Author: Erwin Schulhoff
Conductor: Jiří Rožeň
Directed by Calixto Bieito
Opera National Theater and State Opera
Chorus and Orchestra of the State Opera
The festival program also offers interesting contexts and contrasts to Janáček's works. This time it will be the ensemble of the National Theater Opera in Prague, which at the end of the festival will present a truly dramatic feat - a new production of Erwin Schulhoff's opera Plamena, directed by Calixto Bieit. They had their world premiere in Brno in today's Mahen Theater in 1932, and Janáček's long-time friend Max Brod offered the Don Juan theme to the composer.
Erwin Schulhoff (1894–1942) came from a Prague Jewish family of German origin. After studying at the Prague Conservatory, which he began at the age of ten, he continued in Vienna, Leipzig (composition with Max Reger) and Cologne. The promising start of his artistic career was interrupted by the start of the First World War. Schulhoff spent it as a soldier on the Eastern Front, and this stay shaped his views on art. After the end of the war, he worked as an excellent pianist in European music centers. His preoccupation with jazz and the work of Igor Stravinsky originates from that time. Like him, he began to combine impressionist, expressionist and neoclassical techniques in his work. The author of the work recommended by M. Brod was the Czech writer Karel Josef Beneš, who later achieved international success as the author of the psychological novels Stolen Life and The Magic House. His treatment of the Don Juan legend was unconventional and intrigued Schulhoff, who liked to experiment. In addition to the story of Don Juan, the surrealist theme contains elements from the legend of the Eternal Jew and is influenced by Freud's psychoanalysis.
The opera at the interface of opera, pantomime and symphonic poem is rather a series of ten loosely connected scenes. Don Juan is in love with Death personified by the figure of La Morte, the only woman he has never been able to seduce. He does not go to hell for his actions like Mozart's Don Giovanni, but is condemned to an ever-repeating cycle of his life - entering the darkened house where the opera began, to the sound of a flute solo, to seduce another victim. Six Shadows watch from afar – women commenting like a Greek chorus on the events on stage and on Juan's life. The opera closes with the words La Morte: Salvation is so far away - again. At the time of the creation of the opera, neither Schulhoff nor Beneš had any idea that a similar life fate awaited them: Beneš was sentenced to death for participating in the anti-Nazi resistance, which was changed to prison (1941–1945), Schulhoff did not live to see the end of the war; as a Jewish artist, he was deported to the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died of tuberculosis in August 1942.
Schulhoff's Plameny is a unique grasp of the form of the opera genre, and with its tone of the damnation of Don Juan through eternal life, it forms a parallel to Janáček's Veca Makropulos.
Patricia Částková
