Home » News » Three faces of love

Three faces of love

A dramaturgical project of the Prague State Opera for the 2008-09 season

In the 2008-09 theatrical season, the Prague State Opera is presenting the dramaturgically targeted, thematic project Three Forms of Love, offering audiences premieres of three masterpieces representing the development of the opera genre while introducing three different faces of love as captured in famous works by composers Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901).

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème

Younger by more than 130 years,Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème (premiered in 1896 in Turin) brings to the stage the environment of the Latin Quarter of Paris with its ateliers, cafés, artists and their girlfriends as described in the novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème by the French writer Henri Murger. In the midst of the boisterous lives of a few friends, a burning passion develops between the poet Rodolfo and the poor seamstress Mimì, but their love is not fated to last for long: after a dramatic parting of the two lovers, motivated by Rodolfo’s efforts to allow Mimì an easier life by the side of a wealthier man, some time passes, then Mimì returns, now mortally ill, to die in Rodolfo’s embrace. La Bohème is also a turning point in Puccini’s works between the composer’s traditionally oriented early works and his changeover to the fashionable verismo style. In La Bohème, the composer accommodated the public’s taste and its desire for sentimentality, adorning the story with almost painfully touching melodies of extraordinary effectiveness, winning the opera the permanent favor of the public and of performers.

Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice

A boy becomes the object of the amorous desire of the central character of Britten’s opera Death in Venice (premiered in 1973 in Aldeburgh), the writer Gustav Aschenbach. The youth, Tadzio, is the son of a Polish countess, whose family Aschenbach encounters in the hotel dining hall on the Lido. The aging man is so captivated by the boy’s beauty that he succumbs to temptation and has the hotel barber make up his face and dye his hair. Venice in the grips of a cholera epidemic serves as the gloomy backdrop for Aschenbach’s demise, when he expires in a fever on the beach with Tadzio’s name on his lips, although the boy could not understand or return the man’s feelings. The opera Death in Venice was composed based on Thomas Mann’s novella Der Tod in Venedig (1913), which also provided the subject matter for Luchino Visconti’s famous film Death in Venice. While the main topic of the opera is artistic labor and the relationship of the artist with the world, hidden in the subtext is the theme of homosexuality, a taboo topic until recently that also appears latently in other Britten operas. The composer himself was bonded in a lifelong partnership with the tenor Peter Pears, for whom we wrote the chief roles in all of his operas, including Aschenbach. By including Death in Venice in the project concerning various forms of love, the Prague State Opera is offering another viewpoint on the problems of amorous relationships, which for their complexity and fragility often cannot find fulfillment.

Giuseppe Verdi: Otello

Verdi’s penultimate opera offers a powerful story of love pestered by jealousy, as part of a triangle whose remaining vertices are represented by faithful love, and at the opposite side of the spectrum, desire for power. The scene of the opera is Cyprus in the 15th century. The villain, Iago, schemes against the Moorish Venetian general, Othello, for having promoted Cassio rather than him to Captain. Apart from eventually achieving Cassio’s degradation, he plants the seed of jealousy in Othello’s mind, suggesting that his wife, Desdemona, is having a secret affair with Cassio. Following numerous intricate twists and turns in the plot, Othello becomes convinced of Desdemona’s disloyalty, and in a fit of jealous rage strangles her. When Othello finally learns that Iago is the evil spirit behind the tragic developments, and that Desdemona was innocent and always loved him faithfully, he stabs himself with a dagger, dying beside his beloved. Verdi wrote Otello sixteen years after finishing his previous opera, Aida. In a phenomenal union of his compositional genius at its peak with Arrigo Boito’s masterly libretto, Verdi produced a work packed with drama and abounding in profoundly emotive passages.

During the 2008-09 season, the operas of the cycle Three Forms of Love will be heard in the following order: La Bohème (October 23, 2008), Death in Venice (February 26, 2009) and Otello (May 28, 2009). In a lighter vein (but with love still never absent), the project is supplemented by an evening programme titled Vivat Operetta, featuring selected scenes from the classical operetta repertoire (premiere on April 2, 2009). Another component of the project will be the publishing of a thematic wall calendar for 2009, a compact disc with selections from the great love scenes of Prague State Opera productions, a lecture by the expert Dr. Vlasta Reittererová, PhD, on the topic of Forms of Love and their Representation in Czech Opera in the Context of Period Reception, an exhibition of pictures by the theatrical painter Jaroslav Toms and, last but not least, a photographic exhibition and the presentation of the second volume of History of the Prague State Opera in Pictures and Dates, intended for audience members who are in love with the theatre, on the occasion of the performance of the programme Vivat Operetta.

More News

Where to go next?

What you shouldn't miss
The Prague State Opera - Theatre History in Pictures and Dates - Book cover
The Prague State Opera – Theatre History in Pictures and Dates
Tomáš Vrbka
The Prague State Opera in cooperation with the Slovart publishing house publishes a representative book tracking the history of this significant cultural institution since its opening in 1888 till the end of the 2002/2003 season. The publication called The Prague State Opera – Theatre History in Pictures and Dates is focusing solely on the opera featured at the scene, even though the theatre under various names also served to presentation of drama plays, operettas and ballet. The Prague State opera plans to publish the volumes concentrating on those genres in the next years.

Copyright © 2004 – 2012, State Opera » web 2142.net » webmaster » RSS