kankaanranta on the kantele, the flutist Camilla Hoitenga, the double bassist Aleksander Gabryś, the percussionist Fritz Hauser) and the outstanding bass-baritone Robert Koller. The Swiss singer, adding rainstick to the sound layer of the piece, also demonstrated exceptional acting talent. Every one of his portrayals – from Gauguin to Pound – was equally convincing; every word was rich in meaning, every gesture essential. Right up to the final tearing of the projection screen, behind which stood a sculpture by Marti: a primeval stone idol that could represent anything from the painter’s fourteen-year-old mistress, the leader of the Italian fascists, to today’s objects of idolatrous worship.

Sombre. In the Shadows of Our Time. Photo: Sophia Hegewald

I wish we had been able to see Samu Gryllus Host_Opera – based on a documentary novel about the abduction of a dozen or so girls in the Hungarian town of Balassagyarmat, carried out by the sons of local apparatchicks and hushed up by the communist authorities. I am glad that the encounter with the Cologne-based experimentalist Rochus Aust and his Deutsches Stromorchester gave us the chance to explore the still-deserted spaces of the port mill in the revitalised Deutz district, wearing helmets and protective clothing, just like the future audience of the cosmic performance Die Dualen/Grand Jury. We missed out on a few other ORBIT events, including a Symposium and a Speaker’s Corner featuring representatives from the independent arts scene. The Cologne festival is brimming with youthful energy, at times discovering something new, on other occasions reinventing the wheel. One day it will probably become established and thus less interesting.

The Wittener Musiktage are certainly well-established, which in the context of the previous sentence may again sound like a complaint, but the matter is more complicated. ORBIT is still searching, the Witten festival has already found what it was looking for: at least that is how its regulars see it, enamoured as they are with the great avant-garde of the third quarter of the twentieth century and greeting every hint of tonality with a consternation not unlike that which Wagner’s Tristan caused Clara Schumann. The tentative attempts to persuade the audience to embrace a slightly different kind of music, made during the brief tenure of Patrick Hahn, the festival’s former curator, fell on deaf ears – the oeuvre of Cassandra Miller, the face of last year’s Musiktage, who specialises in musical recycling, got a frosty reception. The helm was taken over from Hahn by Anselm Cybinski – together with the majority of the programme already planned for 2026 and focused on the oeuvre of Chaya Czernowin. We will have to wait and see what happens next.

I feel that, given my experiences to date, I am sitting on the barricade dividing the experimentalists and the advocates of the museum avant-garde. I have been quite happy to see the festival’s programme being expanded to include music that is decidedly “non-chamber” music. I was excited to discover the aptness of this year’s motto of the event: Gegenwart. Unentrinnbar (“The Present. Inescapable”). The present played a trick on us. It made us put greater emphasis on the context when assessing the works presented – often at the expense of a detailed analysis of the artists’ compositional technique.

Forty-eight hours of music in three days. That is why I will focus on delights, surprises and disappointments. Above all, on a radical change in my attitude towards Czernowin’s oeuvre, in which I finally began to recognise pain, unresolved trauma and opposition to the actions of tyrants. Surprisingly, her oeuvre sounds the least convincing when it engages directly in contemporary discourse (the underdeveloped NO! A Lament for the Innocent, featuring Sofia Jernberg’s strangely detached amplified soprano part, at a concert by the WDR Orchestra conducted by Yalda Zamani). I definitely find myself more in tune with Czernowin’s sensibility when she uses delicate musical means to evoke the scent of biblical hyssop, that ambiguous plant used by the Israelites in the Passover ritual to ask God to spare them, while slaying the firstborn of Egypt (a phenomenal performance of Ezov by Quatuor Diotima). I was equally struck by the performance of the Cologne-based band hand werk in a music theatre production, Red-Headed Man, based on the modernist poetry of Daniil Kharms: those who realised that a poem about a red-haired man who had no hair no eyes, no ears, no lips, no nose, who had absolutely nothing at all – and, therefore, it was better not to mention him – was a terrifying metaphor for Stalinist terror, turned a blind eye to Chernowin’s unsuccessful directorial debut in staging her own work, which was saved by the spectacular musical and acting performance of the cellist Niklas Seidl.

Red-Headed Man. Photo: Claus Langer

Another highlight from the Wittener Tage for me was Mártón Illés’ Four Sketches from the opening concert, in which vibrant live electronics merged seamlessly with an equally vibrant performance by Klangforum Wien, conducted by Elena Schwarz, clattering, chirping and shouting against a backdrop of fragmented czardases and Romani rhythms, bringing to mind a torn map of neural connections in the human brain. I was moved by Dmitri Kourliandski’s Partially Restored Landscapes, performed by the Diotima Quartet, and described by the composer as a musical deconstruction of encoded radio signals, but which I perceived as an inability to articulate and express the simplest human emotions, a manifestation of a desperate longing for the irretrievably lost land of childhood. I still cannot quite make sense of the concert by Basel Sinfonietta conducted by Titus Engel, during which the audience gave a warm reception to the technically accomplished, seductively Orientalising piece Untamed River by the Iranian composer Amen Feizabadi (with the superb Noa Frenkel in the solo part), and booed the naive Seven Valleys of Love by his compatriot Golfam Khayam, a clumsy composition, but one that remains touchingly faithful to the aesthetics of the classical Persian dastgāh system.

Noa Frenkel. Photo: Claus Langer

I will not hide my admiration for Øyvind Torvund’s Two Pieces for Orchestra and Electronics, performed by the WDR Orchestra under Zamani. Torvund has always thrown listeners off the scent, branched off down different paths and drawn the audience into an intriguing discussion about the blurred boundary between nature and civilisation – this time he put shreds of inspiration from the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Sibelius into the muzzle of wolves howling in the wilderness and other strange creatures.

There are many things I have not written about and I do not regret it. This trip has transported me back to a beautiful past, when I would immerse myself in the music of the day for weeks and would pick out only what was essential. This trip has thrown me into the inescapable present. I am happy to be able to experience it not only in the existential dimension, but also in the aesthetic dimension, filtered through the sensibility and unbridled imagination of contemporary composers.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Who are you, world, that you terrify me so? – asked Gertrud von Le Fort, the author of the novella The Song at the Scaffold, from which everything began. The German writer was a woman full of existential angst, which is said to be an essential prerequisite for true faith. She lived in this anxiety for a long time, ninety-five years, until her death on All Saints’ Day in 1971. She was a Catholic, but born in a Protestant family whose members – as her father, a Prussian army officer used to say – participated in history wherever they could. Her paternal ancestors came from the Duchy of Savoy-Piedmont and bore the surname Liforti. They were Waldensians, members of one of Christianity’s oldest pre-Reformation movements. In the mid-sixteenth century they converted to Calvinism and fled to Switzerland. There they adopted the surname Le Fort, associated etymologically, like its Italian variety, with strength and courage. In the period directly preceding the action of the novella one of the Le Forts co-organised Louis XVI’s failed attempt to escape to Varennes and two others died at the hands of the revolutionaries.

Gertrud von Le Fort wrote The Song at the Scaffold in the form of a letter from an eyewitness to the events, an exiled French aristocrat. The narrative focused on a fictitious figure of a young Carmelite nun, Blanche de la Force, another mutation of the author’s own surname. However, the story described by von Le Fort did indeed happen. The Compiègne convent was closed by the revolutionary authorities in 1792; for the following two years the nuns lived as “laypersons” in several adjacent houses. In 1794 Fouquier-Tinville, the first public accuser of the Revolutionary Tribunal, delivered an indictment against the Carmelites, arguing that despite official prohibitions they had managed to create a monastic community of sorts. In June the women were transported to the infamous “vestibule of the guillotine”, that is the Conciergerie prison at the former royal palace on the Île de la Cité in Paris, and were subsequently sentenced to death. The Carmelites were executed on 17 July, barely ten days before the end of the Reign of Terror. On their way to the execution site they sang the Salve Regina. After the execution truly deathly silence fell among the crowd. But the last nun to be beheaded was not Blanche de la Force but Madame Lidoine, the prioress, whose dowry to enter the convent had been paid years earlier by Marie Antoinette no less.

The literary Blanche is von Le Fort’s alter ego, a character reflecting her own grief over the values squandered by the Great War, her own fear of the consequences of the October Revolution and the rise of a radical mood in Germany. “Fear is a great emotion,” wrote Gertrud von Le Fort in The Song at the Scaffold, “The nation should know fear. (…) The terrible events I am going to write of have really taken place and may be repeated at any moment”. The short novella, showing not only the horror of history, but also the possibility of inner transformation of people participating in it, caused quite a stir among the intellectual and artistic elites of the day. Interest in von Le Fort’s work continued also after the Second World War. In 1948 the French Dominican Léopold Bruckberger persuaded Georges Bernanos to adapt the novella for a film script. However, he was not pleased with the adaptation. Bernanos died a year later, and his manuscript – markedly different from the original in several respects – was unearthed by his publisher and published as Dialogues des Carmélites, the title having been changed at von Le Fort’s request. Bernanos’ work began a new life on theatrical stages, first in a German translation (as Die begnadete Angst, “Blessed anxiety”) and then, after the 1952 Paris premiere, in the French original.

Photo: Mattia Gaido

Following Bruckberger’s suggestion, Bernanos enriched the portrayal of Blanche with elements borrowed from the biography of Constance, Blanche’s younger “soulmate”. It was Constance who had a brother who, amidst the turmoil of the Revolution, tried to rescue her from the convent – and thus the narrative of the Dialogues gained the character of Chevalier de la Force. In addition, Bernanos put a stronger emphasis on the horrific agony of the old prioress, Madame de Croissy, most likely motivated by his own fear of looming death. The drama became more human than Gertrud von Le Fort’s novella, suffused with mysticism – this may have been the reason why it immediately became hugely successful.

It also struck a chord with Poulenc, deeply anxious at the time about the fate of his partner, Lucien Roubert, who was dying of cancer. However, it was Margarete Wallman, an Austrian dancer, choreographer and director, who finally persuaded the composer to adapt Bernanos’ play for an opera – through her husband, head of the Ricordi publishing house. Poulenc transformed the play into a libretto almost without any interference in its content and form. He worked two years on the music, creating a score that did not go beyond tonality, was full of references to modal scales in its harmony, and limited in its use of chromaticism.  His Dialogues is a magnificent continuation of the French tradition, including Pelléas and Mélisande – with Debussy’s characteristic, unobvious treatment of leitmotifs – as well as the vocal fluency of Massenet’s operas, not to mention other sources of inspiration, from Monteverdi’s recitative and expressive style to the dramatic intensity of the work’s climactic scenes worthy of Mussorgsky.

In Poland Dialogues des Carmélites did not attract much attention until the beginnings of the political transformation. However, the brief popularity of Bernanos’ play ended already in the mid-1990s and Poulenc’s opera was staged only once, over a quarter of a century ago, at Teatr Wielki in Łódź. Yet there are avowed fans of the masterpiece in Poland, usually agreeing that in purely theatrical terms no one has presented it in a more compelling way that Robert Carsen, author of the legendary 1997 production for De Nederlandse Opera. Carsen’s staging has been seen in nearly twenty opera houses across the world. I only managed to catch up with it in Turin – and with good reason, for after nearly three decades of its stage travels it had come full and significant circle. The Dialogues at the Teatro Regio di Torino was prepared by the same conductor who had been in charge of the Amsterdam performances: Yves Abel, a Canadian of French origin, who has been devoted to the popularisation of the musical tradition of his ancestors all his life.

Photo: Mattia Gaido

I have seen plenty of stagings revived without the involvement of the original directors, by assistants unaware of the context and disregarding the timeless significance of gestures that had ceased to be meaningful to them. Nothing of the sort happened in Turin, where Carsen’s original concept was meticulously reconstructed by the experienced director Christophe Gayral, and lighting – which is key to this staging – by Carsen himself, in collaboration with Cor van der Brink, who had gained his experience by working on productions by true giants of opera theatre, like Robert Wilson and Pierre Audi. Carsen’s vision unfolds on a nearly empty stage, on which every solitary prop – a bench, an armchair, a bed, a grave – plays a significant role (sets by Michael Levine, costumes by Frank Baer). Carsen cleverly plays with colour: for example, in Act One, when Blanche wears a white robe, with Marquis de la Force wearing red and his son parading in a blue costume. However, this is not an anachronistic reference to the allegedly revolutionary symbolism of the French flag, but more to the colours associated with the ancien régime: the white of the clergy, the heraldic red of the aristocracy and the blue of the rising bourgeoisie. The duet of Blanche and her brother takes place on both sides of a symbolic cloister wall, represented on stage by a row of nuns with their backs turned to the audience. The wall proves to be an illusion – at some point the protagonists start to pass through this porous partition and every word they utter only serves to emphasise the power of their transgression. The famous final execution scene – phenomenally highlighted by Philippe Girodeau’s evocative choreography – eschews literalness. There is no blood and no guillotine: the sisters announce their death one by one with a sequence of symbolic gestures and then fall prostrated on the stage, with their arms outstretched – but with their faces turned upwards, as a sign of faith, hope and trust in the unknown.

Blanche was portrayed by Ekaterina Bakanova, who has a rounded, ringing and expressive soprano – which was evident especially in the episodes of extreme dilemma and terror, when the artist would sometimes sacrifice the beauty of sound in favour of an almost tangible expression. A perfect counterbalance to the emotional Blanche was provided by Francesca Pia Vitale as Constance, sung with a radiant voice full of girlish ardour. I was less impressed by Sally Matthews as Madame Lidoine – her beautiful, mature soprano is still very sonorous, but has too much vibrato, which, unfortunately, affects the delivery of the text. In this respect Matthews was clearly inferior to the rest of the female cast, including Antoinette Dennefeld, a moving and intensely human Mother Marie, and, above all, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, a phenomenal Madame de Croissy. The alto part of the old prioress, like the part of the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, is usually entrusted to eminent singers who are also excellent actors, but who have their best years way behind them. Brunet-Grupposo went against this trend, demonstrating that a sense of theatre and impeccable vocal technique could support interpretation regardless of age. The intensity of her portrayal overshadowed Bakanova already in the first dialogue, in which she explained the order’s rule in sentences sharper than the blade of the guillotine. In the death scene, when her entire world of values had collapsed like a house of cards, she rose to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Faced with such acting and such musicality, a critic remains helpless with admiration: even occasional lapses in intonation seem to be a conscious tool of communication with the listeners.

The men have very little to do in this opera. All the more credit should, therefore, go the baritone Jean-François Lapointe, an undisputed master of the French repertoire, who, in his brief role as Marquis de la Force, dazzled the audience not only with his spot-on sense of style, but also with his superb diction and outstanding stage presence. Valentin Thill as Chevalier de la Force was more than decent, although his handsome lyric tenor loses some of its power of expression because of awkward transitions between registers. I cannot fail to mention Krystian Adam, who sang the Chaplain in impeccable French, with a warm and beautifully open voice, at the same time creating a nuanced portrayal of a man torn between fear and duty.

Photo: Daniele Ratti

Yves Abel conducted the Turin Dialogues in a highly stylish manner, in wisely measured tempi, skilfully balancing the proportions between the shimmering, colourful orchestral layer, and the wealth and weight of the words uttered on stage. It should be said at this point that the conductor had to cope with the untypical acoustics of Teatro Regio di Torino, where the orchestra’s selective and resonant sound can get out of hand and overwhelm the singers. Nothing of the sort happened. The conductor was in control of everything, including the chorus, superbly prepared by Gea Garatti Ansini, whose members also joined the soloists in the final scene, complementing the musical image of the tragedy of the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne.

And once again we experienced the power of a nearly thirty-year-old staging and the power of artists believing in Poulenc’s masterpiece. For evil truly has no power other than the helplessness of good – to refer to Gertrud von Le Fort’s words again.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I never cease to be amazed by the Czechs, and the grace as well as ease with which they bring back to life underrated operas from their national repertoire. True, it can be argued that Czech composers’ masterpieces have long been present on the world’s stages and that audiences craving for something new – not only in their homeland – will welcome any dusted-off piece with open arms. Yet this argument is false: first, not all of these operas deserved to be banished from theatrical stages, second – even if they are inferior to the more distinguished achievements of their authors, the Czechs usually know how to hide their flaws and highlight their strong points. This is primarily due to the fact that they have never broken with their operatic tradition; they know how to make it fit it into the framework of modern theatre, to look at it with detachment and, when necessary, to approach it somewhat tongue in cheek.

This has recently been the case of The Devil’s Wall, Smetana’s last completed opera and, at the same time, one of the four he wrote to Eliška Krásnohorská’s libretti, including the romantic opera Viola, based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and abandoned after several hundred bars. Krásnohorská, a writer, translator, editor of Ženské listy and activist in the women’s emancipation movement, was much younger than the composer. They met in 1864, before Eliška turned seventeen. Their true friendship began unusually – with an article in which Krásnohorská, whilst making no secret of her admiration for Smetana’s musical talents, pointed out his errors in the prosody of the Czech language, using The Bartered Bride as an example. Instead of taking offence, Smetana took her comments to heart. Krásnohorská was the composer’s muse, collaborator and unfulfilled love in the final decade of his short life, when he was battling increasing deafness, soon compounded by vertigo, hallucinations and sudden rage outbursts – according to Smetana, these were symptoms of madness that brought him to the brink of suicide several times. In spite or perhaps because of that, their first joint operas (The Kiss and The Secret) were bitter-sweet, lyrical comedies in which it is often hard to tell the difference between irony and melancholy, fiction and autobiographical themes.

However, work on The Devil’s Wall dragged on for longer than expected, also because of disputes over the nature of the work itself. From the very beginning Krásnohorská suggested something along the lines of a romantic opera, combining a historical theme with the legend of a devil trying to prevent the construction of the Monastery of Vyšší Brod, founded by Vok of Rožmberk as an expression of his gratitude to the Virgin May for saving him from the waters of the Vltava. Smetana wanted a lighter approach to the subject, to which Krásnohorská agreed, but their subsequent collaboration was a struggle. In the end Smetana removed more or less one-third of the original text from Krásnohorská’s libretto and did the whole his own way. He may have wanted to laugh and be moved a bit before he died.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The premiere in October 1882, at the now defunct Nové České Divadlo in Prague, was received with moderate enthusiasm. The wooden building, used as the summer base of the Temporary Theatre, had neither the technical facilities nor sufficiently talented creative team to properly stage an opera about devils, dreams full of phantoms, a thunderstorm and reversal of the Vltava course (suffice it to say that sheep were played by suitably trimmed poodles). Rarach, a role written for Karel Čech, was in the end sung by a different singer, shattering the illusion of a striking resemblance between the hell’s emissary and the hermit Beneš. Despite favourable opinions about the music, The Devil’s Wall was removed from the repertoire after just six performances. Bad luck continued to plague the the work: a performance in Prague on 28 June 1914 was interrupted by news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Smetana’s last opera did not make it beyond Czech theatres and still remains one of the composer’s least frequently staged works. Worse still, after a while it came to labelled a a work of declining years showing symptoms of the gradual disintegration of the composer’s creative powers.

The Devil’s Wall has not been seen in Brno for nearly half a century. Now the opera has returned in a staging that is so impressive with the richness of theatrical imagination and, at the same time, so irresistibly funny that I do not quite know whom to praise first. Let me, therefore, start unusually with Dragan Stojčevski, who, at the request of the director Jiří Heřman, designed the sets drawing solely on the architecture of the buildings and the interiors of the Vyšší Brod monastery, but making them an equal protagonist of the narrative. Although there is no Rožmberk Castle, nor a shepherd’s hut, nor a cliff on the bank of the Vltava, nor even the eponymous devil’s wall, that is a river dam – everything is there, in the sets organising the entire stage space, constantly moved, turned away, attracting the eye to strange nooks and crannies. Jarek, tormented by temptation, has a dream of an orgy involving smoking weed in the monastery library; Katuška is making out with her lover in the cloister garden; the Vltava River swells just outside the window of St. Anne’s Chapel.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The more our sense of the absurd grew, the easier it was to turn the narrative into a convincing whole – thanks to the brilliant direction of Heřman, who approached The Devil’s Wall with a panache worthy of the Salle le Peletier in Meyerbeer’s era. And with a sense of humour similar to that which must have characterised the authors of special effects of the French grand opéras. Heřman masterfully exploits the “alienness” of a detail or prop – the medieval setting (Zuzana Štefunková Rusínová’s superb costumes) is disrupted by a young monk in trainers; wheelbarrows from a DIY store roll onto the stage several times, and the peasant women push quite modern, neatly compressed bales of straw with their rakes. In addition, the director plays a hilarious game with symbols. The abundance of fish caught in the orchestra pit and swimming in the banked up Vltava, and, finally, the carp wagging its tail in a Gothic sculpture’s arms serve as a subtle (?) reminder that Vyšší Brod is a Cistercian abbey. The Rožmberks’ heraldic rose appears in a variety of contexts – for example, in Vok Vítkovic’s ceremonious entrée in full armour (I will not describe the scene, for if anyone is intending to go to Brno, I will spoil all the fun for them).

Some of Heřman’s ideas are so mad that I sometimes had the impression that I was watching the film Arabela, alternating with The Red Inn. However, wherever lyricism, horror or seriousness is needed, the spectator will find it. What deserves a special mention is the director’s collaboration with the choreographer Marek Svobodník, who has provided Rarach with a retinue of skeletons in black-and-white costumes, moving with the eerie grace of danse macabre figures (in scenes where Rarach is not parading in Beneš’s habit, but appears as a skeletal devil, the singer animates a hermit’s puppet in front of him). Add to this the superb crowd scenes, Dominik Žižek’s evocative projections and the lighting design overseen by Heřman himself, and we have a production that will captivate everyone – from a child taken to the opera by their parents for the first time, to a discerning music lover who has hitherto not believed in the power of Smetana’s work.

Photo: Matek Olbrzymek

For after what we heard in Brno, no one will believe that the opera is a work of declining years. Under Robert Kružík’s confident yet delicate hand the performance revealed not only obvious allusions to Wagner and Liszt, but also unexpectedly sophisticated and novel harmonic and colour structures bringing to mind Dvořák’s and Mahler’s late works. This was due to the disciplined and attentive orchestra, not to mention the phenomenal chorus of the Brno Opera, which I cannot praise highly enough in every performance. In the solo cast I saw a month after the premiere I was impressed the most by Pavel Švingr in the role of Rarach. He is a singer blessed with a powerful bass voice, yet one that is both exceptionally handsome and musical. Singing Beneš, David Szendiuch, with his considerably less distinctive voice, paled somewhat in comparison. On the other hand, an excellent performance came from Roman Hoza – a moving and human Vok Vítkovic, sung with a soft baritone with excellent breath control and beautiful middle range. The ever reliable Peter Berger was outstanding in the tenor role of the knight Jarek – no doubt aided by the soprano Lenka Máčiková, who gave a superb acting portrayal of Katuška with a mercurial voice. Romana Kružíkova lacked a similar stage presence; hers is a soprano light and girlish enough for the role of Hedvika, Vok’s beloved, but she still needs to work on her interpretation on the character. Záviš was convincingly portrayed by Václava Krejčí Housková, whose assured, steely mezzo-soprano is perfect for this trouser role. Finally, a round of applause should go to the tenor Petr Levíček in the character role of Michálek, the castle steward and Katuška’s father, a part that seems to have been taken straight from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Next year The Devil’s Wall will be presented at Prague’s National Theatre in a production by Ondřej Havelka, the first director that made me cry with laughter at the opera. A quarter of a century has passed since then and Havelka now has some stiff competition. If the Prague production turns out to be just as successful, Smetana will die of laughter in the beyond.

Translated by: Anna Kijak