Benjamin Britten: The Little Sweep
 
Opera for children in two parts

Conductors: László Bartal and Géza Köteles

Director: Rita Bata
 

“Since Purcell produced Dido and Aeneas for Josias Priest’s girls’ school at Chelsea, no more beautiful opera for child performers has been written. Its immediate popularity as an entertainment, not only in this country but all over the world, has been phenomenal; but what is more difficult to assess is the extent of its influence in introducing children to opera. In some countries a new generation is growing up that, thanks partly to its example, is prepared to accept opera and its conventions as a natural and familiar art. The Little Sweep is an opera of innocence – of innocence betrayed and rescued –, and it is fully worthy of the singer of innocence who inspired it.”

The poet White is referring to is William Blake, whose poem from his Songs of Innocence had a decisive impact on the atmosphere and world of Britten’s opera:
 

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

(The Chimney Sweeper)
 

According to the original concept (which worked perfectly), The Little Sweep (libretto by Eric Crozier) was the third act of Let’s Make an Opera!, which was composed for the entertainment and musical-theatrical education of the young. In the first act the children decide to compose an opera, which they rehearse in the second act and perform in the third. The plot is based on a short story by Charles Dickens.

The original story takes place in Britain in the early 19^th century. Robert, the authoritarian sweep-master treats his young apprentice, the eight-year-old Sam with great harshness. He orders him to climb into the fireplace of the children’s room to sweep the chimney. When he leaves the room with the other apprentice and the housekeeper, the children, who are playing hide-and-seek, find Sam, who has got stuck in the chimney. Feeling compassion, they rescue and hide him in a wardrobe, and, to make Sam’s master suspect that he has fled, they open the window and scatter soot on everything between the fireplace and the window. They children have barely finished when the master and the housekeeper return. They immediately notice the soot, and set off in pursuit. Rowan, a kind-hearted girl takes pity on the young apprentice and helps the children. They quickly wash him, give him new clothes and hide him again. Next morning, John, who is only a guest, comes up with a splendid idea. Since he lives in the same village, they pack Sam in his huge trunk to free him from his wicked master. The coachman and the gardener arrive to pick up the trunk, but finding it too heavy they want to open it. Now it is the children’s turn: they all help to heave the trunk onto the coach. Thus, they manage to rescue the little sweep.

The Opera House includes this highly emotional and deeply humane Britten opera in the programme – following The King’s New Clothes – to cater for the future opera-lovers (and, of course, their parents).

11 October 2009

Béla Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle

 Opera in one act performed twice

Conductor: Fischer Ádám

Director: Schörghofer Hartmut
 

„The interpretation of the myth obviously always depends on the author” – wrote György Kroó about the rich, ancient literature of the Bluebeard myth. Maurica Maeterlinck (Ariane and the Bluebeard, 1902) revealed the spiritual richness and depth of the basic story, and his adaptation is perhaps the most poetic of all. In his work Ariane (Judit in Béla Balázs’s version), the new woman is not an everyday figure; she is a symbol, her character is a mixture of “the proud woman, the love who brings blessing, and the beneficial fairy”. She comes to free Bluebeard’s previous women from their prison, the castle. She is not in love with Bluebeard, she blames him for the failure of their relationship. She charges him with selfish and aggressive love: “you asked for more from them than you could give”. When she opens the doors for the erstwhile lovers, she realises that she cannot free them from their own selves. “My poor, poor sisters! Why do you yearn for freedom if you like darkness so much? And why were you crying in the depth of your prisons if you were happy?” Bluebeard’s tragedy is also revealed to her: “he could not love you the way he should have, and he wanted a hundred women because you were only shadows for him.” Maeterlinck’s play is about the love in which man and woman are continuously looking for the other but neither of them can be dissolved in the other, and thus it is inevitably tragic. Anatole France’s short story (Bluebeard’s Seven Women, 1909) turns the story inside out. His hero is rich and smart, but also shy, reserved and bashful in the company of women. “All his marriages were destroyed by his wives’ whims and aggression. They all exploit his blessedly good heart, endless patience and true emotions,” writes Kroó. Anatole France’s Bluebeard is the archetype of the modern henpecked husband: one of his wives’ has a lover, the other refuses to share his bed, and the third is yearning for the king. His last wife humiliates him with a series of comedies: “And the innocent women are not victims, each of them are rather the embodiments of despicable female characteristics. The eternal struggle between man and woman appears here in a way that reveals the curse of modern life.”

An interpretation of a piece of art always depends on the author who adapts it, and – in the case of staged productions – on the performance too. Béla Bartók’s opera, like every masterpiece, is open to an infinite number of interpretations. We can find in it, among others, the voice of Anatole France, who looked at everyday life with his sober irony as well as Maurice Maeterlinck’s highbrow symbolism. However, no matter how we paraphrase Bartók’s piece for ourselves, we will always see a projection of our games in our own relationships. This eternal story will always touch the hearts of audiences.

This new production by the Opera House stages Bluebeard’s Castle in a unique form. The one-act opera is normally performed together with another piece. On this occasion the opera will be performed twice. The singers are the same, but the directors’ concepts will be different, and, accordingly, the interpretations will also be diverse from a musical point of view. These are only two of the many possibilities, but the two versions will be coherent both individually as a pairing.

In the last century it was Arnold Schönberg and his colleagues who initiated a practice in concerts in which, by performing the pieces twice, they aimed to create a novel and unique atmosphere for the audience. The first performance would give a general impression of the piece, mainly setting its contours and the main directions of the dramaturgy. During the second performance, however, we notice the details and the unique characteristics of the whole composition is instilled with. This concept, originating from Bartók’s time, also contributed to our decision to perform our most important opera in an unusual way.

 7 & 8 November 2009

S. Rachmaninov – M. Mussorgsky – R. Wagner –

B. Eifman: The Karamazovs

 Ballet in two acts

Conductors: Ádám Medveczky and Kálmán Szennai

Choreographer: Boris Eifman
 

The Hungarian audience has always liked ballets with stories, especially those which revive a piece of literature (e.g. Cranko’s Onegin or Pártay’s Anna Karenina). That is why Boris Eifman’s The Karamazovs was chosen to be one of our premières.

Boris Eifman (b. 1946) started to create choreographies during Soviet times, and besides the renowned ballet companies in Moscow and St. Petersburg, he managed to develop an international career. His first works appeared in the 1970s, creating a storm in the silent waters of the cultural policy of its days. And yet Eifman remained on the scene, choreographing more than 40 pieces for his own company. His Bivocality of 1977 was composed for music by Pink Floyd, which amounted to a breaking of taboos in those times. The themes he adapted are varied, but his most highly praised ballets are those inspired by literature, e.g. The Master and Margarita (1987), the Russian Hamlet (1999) or Don Juan (2001). What the international dance world especially admires is that the choreographer merges classical movements with acrobatic elements, complemented with very powerful dramaturgy. The Eifman Ballet frequently tours around the world, and his choreographies are performed on a variety of stages. In Hungary the Eifman Ballet last appeared in 2004 at the Miskolc Opera Festival and Budapest, where they performed a Tchaikovsky ballet and the Russian Hamlet.

Eifman’s primary interest does not lie in the narrative story of the pieces, but rather in the unfurling conflicts of the characters of literary works. He draws the characters of the figures by depicting their internal struggles, which results in powerful scenes on stage. Dostoevsky’s piece is perfect material for Eifman as the brutal, alcoholic father, the brothers of largely diverse characters, and the female figures who appear in their lives give opportunities for many outstanding dances and, at the same time, dramatic features. And in order to create a theatre in its completeness, the choreographer uses musical excerpts by Rachmaninov, Wagner and Mussorgsky, successfully combining these with gypsy folk songs.

28 November 2009

József Sári: Solar Eclipse

 Opera in two acts

Conductor: Zsolt Hamar

Director: Balázs Kovalik
 

József Sári’s opera was premiered in Pforzheim, Germany in 2000. The piece was composed from a German-language libretto, but it is linked with Hungarian history and culture in many ways. The libretto, written by Elisabeth Gutjahr, is about the life of Arthur Koestler, and the German title (Sonnenfinsternis – Solar Eclipse) refers to Koestler’s famous novel Darkness at Noon. However, the opera itself is not a stage adaptation of the novel, but a story consisting of episodes which are partly real, partly ones that “could have happened”. Events from 1914 to 1983 – from Koestler’s childhood to his suicide – follow one another in a film-like way in the eleven scenes. It is documentary theatre – in opera. This form, which is almost unknown in the Hungarian operatic tradition, is not unusual in the international opera world. Thus, the Hungarian premiere of József Sári’s piece has two aims: to bring one of the most outstanding Hungarian composers’ operas closer to the audience, and, at the same time, enrich and widen the public perception of opera as an art.

All of the many characters of the opera are real figures: family members, personalities of the literary life of Budapest and the world (for instance Walter Benjamin, Andor Németh, Attila József, Lajos Kassák or Miklós Radnóti), and activists of the Communist movement (Otto Katz). The opera revives the colourful buzz of the Japán Café, the Spanish Civil War, an interrogation, and reality is sometimes mixed with the fiction of the novel inspired by reality. After the première in Germany, music historian Zoltán Farkas commented on the music: “the score of the opera is an organic continuation, and even logical consequence of Sári’s creative career. The listener who is familiar with the composer’s oeuvre sometimes has the impression (or illusion?) that musical ideas and gestures which have been nurtured for a long time and returned again and again are reenergized and take on new meanings in the verbalised world of the opera, or even find their proper place in it.”

The “hero” of the opera, Arthur Koestler, was born in Hungary in 1905. He was a writer, philosopher, science historian, and a researcher of paranormal phenomena, a political thinker and essayist, who wrote in many languages (Hungarian, German, Hebrew, French and English); he was extraordinarily sensitive to social questions, and had close contacts with Zionism, belligerent Communism, and later Anti-Communism and Liberalism; he tried to find solutions to the crisis of the West in Far-Eastern philosophies, but he was disappointed in that too. Koestler was an adventurer of the mind, and his fate is a characteristic 20^th century one which he lived in an especially radical way, with all its doubts, lows, mistakes and admissions. As a journalist and correspondent he worked in the Middle East, Paris, Berlin, the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and he often appeared in Budapest. He joined the German Communist Party in 1931, which he left in 1938, when he settled down in Britain. His novel Darkness at Noon, published in English in 1940, made him world-famous. The novel describes his disillusionment from Communism through the story of an old Russian Bolshevik. Many argue that the novel played an important role in the Communist electoral defeat in France after the war.

Koestler’s loves and private life was also of a higher velocity than those of average people, and his last great decision was typically radical.

25 & 27 December 2009, 16 January 2010

Vígszínház

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Die Zauberflöte

 Opera in two acts

Conductors: Ádám Fischer, János Kovács, Géza Török

Director: László Marton
 

In 1790, the year when King Leopold (Lipót) was crowned, a dynamically developing district of Pest – today’s Inner City – was named Lipótváros. Outside its boundaries, where the

“The Freihaustheater was one of Vienna’s many suburban theatres, but was well located for transportation, and easily accessible, it was part of a complex of 225 flats owned by Prince Starhemberg. The members of the company had cheap accommodation there along with the artisans, workers and servants – who were the audience of the theatre – although the performances were also attended by high society. The audience sat on simple wooden benches in the stalls (…) and the theatre could house 800 people nightly. Schikaneder proved to be a theatre manager who could calculate precisely and follow the rules; he was a sober man who could even plan artistic success in advance” – writes Volkmar Braunbehrens, an excellent historian of the period. “Although he did not pay outstanding fees, which could, of course, not compete with those of the artists in the National Theatre, he set the artists’ remuneration at a level which could retain the best ones and link them to the opera house”, who – we should add – had little problem in making a success of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

Today there is extensive literature on how the theatre itself influenced and formulated the intricate tale of The Magic Flute, its wonderfully simple, elevated and profane music which is addressed to everybody, and its enchantingly naïve and yet sophisticated and complex ideas; with its location and characteristic audience, and its internal conditions, which place everything into a prolific refraction. The cooperation of the Hungarian State Opera House and the Vígszínház can be regarded as a playful and serious experiment: we wonder how the differences between our theatres could be turned into energy and whether it is possible to achieve that prolific refraction again today.

20 (6 pm) and 21 (6 pm) March 2010

Richard Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier

Comic opera in three acts, sung in German

Conductors: János Kovács, István Dénes

Director: Andrejs Zagars
 

Although we still have many more of them to perform, it is undeniable that some works by Richard Strauss belong to the core repertoire of the Opera House. Such operas are Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, each of which was staged in Budapest almost simultaneously with the world première. Der Rosenkavalier arrived at the Ybl Palace exceptionally early: it was premièred in Dresden on 26 January 1911, and some months later, on 21 May, it was performed in Budapest. A contemporary journalist did not understand the reason for the swiftness, and had a mixed reaction. He wrote about his experience at the Budapest première as follows: “The music of Der Rosenakavalier is, in its way, bold and spectacular, but it is not a masterpiece, although the distinguished composer, who has ventured into the style of the Vienna Secession, pretends to compromise with the melody. As a whole, I liked the piece very much; perhaps partly because of its spicy language.

The hero is a 17 year-old man, who is distancing himself from his elderly mistress. He falls in love with a younger girl, but her father wishes to marry her to a rough and hedonistic baron. The feminine-featured little Rosenkavalier, disguised as a chambermaid, offers a rendezvous to the indecent fiancé, and humiliates him in public – while the generous Princess arranges that the happy girl can marry her former lover.

The first and last acts are set in a bedroom, and in the middle one the aggressive baron’s garments are outrageous – in these motifs it is definitely not easy to recognise Hogmannsthal’s muse who glitters in a goddess-like divinity in his other works. The fact that Richard Strauss, the highbrow composer of the tone poem Tod und Verklärung can descend to the ash and mud of the ground could already be seen in the mocking sounds in Symphonie domestica.”

Interestingly, Hofmannsthal’s tale became so popular that a film adaptation followed, which was also shown in Hungary. In the periodical Nyugat (1926), Iván Hevesy clearly recognised the characteristics of the story: “instead of a realistic dramatic effect, the film adaptation of Der Rosenkavalier gave the impression of some kind of sweet pastoral, while at the same time offering the powerful and dynamic turns of realistic drama. Even though we could see realistic details of a realistic Vienna, as a whole it is just a tale, as the author, Hugo von Hofmannsthal intended: A tale of love”.

With his Salome, Strauss became a leading figure in modern art, and many thought that he had betrayed the cause of new music with Der Rosenkavalier. However, “Der Rosenkavalier turned out to be a worldwide success, which could only be compared to that of Puccini’s last opera Turandot in 1926. The singers were recalled to the curtain ten times after the second act, and twenty times after the third act. All major European news agencies reported that Der Rosenkavalier had proved: everything turns to gold in Strauss’ hands.” The critical response, however, was unanimously hostile. Hofmannsthal’s “humourless libretto” was condemned together with Strauss’ “superficial” music. The audience, however, marched to a different drum – and thousands of them marched.” (Matthew Boyden: Richard Strauss)

During the series of successes Strauss was greatly surprised that his opera caused a scandal in Milan. “Pauline was sitting by my side with the Viscontis, and she was talking to the duchess about French fashion. After a while the duchess told her: ‘I reckon, my lady, that it is only you and your husband who are not worried in the theatre tonight.” Pauline replied: “Why should I be worried? The opera was quite successful in Germany.” How right the duchess was only turned out after the second act. The first act went well, and the singers were called before the curtain three times. But after the second act the audience suddenly started to get noisy: they were hissing, whistling and shouting, and hundreds of paper slips were flying from the gallery, on which the youth (called ‘futurists’ those days) were protesting that the composer of Salome ‘degraded’ himself to write such a frivolous piece. When the scandal calmed down, I went to the stage and asked what made these people so furious? The reply was: ‘Because of the waltz.’”

29 May 2010 (5 pm)

A joint production of the Palace of Arts and the Opera House

Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

Opera in three acts, sung in German

Conductor: Ádám Fischer

Directors: Magdolna Parditka and Alexandra Szemerédy
 

There are probably psychological, philosophical and practical explanations for Wagner’s decision in the summer of 1857 to suspend work on his most ambitious venture, the composition of Der Ring des Nibelungen to start Tristan und Isolde, thus taking a considerable artistic risk. In hindsight, we know that this was only a temporary diversion from the glittering stage of spectacles never seen before with its gods, heroes, giants, dwarves and miraculous creatures only to lead his audience to the internal stage of the soul, the maze of the paradoxes of human existence and eternal twilight. We might even believe Wagner that he did not distance himself from “his poetic and mythical views which evolved while he was working on his opera about the Nibelungs” as Tristan “is an auxiliary act of the tragedy of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, which is only a wider elaboration of the tragic relationship between death and love”.

Practically, the stage of the soul is a small one. It has only few characters and no set, as the soul is shown in its pure reality in the play. The theatrical reality of Tristan und Isolde – as Wagner hoped – cannot be an obstacle to staging the piece. And a new piece was desperately needed to draw the attention of the German people to the composer living in exile in Switzerland: when the time comes, who will take the composer of the four-night-long Ring seriously? The composition of the monumental musical drama, which gives the illusion of an uninterrupted musical flow, was hindered by – who would believe it? – bouts of depression. Wagner faced the nightmare of his own lack of talent in desperate letters. Perhaps he just expected reinforcement, praise and adulatory encouragement. In the periods of sweeping vigour, however, he was overwhelmed with completely different fears: “Child! This Tristan is becoming something terrible! This last act! I fear the opera will be forbidden – unless the whole is turned to parody by bad production – nothing but indifferent performances can save me! Completely good ones are bound to send folk crazy, – I can see nothing else for it. To this length has it had to come with me! Heigho! I was just in full blast! Adieu!” – he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck, the muse of the opera. Eventually, Tristan was successful. It captured and bewitched the audience in Munich, including the Bavarian king. The piece became a symbol of the magic and dangerous power of art, an important step to achieve the great dream, Bayreuth. In 1854, some years before composing Tristan, new dimensions were opened in Wagner’s way of thinking after getting acquainted with Schopenhauer’s philosophy. “His principal idea, the final denial of the will to live, is of terrible seriousness, but it is uniquely redeeming. I have found a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night; it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreams – the only redemption!” he wrote to Franz Liszt. Schopenhauer’s philosophy inevitably influenced the ideal and musical world of Tristan that the directness of this impact is questioned by many even today. As Thomas Mann wrote: “By its cult of the night, its execration of the day, Tristan reveals itself as a Romantic work, deeply rooted in Romantic thought and sensibility, which as such had no need of Schopenhauer to stand godfather. The night is the true domain and dwelling place of Romanticism, its real discovery, which it invariably presents as the truth in contrast to the vain illusions of the day – the realm of sensibility contrasted with reason.” (Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner)

Beyond the change in Wagner’s views and practical implications, the birth of the opera was probably the result of the crisis in Wagner’s personal life which he wanted to descend into and escape from at the same time, and which greatly reminded him of the ancient love triangle, the story of Marke, Isolde and Tristan.

5 & 6 June 2010

In the Vortex

Ballet Evening

Part I.

     Franz Schubert - Robert North: Death and the Maiden

Part II.

     Gustav Mahler - Myriam Naisy: Love and the Girl

     Kurt Weill - Krzysztof Pastor: How much longer?
     Max Richter - David Dawson: On the Nature of Daylight

Part III.

     Philip Glass - András Lukács: Whirling

Every ballet company arrives at a stage when the traditional romantic-classical and national repertoire is not sufficient any more. The artists await new challenges, and the more open part of the audiences misses contemporary works. The performance of new, contemporary choreographies has always been important in the life of the Hungarian National Ballet. The ballet night to be premièred in June 2010, will feature five pieces by five choreographers of varied characters.
The American Robter North’s Death and the Maiden might be familiar to the Hungarian audience. The choreographer’s concept is easy to comprehend, and the first two movements of Schubert’s string quartet of the same title provides the musical base.
Myriam Naisy created her piece Love and the Girl in response and as a counterpoint to Robert North’s beautiful choreography, composed to Gustav Mahler’s sensitive winter Adagietto.
The mood of Krzysztof Pastor’s How much longer? can be compared to Andrzej Wajda’s film Ash and Diamond. The choreography tries to find an answer to the question: how much longer does the unhappy love in Kurt Weill’s piece will take.
David Dawson’s On the Nature of Daylight expresses a yearning to find the Other One. “I asked myself” Dawson writes “whether it happens in such an easy and simple way? What happens if I pass my spiritual partner without noticing her? It was this randomness that made me curious.”

András Lukács, who is presently working with the Vienna Staatsoper, has proven his talents as a choreographer on many occasions in the past years. The amended version of his composition Whirling bears all the qualities and harmony of the original piece.