Patrick Bade
Czech Opera

Patrick Bade - Czech Opera

- So, as you all know, opera is an Italian invention at the end of the 16th, beginning of the 17th century. And in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, it spread throughout Europe from country to country. And eventually, I suppose all European countries have produced their operas. But there are essentially five great operatic traditions in Europe, the Italian, the French, the German, the Russian, and the Czech. ‘Cause the Czechs tiny country compared with all the others. But as I mentioned before, the Czechs have always punched way beyond their weight from a cultural point of view. Already in the 18th century, Bohemia have produced one very great opera composer that’s billable, look, but there’s nothing Czech about his operas, they’re thoroughly international, really. His main centres of activity were Vienna and Paris. So it’s not till we get to the middle of the 19th century that we can really talk about a distinctive type of Czech opera. And the father of Czech opera is universally acknowledged as Smetana. He was, as a young man, he was already a passionate Czech patriot. He was involved in the 1848 revolution. And when that came to nothing, he fled from Bohemia. He went to live for a number of years in Sweden. And it was only in the 1860s when Francis began to liberalise the Habsburg Empire. Excuse me, I’m still a bit croaky. Smetana came back to Prague and he was determined to create a National School of Opera. And he had his first moderate success in 1863 with an opera called of the Brandenburg and Bohemia. And then in 1866, he wrote the opera which is to be, was to become his most famous internationally, which was the Bartered Bride.

Then 1868, actually this building, which started with Foundation Stone, was laid for it. This is the Czech National Theatre. So this is a big sumptuous building that was intended for works both spoken and musical in the Czech language. And on the day that the foundation stone was laid in another theatre in Prague, there was the premiere of Smetana’s Dalibor, great epic opera, typical of these opera in the 19th century, which were intended to be sort of national operas. And it’s about, it tells a story of Dalibor who is the leader of a patriotic revolt against Hungarian domination in the 15th century. And it’s still regarded as a great Czech national opera. It’s not done that often. I’ve seen it once in London. I think it’s done sometimes in German speaking countries. It’s a very exciting piece. I’m going to start off with an orchestral passage for a procession. Begins very, very quietly. So you have to wait a minute, you may have to wait a minute before you hear anything, but it gradually builds up this great crescendo. And it’s a feature that we find in quite a lot of Czech opera of taking a very little musical figure and repeating it. Repetitions, repetitive style we’ll find is again, very much of course in Yenoczech. I hope he’s actually started, I can’t tell. Maybe it hasn’t. Nothing seems to be happening.

• [Jodi] Patrick, I can hear it. I can hear it faintly. Is the volume turned up on your system?

• I have no way of altering volume.

• [Jodi] Okay, so I can hear it just ever so slightly in the background.

• Oh, well good, then it will build up.

• [Jodi] It builds up, yeah.

• Now, the point of these operas is that they’re really meant to inspire you to go out onto the barricades to fight for freedom, to fight for your nation. And I’m going to play you a vocal passage now with the chief female character, Milada. She’s in love with Dalibor and she decides to, he’s in prison, and she decides to try and rescue him. So again, very rousing stuff, you can hear I think that he’s been listening to Wagner and also to Bario. So he’s very open to new ideas of music drama. But as I said, the opera that really has won the hearts of the world and is in the repertoire in every major opera house is “The Bartered Bride”. And that’s an opera of a very different character. It’s humorous, good humoured, sentimental, touching. It has a wonderful overture that has a life of its own in the concert hall that I think is clearly inspired by Mozart’s overture to “The Marriage of Figaro”. It’s got this a similar kind of character of bustling intrigue. So when it gets to the melodic bits, you can hear the folk influence and the typical dance rhythms of Czech folk music. Now Smetana also knows how to tug on the heartstrings. I’m going to play you the big aria of the heroin Marenka. She thinks that she’s been betrayed and dumped and even sold by her lover Jenik, and she’s completely heartbroken and she expresses her emotions in this aria. I’ve actually chosen a version which is not in Czech, it’s in German, but it’s so beautiful, I couldn’t resist it. This is the Croatian soprano, Zena Uranez. Such a lovely voice, sort of velvety, no edge to it at all. Now I’ve got to mention a very important fact, and that is that Smetana, he’s the father of Czech opera, was not actually a native Czech speaker. He was brought up speaking German. He had to learn Czech as an adult. And the libretto of Dalibor which was intended to be his great Czech national opera, the original libretto was actually in German. He set it in German.

And so what we hear in a Czech recording is actually a translation from German. So a German was of course the language of the intelligentsia and of the bourgeois. And I’ve got one more delightful excerpt from the Bartered Bride. And this is a duet that comes towards the end of the opera. Marenka, she still thinks that she’s been dumped by Jenik. She still thinks he’s betrayed her. And she’s absolutely incandescent with rage. And he is, I suppose, in a way, teasing her a bit in this duet. And it hurdles along with these characteristic folk dance rhythms that permeate the entire score. So the next great Czech composer is Antonin Dvorak. He is, oh, I’ve forgot to say the tenor there, the wonderful tenor that’s Ben Ohblach. He was the leading jack tenor of the postwar period. So Dvorak is a generation younger, he’s born in 1841. And he was really a Czech speaker. He came from quite a humble background, not very poor, but quite poor. His father was an inn keeper and a butcher. And it says something about the linguistic complexities of Bohemian in the 19th century that whereas Smetana had to set out to learn Czech, Antonin Dvorak in his teens was sent away by his father in order to learn German, because obviously that was a way of bettering himself. And he did not have a conservatory musical education. He was actually trained as an organist, and then lived for some time as a kind of jobbing musician working in orchestras and so on before turning to composition.

But he became a very prolific composer. As I said in a previous lecture. The music, he’s one of those composers like Mozart or the Young Mendelssohn where the music just pours out of him. It’s almost like it comes directly from God. And he wrote, he’s a versatile composer. He wrote nine symphonies, nine operas, and the great quantity of chamber music. He’s on record as saying that he thought the opera was really the most important musical art form. He thought it was the one in which the spirit of the nation could best be expressed. So he wrote nine operas, but there’s only one which is ever done outside of the Czech Republic. And that is “Rusalka”, which comes very late in his life, in his career. It was premiered in 1901. And it’s, what can I say? It’s such an enchanting opera. It’s one of the, you sort of feel sort of, everything went right almost by accident. A film equivalent might be the film Casablanca. All the elements come together in a way that they don’t in any of his other operas. And it’s an opera which has, you could say it almost has a Shakespearean quality, in the way that it mixes a very earthy humour. There’s also a kind of macabre element, a kind of macabre that you get in children’s tales. There are frightening elements in the opera and it’s also extremely, extremely passionate. And it tells a story of water nymph who sees a passing prince and she falls in love with him with terrible consequences. What’s the most famous piece, which I’m sure you all know 'cause it’s on practically every Soprano’s recital CD, become immensely popular, is Rusalka’s “Song to the Moon” in act one.

The soprano there was the wonderful Czech soprano, Milada Subrtova, she was her height in the 1950s to seventies. 'Cause that was the time of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain. And many Eastern European singers didn’t have the kind of world careers and reputations that they should have done. But she did record very extensively for the Czech firm of Supraphon. When I first went to Prague in the 1990s, all over the city, there were little CD shops aimed at tourists, I suppose. It was actually soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And I got somebody to teach me how to say the name correctly, Milada Subrtova. And I just went into every shop in Prague and I just said Milada Subrtova. And they would plunk some CDs on the counter and I would buy them. And I came back with a whole suitcase of CDs of this wonderful singer. Now she has the most interesting role in the opera, the title role, the prince is a bit of a cardboard prince. But there is some wonderful colourful small characters. The wood nymphs are wonderfully boisterous. It was production at the NO many years ago where it was all set in a girl’s dormitory. And the water nymphs were doing pillow fights and music certainly seems to kind of suggest that. And there are various comic characters and there is the wonderful macabre comic creation of the witch, Jezibaba, who is, you know, gloriously malicious and malign and so on. But at the same, she’s a witch with a heart. And she obviously feels for the predicament of Rusalka and warns her of having anything to do with human beings. And so the only thing I can act apart from the only thing I can actually say in Czech is abracadabra because of this incantation that Jezibaba does when she’s enabling Rusalka to take human form. So abracadabra in Czech is cury mury fuk, as you are going to hear.

Well, the shallow prince betrays Rusalka. And she has the terrible fate of not being able to return to the spirit world and not being able to be human either. And in the last act he realises his mistake and he’s sorry, and he goes and he seeks her in the forest and he finds her and she says, well if you embrace me now, you are going to die. And they have this splendidly, highly charged duet. It’s really Wagnerian. It’s a music that requires a lot of passion and a lot of vocal stamina for both the soprano and the tenor. Starting off again with this lovely moonlight music we’ve already had in act one. Now, the last composer I’m going to talk about today is Leos Janacek, there are other Czech, many other Czech composers of opera, but these are the big three whose work you are likely to encounter. It’s always amazing to me to think that Janacek was only just over a decade younger than Dvorak. Dvorak seems to belong so completely to the 19th century and Janacek to the 20th century. In fact, Rusalka and Jenufa are more or less contemporary. They were being written at the same time. So Janacek, he’s actually Moravian , born in a small town in 1854. Like Dvorak, he was trained as an organist, but he went on to have proper conservatoire education in Leipzig and in Vienna. He’s a slow developer. His first mature opera was Jenufa which was performed in Buro in 1904 when he was already 50 years old. And it didn’t have much in the impact and it soon disappeared. And it was only later through a series of events that really his interest in opera was rekindled. But this, I’m going to play you the opening of an opera, which you are unlikely to have heard, it has been done in London. It’s called Fate. It actually dates from immediately after “Jenufa”.

And it’s dramatically a very awkward opera. I think that’s why it’s not done very often. But I want to, Janacek’s musical language is so individual, it’s so unlike anybody else. You hear him on the radio and you know it’s Janacek within seconds. This sort of very jagged spiky music. “Jenufa” I suppose is his most frequently performed opera. I mean it’s a staple of course at Glyndebourne. I’ve seen several productions there. It’s an extremely powerful piece. I mean, every time I’ve saw it recently at Garden, they had a very good production. When you hear it in the theatre, I think it’s not a really an opera to sit at home and listen to, or on a cd. You want to be there. And then it has a really, I would say a visceral impact. The title Heroin, Jenufa, is a very sweet girl who is disfigured by a jealous young man. She’s slashed in the face when she rejects him. And she is already pregnant by another man who then rejects her because he finds her frightening because of her scared face. And her stepmother. This is the Kostelnicka, the stepmother. Is terrified of the public shame of her daughter having illegitimate child. And in the scene I’m going to play you, she works herself up into a kind of frenzy of rage where to the point where she picks up the child and takes it out and throws it into the river to drown it. So it, this is a truly powerful, frightening, terrible scene. And I’m going to play it to you in a live recording from Scala Sung in Italian in the 1970s with my absolute favourite Soprano of all time, Magda Olivero. This is very, very late in her career. And I think she, when she was asked to do this, she was hardly the, you know, she’d never sung any Janacek before. She wasn’t an obvious choice. And I think she actually found it quite a different, difficult decision to take on this role. The great tragedy of Magda Olivero’s life really was that she desperately wanted to have children and she could never have them. So to actually play on stage, a woman capable of murdering a baby, I think this must have been quite a challenge for her.

And she talk about no holes barred singing. I mean, she was a singer who could sing very beautifully. Of course she doesn’t, she doesn’t want to sing beautifully here and she does things to her voice. You think, oh my God, how could she ever sing again after what she’s just done to her vocal chords in this scene? It’s so intense, so wild. And actually, the slightly bizarre thing about this recording is that as she rushes off stage with the baby to murder it, the audience is so taken by her performance that they burst into spontaneous applause, which might not seem very appropriate considering what’s going on on stage. So Jenufa, having not really achieved any success initially was finally taken up, in 1916 in Prague and then Vienna. And then it really took off after First World War, partly through the agency of Max Broad, who was a great advocate of Janacek’s music. And then it even got as far as New York in 1921. So as I mentioned recently, I think there was a combination of things that really stimulated the last great decade of Janacek’s work. The success of Jenufa and indeed all his later operas. The creation of a new independent nation of Czechoslovakia, which inspired him, and also his love for a much younger woman, Kamila Urvalkova. And so in the years that were left to him, he wrote five operas. “Kaťa Kabanova”, “The Makropulos Case”, “Excursions of Mr. Broucek”, “Cunning Little Vixen”, and “The House of the Dead”. And all, it’s a really incredible success rate that they’ve all really become standard operas of the repertoire throughout the world.

And my own favourite is “Kaťa Kabanova”. It’s another very, very harrowing story of a young woman who’s unhappily married to a man who’s dominated by his incredibly nasty mother. So Kabanicha, the mother-in-law, she’s the ultimate mother-in-law from hell. She’s a truly, truly horrible character who torments the heroin. And she falls in love with a man called Boris, who’s also tormented by his uncle and guardian. And they have a brief affair with fatal consequences. And in the final scene she commits suicide by throwing herself into the river. So I’m going to play you just the last few minutes of this opera. This is Kat'a saying farewell to Boris, who’s been sent off into exile. And then as you’ll hear, she has disappeared and the villagers are out searching for her and you hear their voices in the distance calling for her. And then eventually just in the last couple of minutes she throws herself into the river. And it’s an extraordinary scene. It all seems to move in fast forward, I don’t how many minutes it is, it’s probably like two minutes between her throwing herself into the river. Her body is pulled out, she drowns, the body is pulled out of the river. And finally her very weak husband, turns on his horrible mother and accuses her. And then she just coldly thanks the people for dragging the body out of the river. It’s one of the most gut-wrenching endings of any opera that I know. I’m always absolutely reduced to a pulp by the end of this opera. I always have to think who I’m going to go to the opera with when I hear that. 'Cause I’m usually a kind of a blubbering rack at the end. Right, let’s see.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you Jennifer.

Q: How come Spain with its own glorious music, very little opera?

A: That’s true. There’s the fire opera “La vida breve”, that’s a wonderful piece. But there is the operatic tradition, the light tradition of Zarzuela, which I think is very underrated outside of Spain. And I’d be very happy to do it in an appropriate context, a lecture on Zarzuela.

Yes, you know, Dalibor, I’m sure of course Smetana had been listening to Wagner. He would’ve been very familiar with the Rhine Gold.

Q: Do I think Bolero copied this?

A: I’d be surprised. I think it’s less likely that Revelle would’ve been very familiar with that. The singer, the role of Milada was the great dramatic soprano, Nadezhda Obukhova, it’ll be on the list that you’ll been sent. Soon after Czech Republic was free from communism we visited Prague source called “The Kiss”, that’s a very charming opera, yeah.

Q: Which instrument did Dvorak play?

A: Do you know I’m not sure it’s a string instrument. I think it’s a violin, but I’d have to check on that.

Dvorak museum in Prague, I’ve never been there.

Rusalka, yes, Milada, oh the Rusalka, yes it’s Milada Subrtova the singer I was telling you about who I liked so much.

This is Susan saying her mother’s name was Smetana, she was from Vienna. There was a story in the family that descended from his Swedish mistress. That’s interesting, who was Jewish? Difficult to prove. Well, nice to speculate.

Yes, Milada Subrtova, she’s terrific, really terrific. And she made a lots of records, but they’re probably quite hard to find. They’re all on the label of Supraphon.

Q: This is Jean, did Smetana write the music and lyrics?

A: No, he didn’t write the lyrics. He only wrote the music for Dalibor.

Hope your parents took you to see an easy opera. My first opera was Boheme, which I would recommend to anybody is their first opera. And I think that Wagner would be a dangerous introduction to opera. But it does work for some people.

Oh, thank you Patricia. She’s giving you, you can link to Subrtova That’s great, so that people can explore her recordings. There was once a bartered bride, her name was Libuse, that’s another one of his big opera’s. Fell in love with Dalibor gave him a kiss behind the Devil’s Wall. Two widows saw it, they told Brandonbergers in Bohemia and it was no longer a secret.

Yeah, you’ve got all the names. That’s very clever. You got the titles of all his operas, all eight of them. I was in the College of Music in Cape Town with John Terrell who wrote research on Janacek.

Moravia, today’s Czechia was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, official language of the government. Czech nationalism echoed, yes, all of that is true. All of that is true.

Wonderful exhibition in the National Museum in Prague last year on the lives and works of the three composers. Lucky you. Interestingly, even in socialist Czechoslovakia, these operas were deemed to be suitable and were performed regularly. Although interesting, there was a phase in, I think in the 1950s where Smetana was being promoted as the great national composer. And Dvorak was slightly out of favour.

Your cousin is a singer. Dalia Sheta, Israeli born living in Cologne. She’s started Janacek’s for a few years ago. And nice, thank you for the link for people so they can check that out. Singing Jenufa, well Margaret, I’m so interested, you think it’s of course, I think Oliver is just incredible. But I wouldn’t really, I’m interested that you find it beautiful 'cause not many people would I do, but she certainly does some quite drastic things with her voice in that scene.

Yes, Erica, I hope I will get an opportunity to do a talk on Zarzuela. I’m very fond of it, even though I’m not a Spanish speaker.

Fiola, thank you very much. Yes, thank you. That’s what Dvorak played, of course. Think lots of people saying that. First opera “Bartered Bride”, I think “Bartered Bride” would be a good opera for children. Anyway, that seems to be it for today. And next time I’m going to concentrate on Czech Jewish composers. Wonderful, promising generation of composers, most of whom were wiped out in the Holocaust. It’s a very terrible story. So I’ll see you again on Sunday. Thank you everybody.

• [Judi] Thank you Patrick, and be well. And we will see you on Sunday, bye-bye.