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Project for the 2009/2010 season: Great Stories of Romanticism

For the 2009/2010 season, the Prague State Opera has prepared the dramaturgy project Great Stories of Romanticism, consisting primarily of new productions of three magnificent works by representatives of 19th-century musical romanticism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883), Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) and Jules Massenet (1842–1912). The chosen works deal with subject matter from various period of history.

As its first premiere of the season, the Prague State Opera will present to its audience Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty (the ballet’s Czech title Šípková Růženka literally means Little Wild Rose). This will be the sixth production of Tchaikovsky’s most frequently performed ballet on the stage of the present-day State Opera. This time, the public will see the work in an exciting dramaturgic adaptation by the Hungarian director and choreographer Yuri Vámos, famed for his adaptations of ballet classics. He has set the action of the fairytale original in the context of pre-revolutionary Russia’s royal family in the waning years of the tsar’s rule, and has made the ballet’s chief heroine Anna Anderson, who spent her entire live imagining that she was the tsar’s daughter Anastasia. In a production titled Sleeping Beauty – The Last Daughter of the Czar, reality mingles with memories in the mind of the chief protagonist. This drama about the happy life and tragic end of the tsar’s family is a grand reminiscence of classical Russian ballet with its pathos and virtuosity. The production promises to be a special experience for lovers of powerful stories and of ballet at its finest.

Jules Massenet is best known for his operas Manon and Werther. Like most of his works, those two operas already achieved great popularity during the composer’s lifetime, and audiences still enjoy them today. The longevity on the stage of Massenet’s other operas has been less assured, making all the more interesting present-day attempts to bring other operas by this fundamentally melodic composer back to the world’s opera stages. Alongside the many operas that mainly revolve around heroic females, the opera Don Quichotte, a product of Massanet’s artistic maturity, stands out in a peculiar way. Don Quichotte is based motifs from the famous novel by Miguel de Cervantes, but unlike its literary source, Massenet’s opera is no caricature of a knight-errant. Instead the melancholy knight is portrayed as “a humanistic dreamer, immersed in himself, with the weaknesses of a child, the pride of a Castilian knight and the goodness of a saint,” as he was characterized by his first performer, Feodor Chaliapin, for whom Massenet had composed the opera. Representing the feminine element in the opera is the lovely Dulcinea. It is for her that the hopelessly infatuated Quixote undergoes all of his adventures. In the end she begs Quixote’s forgiveness, for her heart belongs to all, and she cannot promise it to one single man. In spite of its late date of composition (its world premiere was in Monte Carlo on February 19, 1910), Don Quichotte is a masterful example of Massenet’s freshly lyrical and conversational style and of his splendid orchestration, and the music expresses itself in a language that still fully belongs to the romantic period. The second premiere by the Prague State Opera in the 2009/2010 season will revive this work 45 years after its last Prague production.

An immortal tale of dying for love, Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde is a setting of the composer’s own libretto based on an epic poem by Gottfried von Straßburg. Tristan und Isolde is a  true synonym for a great story of romanticism both for its subject matter and for its handling of literary and musical style. Because of its extreme demands on performers, when a production of the opera was attempted in Vienna in 1862–64, after seventy rehearsals the work was declared to be unplayable, so its world premiere did not take place until 1865 in Munich at the initiative of King Leopold II of Bavaria. During the era of the former New German Theatre in Prague, the forerunner to the present-day Prague State Opera, Wagner was one of the key composers in the repertoire and his Tristan und Isolde was among the “family silver” that regularly adorned the theatre’s repertoire whenever great conductors and singers with exceptional qualities required for such a task were available. As a consequence of wartime events, after 1945 Wagner’s works did not enjoy success here for some time. Although Wagner’s rehabilitation began gradually in the late 1950s, Tristan und Isolde somehow got stuck with the reputation of being an unattainable summit. Co-producing the opera’s first new local production in 76 years (if we overlook guest appearances by foreign ensembles) will be the Prague State Opera and the Teatro Municipal of Santiago de Chile.

Also riding the wave of romanticism is Kudykam “a stage play with 2009 verses” from the workshop of Michal Horáček and Petr Hapka, masters of the art of the Czech chanson. The world premiere of Kudykam will take place at the Prague State Opera on October 21, 2009. The story tells of Martin, a young man who sets out on a quest for faith, love and hope, accompanied by a bizarre figure acting as his conniving advisor and tempter. Audiences will get to see up to three different casts of singers and actors specially engaged to appear in this magnificent, fantastic spectacle with plenty of visual and technical magic.

Accompanying the project Great Stories of Romanticism at the Prague State Opera will be auxiliary events complementing the premieres. Foremost among these will be two thematically focused exhibitions prepared by the Prague State Opera documentation centre. The first, titled From Sleeping Beauty to Anastasia, will use a selection of period photographs to present all of the past productions of Sleeping Beauty on the stage of the Prague State Opera and to depict preparations for the latest production of the ballet as directed and choreographed by Yuri Vámos. The second exhibition will focus on the tradition of productions of Tristan und Isolde at the New German Theatre, including the famous conductors and singers who helped to create that tradition. Introducing Massenet’s opera will be a lecture by the musicologist and critic Dr. Vlasta Reittererová titled The Operatic Legacy of Jules Massenet Viewed through the Prism of the 21st Century with excerpts from recordings of Don Quichotte performed by world-famous singers. The Romantic project will be supplemented by an exhibition inaugurated in the State Opera building on February 27, 2010, concomitant to the gala night featuring Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata which will be marking ninety years from the first new production of this opera at the then New German Theatre of Prague. The exhibition will display twenty portraits of eminent interpreters of Violetta Valéry who created the role on this stage in different periods, a gallery including such stars as Emma Albani, Luisa Tetrazzini or Nellie Melba.

Pavel Petráněk, Tomáš Vrbka
authors and chief coordinators of the project

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.

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