Erwin Schulhoff’s opera will be performed for the first time in Prague after 90 years since its premiere
The unconventional Donjuan story premieres on June 12. After its premiere in Brno, the opera was not performed until the 1990s in a German translation by Max Brod. The National Theater reconstructed the original Czech libretto by Karel Josef Beneš for the current performance. The production is directed by the Spanish theater director Calixto Bieito, the musical production was prepared by Jiří Rožeň.
The Czech debut will feature Ukrainian tenor Denys Pivnickij as Don Juan, Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tone Kummervold in the role of La Morte and Ukrainian soprano Victoria Korosunova, who will play the trio of Donny Anna, Women and the Nun. In addition to six performances at the State Opera in June and November, the opera will be performed at the Janáček Brno International Music Festival.
The National Theater presents the title in the cycle Musica non grata, which is a joint project of the Czech Republic and Germany and which revives the legacy of persecuted composers and recalls the musical life of interwar Czechoslovakia.
Bieito is one of the most prominent European directors of today, he is enthusiastically admired and sharply criticized. “I didn’t know if I could fully understand this work, but I felt I could fulfill it with my imagination,” Bieito mentioned his first feeling from the opera Flames. In his directing concept, he claims to be enchanted by Spanish surrealism, especially the film work of Louise Buñuela. According to the director, Flames is a work that allows us to talk about darkness, about human emptiness, about images that appear in dreams, about the transition from life to death, about seduction, desire and love. “It is an opera that breathes the absolute freedom of our ideas,” he added.
Twenty-nine-year-old Schulhoff began working on his first opera title in 1923 after returning from Germany to his native Prague. He was sent by Max Brod to erotically irritate Don Juan, the writer Karel Josef Beneš, who became the basis of the libretto to the opera Plameny. The libretto was written by Beneš, but Schulhoff, whose mother tongue was German, composed music based on a German translation by Max Brod.
He worked on the work until 1929, ie during a period of strong fascination with jazz and elements of dada, which was projected into the Flames. The surrealist theme of the opera is also strongly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis. In several places, Schulhoff also consciously reports to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But while Don Giovanni dies, Don Juan in Flames is doomed to eternal life.
“In my opinion, Schulhoff is one of the key authors of his time who profoundly influenced his contemporaries and did not receive nearly as much recognition as he deserved,” said Per Boye Hansen, artistic director of the National Theater Opera and the State Opera.
Schulhoff and Beneš were united by the tragic fate that the Second World War had prepared for them. Beneš was sentenced to death for his participation in the anti-Nazi resistance, which was subsequently turned into a prison and stay in concentration camps. Schulhoff did not live to see the end of the war, in 1941 he accepted Soviet citizenship and as a Soviet citizen was deported to an internment camp in Wülzburg, Bavaria, where he succumbed to tuberculosis on August 18, 1942. Schulhoff was the father of Czech film director Petr Schulhoff, who spent part of his life with him in the Wülzburg camp.