10 Eastern Europe

Rachel Beckles Willson

Once upon an ancient time . . .

A story introduced in rhyme . . .

The tale is old, the moral new,

Even the players could be you

Yourselves, Ladies and Gentlemen.

You’re watching me, I’m watching you,

But which is which and who is who?

Consider, safely in your beds

Is the theatre here, or in your heads

Ladies and Gentlemen?

Here there is a generous ration:

Crimes of violence and passion –

In wars outside the blood runs redly:

Here is something far more deadly,

Ladies and Gentlemen.

The prologue to Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (John 1991 , 46) invites the audience to use the opera as a mirror for itself, to observe connections between spectator and spectated and also to look beyond the surface of the bloodied castle for its meanings. We do well to think similarly when considering ‘Eastern Europe’, which unlike other ‘Topographies’ in this volume, was not a politically unified entity before the Soviet Union occupied it in 1949. The region’s agglomeration of nations has nonetheless been characterized as a whole in various ways, regarded frequently as an aspiration, but equally often as a problem (see, for example, the editors’ preface to Central Europe , 1/1 (May 2003), 3). It has been viewed as a ‘Kingdom of the Spirit’ (Garton Ash 1989 , 161–91), a region of people sharing ‘thought-styles and thought-worlds’ (Schöpflin 2004 ) or just a myth constructed by Western Europe (Wolff 1994 ). Eastern Europe’s citizens themselves have had far from straightforward relations with their so-called homeland – many emigrated beyond its apparent provinciality or lived in deeply nostalgic, enforced exile. And at times, people have been placed there by sheer brute force.

What follows will, despite these cautionary remarks, identify some common elements in the region’s operas, focusing on the countries where an operatic tradition in the nineteenth century led to the richest fruits in the twentieth: Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. (In Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia and Greece operatic institutions developed more recently, and no operas from these countries have been successful internationally; for an excellent overview of the varying contexts for music in the region, see Beckerman and Samson 1993 .) In the first half of the century operas are predominantly serious in spirit and a large number are set in villages. Most are shaped by the ambition to explore the question of human destiny, several of them do so through tragic plots that unfold with an irreversible teleology. Many libretti are specific to national pasts or presents and music regularly draws on, even if it does not actually quote, indigenous folk music. Others, where composers were concerned to forge closer links with European traditions, are shaped by ancient Greek myth. For related reasons, most operas have absorbed some elements from French nineteenth-century grand opera, Strauss or Wagner.

Yet if these tendencies shape a large number of operas, then there are many exceptions which deserve to be taken on their own terms, rather than seen as anomalies. With the benefit of hindsight, these operas turn out to be ahead of their time, carrying the most premonitions of the latter part of the century in their probing of tragedy and temporality. Some are written by exiles, which this chapter includes without claiming that they ‘belong’ to Eastern Europe, but rather in the interest of exploring what links they retain. Others are written by ‘insiders’. Viewing Eastern Europe is indeed like viewing Bluebeard’s Castle. Let us open its doors.

Door One: Czechoslovakia (I)

Whereas a strong sense of Czech tradition was continued in the operas of Ostr il, Novák and Foerster in the first part of the twentieth century, Janá ek moved beyond this romantic style (see Tyrrell 1988 and 1992 ). His Jen fa (1894, c. 1901–08), which Chew ( 2003 ) situates in the context of Czech Decadent and Naturalist drama of the turn of the century, retained strong links with the past yet transcended local reference in both the depth of its subject matter and its musical treatment. Although the opera is framed by Moravian folk dances, guaranteeing a sense of realist ‘rural tragedy’, and follows the prose writing of Gabriella Preissová in a naturalistic ‘speech melody’, the final act in particular pushes beyond the local characterization with profound questions of human morals and motivation.

Tragedy unfolds in the first three acts, by the end of which Jen fa has lost her beauty (disfigured by a rejected suitor), her preferred partner (no longer captivated by her looks), her purity (she is pregnant by him) and her baby (secretly murdered by her stepmother). As Jen fa’s personality develops, however, she becomes reconciled to the lover who had slashed her face and – in the heart-rending climax of the opera – even comes to understand and forgive her stepmother when she confesses to the murder of her child. The interweaving musical threads of ‘locality’ (such as an ostinato representing the turning of a mill wheel, folk-type dances and songs), human passions and fate (dialogues, passionately lyrical monologues and powerful orchestral interludes) are bound with an extended tonality that uses dissonance as a poignant and ominous undercurrent. The strength of Jen fa’s character, which breaks the interweaving cycles of retribution, is mirrored in the final resolution to a more settled tonality and texture.

Janá ek revisited personal tragedy in Kát’a Kabanová (1921), which is also framed by its rural setting. Kát’a is unhappily married into a family which bullies her, while she is attracted to someone else (Boris); her husband’s temporary absence allows her to become intimate with Boris and struggle violently with her conscience thereafter. Her consequent ‘confession’ echoes that of Jen fa’s stepmother, but does not resolve her situation at all. Feeling guilty at having brought Boris into disrepute and doomed, herself, to an interminable domestic imprisonment, she leaps into the Volga; her husband releases his grief by hurling the blame on his mother. The opera is thus a more pessimistic portrayal of humanity than Jen fa , setting the forces of society’s pressures and their restrictions into sharper relief. Unlike Jen fa , Kát’a does not transcend her miserable surroundings. Janá ek’s musical vision, however, is all the more powerful once released from the ‘up-front’ Moravian folk dances. The music sets up the apparent inevitability of the tragedy from the start in portentous timpani beats, ostinati and Kát’a’s passionate pleas (she fears her own transgression) that her husband not travel away. Her confession, taking place during a tumultuous rainstorm, is the musical response, the balancing frame, to that anxiety; and the wordless choir haunting her from then until her death is a tugging thread that draws her beyond the village in which we see her .

Door Two: Hungary (I)

Bartók and Kodály each made a clear break from Hungary’s nineteenth-century grand opera, but in very different ways. Kodály wrote a number of nationalist Singspiels, each setting a string of (newly discovered) Hungarian folksongs and dances, and each based on a national theme: The Transylvanian Spinning Room (1924–32), Háry János (1926, revised 1937–8 and 1948–52) and Czinka Panna (1946–8) . Contrarily, Bartók’s early opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) plunges into the inner life of humanity. A symbolic dialogue, rather than dramatic action, shapes the work, the tension between newly wed Judith and her husband Bluebeard manifested in their discussion of seven doors within his Castle. Each time Judit persuades Bluebeard to let her open a door, a highly colourful musical tableau evokes the scene behind it. Stage realizations tend not to reveal these scenes (which range from a torture chamber to a lake of tears) because they are intended to represent Bluebeard’s character, rather than his physical castle. Suggestive lighting changes allow their symbolic nature to remain intact , through which the music provides a sense of progression, leading from dark pentatonic hues, to bright tonal ones and back to the pentatonic when Judit herself is enclosed behind the seventh door.

This dialectic between darkness and light is interwoven with that of closure, control and rationality (Bluebeard’s speech-like utterances, his pulling Judit back into pentatonicism at the end of the opera) against openness and emotion (Judit’s wide-ranging and ornamental vocalizations). Judit attempts to open Bluebeard out, but destroys herself entirely in the process: understood thus, ‘man’ is by definition lonely, and ‘woman’ is too curious to respect or withstand the necessary – if tragic – loneliness of his position. Yet if the opera is indeed such a projection of a ‘male’ centre, repeatedly penetrated by a ‘female’ inquisitor, then the male centre nonetheless colludes in her presence, even invites her in. The ‘male’ longs for ‘female’; or rather, the ‘rational framework’ longs for ‘irrational, unconscious invigoration’, while also perceiving it as something needing to be repressed, crushed into a monolithic framework. In this sense Bluebeard offers a metaphor for Bartók’s intoxication with peasant music, coupled with his need to make it palatable for the city. At the time he wrote the opera his interest in folk music was primarily creative and idea-forming rather than nationalistic: in 1910 he expressed in a letter to Delius his enthusiasm for the ‘vivid reality’ of Romanian music, and mentioned that his interest in folk music was not ‘the thirst for scientific knowledge’ (Demény 1971 , 106). At the same time he was anxious about the reception of his work, which was already indicted by some as expressing ‘frenzy’ and ‘insanity’ (97). Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is a pessimistic commentary on the possibility of such synthesis .

Door Three: Poland (I)

Like Bluebeard , and although written shortly after Poland gained autonomy, Szymanowski’s King Roger (1918–24) makes no statement regarding national history or identity. Neither does it resource nineteenth-century Polish models, nor quote folk music. Rather its concern is with universal questions of human nature and it is often read as a quasi-autobiographical reflection on personal development: Stephen Downes suggests that it ‘dramatises Szymanovski’s struggle with the nature of his personality and his art’ ( 1995 , 258). Comparison with the Hungarian work is rewarding because there is a basic similarity: the central character, functioning within an established framework, finds a way to come to terms with irrational forces. King Roger is based on a loose reworking of Euripides’ Bacchae by poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and Szymanowski himself.

The framework here is the Orthodox Church, powerfully evoked by the opera’s opening with hymn singing and, frequently, a Byzantine Chapel scene on stage. King Roger is informed by the Archbishop that a shepherd is leading people astray by preaching a new faith; when the shepherd enters (with his music of free lyricism) we learn that his ‘faith’ is the pursuit of ecstatic Dionysian joy. The tension between the poles of rationalized religious authority and the dark, elemental energies of eroticism are played out on several levels in the opera. In part, they are seen as externalizations of the King’s own personal conflicts: here the link with Bluebeard is manifest. King Roger fares better: unlike Bluebeard he does not ultimately rejoin the medieval scholasticism of the church and thus return to the state where he was before encountering the irrational. Nor does he simply turn away from the rational side of his existence and pursue an unfettered life of indulgence. Although the end is somewhat ambiguous, there is no doubt that he is fundamentally altered: the harmony at the close synthesizes the diatonic (representing the church) with the (disruptive) whole-tone collection. Where Bluebeard remained in darkness, King Roger found a capacity to choose his own path between orthodoxies .

Door Four: Romania

Enescu’s Oedipe (1910–22, orchestrated 1931–2) was written while its composer divided his time between Romania and Paris. Edmund Fleg’s libretto comprises a reworking of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonnus , preceded by two acts drawn from legend but not hitherto available as drama. Changes made to Sophocles are significant, especially the riddle of the Sphinx. Rather than asking Oedipus ‘what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the day and three legs in the evening?’, she asks whether there is any force which can withstand destiny. The answer is the same for each, and Oedipus’ correct response, ‘Man’, paves the way for the rewriting of the tragedy. Although Oedipus does kill his father unwittingly and does blind himself, he recovers his sight and dies in a pastoral grove amid a blaze of light, while the Eumenides chant: ‘Happy is he who is pure in soul: peace be with him’. The tragedy is redeemed by a Judeo-Christian note of hope.

Enescu shaped the tragic impulse of the early acts with motives associated with ‘fate’ and ‘parricide’, and used orchestral effects to magnificent dramatic consequence. The music of the Sphinx, with extraordinary timbres from ordinary instruments as well as celeste and harmonium, builds up towards her ‘death shriek’, which is extended by a musical saw. While drawing on the Romanian doina for the leitmotiv of the Shepherd’s flute, Enescu refrained from exoticizing the origins of his libretto: he ‘decided to remain ignorant’ of Greek music (Malcolm 1990 , 150). His experimental vocal techniques are notable, however, all of which are put to dramatic effect. Oedipus resorts to a quasi- Sprechgesang when standing blind before his people, for instance; in other areas quarter-tones – deliberately ‘out of tune’ singing – emerge as if as a consequence of fear or horror. In that the entire span of Oedipus’ life is presented, and that he passes from great hopes through horrendous disaster to final rest, the opera represents an archetype for human life in general. Enescu projected something akin to Szymanowski: the ability of humankind to transcend, or at least modify, the mythology according to which it lives .

Door Five: Czechoslovakia (II)

Whilst the operas of Enescu, Bartók and Szymanowski share some elements with Jen fa and Kát’a Kabanová , Janá ek’s comical The Excursions of Mr Brou ek (1923) is rather different. It includes a journey to the moon, as well as faintly absurd reflections on the aesthetics of artistic creation: its closest relatives probably lie in the work of the composer’s compatriot Martin . Comparison with the more light-hearted music of Martin is nonetheless more revealing of the composers’ differences, rather than their similarities. A 36-year gap in their ages was probably contributory, but their operas also bespeak vastly different places of composition . Whereas the libretto of The Excursions is closely related to Prague and fifteenth-century Czech history , Martin ’s three comedies of the 1920s are influenced by the arts in Paris at the time. (The cultural exchange between the two countries is mapped, in relation to Martin ’s Les trois souhaits ou Les vicissitudes de la vie (1928–9) in Chew 2000 .) Their music maintains a distance from its subject matter: set against Janá ek’s powerfully expressive tone they are determinedly cool, evading overt subjectivity. They are also highly eclectic, drawing on operetta, French jazz and surrealism, and as such, they might seem overly derivative or even slightly passé to some.

Viewed from the perspective of European operatic development, however, they emerge in a very different light. Martin ’s collaborations with the poet Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes led him to create what is probably the first Dadaist opera: The Tears of the Knife (1928). This represents a 20-minute destruction of the medium’s most basic qualities. Operatic singing style may be forced into a tempo in which it sounds ludicrous rather than powerful or anguished; such moments are juxtaposed with tango, foxtrot and Charleston; and scenes change as if they were film clips (see Pe man 1967 , 127–58). The ‘plot’ is an anti-plot and the frequent appearances of Satan’s head – popping out from other heads as they split open – alert us to the source of the forces of destruction. Any potentially dramatic event collapses into a grotesque situation. The heroine is in love with the body of a hanged man; she stabs herself to death; the hanged man comes to life; a pair of legs (only) begins to dance; it then juggles with a smiling head. The parody of contemporary idioms is comparable with Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Honegger’s Antigone , but the parody is here more destructive. Thus, for instance, within the orchestration of four woodwind, four brass, three strings, piano, banjo, accordion and tom-tom, the instruments associated with jazz (saxophone, banjo and tom-tom) are almost always silent in the jazz-like sections. The work actually consisted of its own obliteration, in that it was completely unstageable: only through film and stage technology beyond the capabilities of the 1920s could this extraordinary and path-breaking spectacle be realized .

Whilst aiming for something far less radical, Janá ek’s final three operas are nonetheless also highly individual. If myth functioned in several works discussed above as a means to come to terms with the limitations of human capabilities during their lives, then here a related question is posed rather more explicitly: how can humanity come to terms with its own death? The Cunning Little Vixen (1922–3) and From the House of the Dead (1927–8) are set in diametrically opposed contexts: one in a scene of vital pastoral renewal, the other in a Siberian prison camp where death is an everyday event. The Makropulos Affair (1925), lying between them, is set in early twentieth-century Prague, where the heroine’s interminable life provides not only the solution to a legal case, but also a reminder of death’s function within life.

The focus of Rudolf T snohlídek’s novel on which Janá ek based his libretto for The Cunning Little Vixen is a vixen’s escape from human captivity, and her rearing of a family thereafter. The vixen is Janá ek’s central character, forming the focus for his characteristic explorations of women and their trapped domestic situations; although she is eventually shot by a poacher, the opera proffers solace in the natural cycle of the seasons and by the large family of cubs she has had. This positive message can be traced throughout the music, whether in the various dances of animals (grasshoppers perform a waltz, for instance) or in the use of an off-stage choir that invokes not death (as in Kát’a Kabanová ) but rather the natural life of the forest. This idealized forest dominates the opera, which is something of a tribute to nature’s diversity and fantastical capacity for creation. The use of children’s voices for animals also lightens the tone of the score; and ballet and mime add a delicate humour.

In contrast, Dostoyevsky’s novel drawn upon for House of the Dead has no central role, and no significant female characters. Relegated to equal servitude and suffering, individuals emerge at intervals from the chorus and then sink back into it. They are distinguished from one another only by their pasts, established mainly in three lengthy monologues describing their brutal crimes. Harmonic writing is harshly dissonant; the opera does contain moments of warmth and hope, but closes with a return to the unremitting hard labour of the camp (see Wingfield 1999 , 56–78).

Nonetheless, this ending, in which individual death has been subsumed into a larger flow, invites comparison with The Cunning Little Vixen . Moreover, musical textures and structures in the two operas are unified similarly: each is sustained by an orchestral continuity that allows vocal parts freedom to explore the naturalistic speech-melody that Janá ek had been developing since Jen fa . Finally, the two operas are linked by their analogously complex exploration of captivity, which renders them distinct from Janá ek’s other operas. Apparently more strictly bound than the vixen, the prisoners in House of the Dead cannot escape. But they themselves have a captive: an eagle which they torture, while admiring its defiance and regarding it as a symbol of freedom. It is their ‘vixen’.

The vixen and eagle are linked, symbolically and through allusion, to human roles and aspirations. In The Cunning Little Vixen the animal and human spheres are linked in fantasy: the vixen dreams of being a girl, while the forester is lonely without her; at the same time the schoolmaster and priest pine for earlier loves (who, we infer, ‘escaped’). In House of the Dead , the fate of the eagle is made to entwine with that of the prisoners: when a prisoner is released, the remaining prisoners release the eagle, which soars above them to the accompaniment of the musical theme associated with freedom earlier on. Just as these separate realms are suggestively linked, the past protrudes into the present in each opera. Even when the vixen is dead, her children taunt the forester. And in House of the Dead , prisoners’ tales of being flogged in the past are related almost synchronically with actual floggings; and a character from someone’s past turns out to be present in the camp – unrecognized until he has died.

The notion of the past in the present, and the mysterious passage of time, is central to The Makropulos Affair . Janá ek’s characteristic ostinato technique finds particular resonance here: sustained, yet constructed through the repetition of very short melodic cells, it evokes the paradoxical temporalities of the opera plot. In the opening scene a lawyer wakes up with a start (‘is that the time?’) and, while rushing about to a ‘ticking’ ostinato, ruminates on the family inheritance dispute that has run on through generations for over a hundred years. The fragmentary melodic style, with sudden harmonic lurches and pulsating orchestral interruptions, sets the tone of hasty preparation. Yet into this chaos steps the heroine, who has lived for 327 years so far. Her lengthy life has brought misery to several of the opera’s characters, past and present. Some fell in love with her beauty, some with her voice, but none found their warmth reciprocated, and none found happiness in their admiration. Her name becomes associated with a rising and falling musical theme of longing. Yet we learn gradually that unless she can obtain another dose of the magic elixir, she faces death. Her own melodies come to express the musical longing associated with her name; and the other characters, instead of admiring or coveting her, come to pity her. The final resolution – her death – brings her relief, for she has come to realize that without the measure of death, life can find no system of values: it has no point.

Janá ek had moved a long way from overtly national expression by this stage, while Martin , still living in Paris, dedicated himself to it afresh when he returned to opera (after a considerable gap) in 1933. The Plays of Mary (1933–4) combined miracle plays with medieval drama; and his radio opera, The Voice of the Forest (1935), quoted folk song in an ambition to fashion a folk theatre for the time. The Comedy on the Bridge (1935), also a radio opera, treats instruments, gestures and rhetorical figures with remarkable witticism: recitative is parodied, solemn ‘highly confidential’ choral sections are satirized and the absurd plot is bound together with marches reminiscent of – and sometimes quoting – the Rákóczi March, the Hungarian national march in nineteenth-century Austro-Hungary. This provides the listener with a reference to Central Europe, even if the opera is a distant mockery of the Dionysian passions explored elsewhere in the region.

Martin ’s best-known opera, Julietta (1936–7), touches more penetratingly on the more mysterious aspects of destiny than elsewhere in his work. In Julietta the border between fantasy and reality is treated with considerable nuance, even though it is still indebted to his less subtle earlier influences: the disruption to expectations of narrative and our understanding of the flow of time are distinctly surreal. Michel arrives in a town where he has been before, in search of a woman he once loved. Nobody in the town has any memory at all, however; they do not even remember what they just said. The situation renders not only his search fruitless, but also his (and our) ability to discern dream from reality, fantasy from truth. ‘Truth’ lost, the whole opera becomes a projection of human longing, whether for ‘Julietta’, ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. Even the characters cease to be protagonists in action, because their actions are entirely inconsequential – forgotten the instant they are committed. Michel is merely the embodiment of longing, a vehicle for the composer to appraise rational, irrational and emotional values through him (see Pe man 1967 , 160–82). If it is typical of Martin ’s light touch, his rhythmic prodigality and folk-like extended tonality, it is nonetheless more unsettling than much of his work. Variously communicating through lyrical lines, recitative and spoken words, the characters become bizarre, their very vacillation between half-sung and half-spoken statements embodying the borderline of their plausibility (Macek 1993 , 120–25).

Martin fled to Provence in 1940 and to New York in 1941. Shortly afterwards, the Nazi camp at Terezin saw the composition of Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis . The work is composed into the German tradition in which Ullmann, a pupil of Schoenberg’s born in Teschen, was trained, but in using the tritone ‘death’ theme from Suk’s ‘Asrael’ Symphony throughout also provides specifically Czech references. It is a transparent parody of the regime which would exterminate both him and Ullmann within a few months. The librettist, the poet Peter Kien, nonetheless conjured up an opponent more powerful than the ‘Emperor’ of his tale, namely the character of ‘Death’. ‘Death’ refuses to cooperate with the despotic Emperor and thus obstructs his plans to eradicate his subjects. The problem recalls the question raised by Enescu’s Sphinx and destiny’s eventual overturning by the faith of Oedipus: Ullmann’s and Kien’s message is defiant.

Opera took a new direction in Czechoslovakia with the performance in 1949 of Eugene Sucho ’s The Whirlpool (1941–8). The libretto’s probing of love, murder, pregnancy and guilt in a rural situation recalls Janá ek, as does the use of short melodic and rhythmic figures combined with ostinato. The atmospheric and psychological dimension of the work might have alienated it from the newly implemented Communist regime, and its expressionistic music is often dissonant. The realism of the tale, however, coupled with the regime’s desire for highly visual and articulate moralizing artworks, secured it significant support. The chorus is used as a formal and moral framing device; the anti-hero’s sense of guilt overwhelms him, for example, in a scene when he hears the chorus (symbolic of the idealized ‘village community’) in the distance. A socialist interpretation of his decision to face up to his wrong-doing and perform self-criticism would not have been difficult to construct, and The Whirlpool enjoyed widespread success in the Soviet Republics. Sucho was to be outstripped by Ján Cikker in quantity of operas produced: the latter’s Resurrection (1962) continues the line of themes of childbirth, murder and betrayal, adding to the tendency towards psychological exploration with monologue interludes in which characters reflect privately on their situations.

Martin did not return to Czechoslovakia, although he remained in close contact with the country and considered relocating there many times in his last, unsettled years living variously in the US, France and Italy. Written during this period, his last opera was originally intended to be on a Czech theme, but eventually set a compacted version of Kazantzakis’ novel The Greek Passion (original version (discussed here) 1954–7; revised ‘Zurich’ version, 1957–9). The rural village setting involves many elements from operas discussed above; the villagers’ preparation for their annual Passion play draws into that context the use of myth in shaping human development and destiny. The village is put to a test when a starving group arrives looking for protection, having been banished from their own village by Turks. The villagers’ responses take on rôles of Christian mythology linked increasingly obviously with their designated rôles in the passion. Most (including a priest) turn them away; a woman (Mary Magdalene) shows kindness and compassion; and a shepherd (Jesus) insists – at the cost of his life at the hand of a villager (Judas) – that the village welcome the strangers into their fold. The individuality of their characters is expanded into the larger fabric by their characterization through families of instruments: wind for the priest, strings for ‘Jesus’, for instance. The two choruses – villagers and refugees – have prominent dramaturgical roles too, so that the tension between societies and individuals is played out with some complexity.

The Greek Passion is Martin ’s most ‘realist’ opera and his shaping of music through dialogue brings him as close as he ever came to Janá ek. His libretto (in English) contributed to the intonation of speech-like sections which move the action forward very rapidly; he also drew on quasi-liturgical intonation for the priests. Rapid shifts from everyday to liturgical reflect the tension characterizing the whole opera. As Martin expressed it in a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation written in 1956, ‘the two themes are like thin trickles of blood: the heritage of man’s Christian virtues and his obligations to humanity’ (reproduced in the Royal Opera House Covent Garden’s programme book (2000), 13). Relations between the two themes gape wide with irony. The moral framework of the Orthodox Church is presented as too rigid to offer compassion to the refugees in their sick, needy, earthly reality. Meanwhile ‘Jesus’ also renounces aspects of life on earth, abandoning petty thieving and sexual gratification to aspire to spiritual purity. There is a bleakness here in stark contrast to Janá ek’s welcome of the passing seasons in The Cunning Little Vixen . The village, celebrating Christmas some months later, has apparently forgotten their spring murder, which renders their real tragedy useless on a spiritual level.

Door Six: Poland (II)

Socialist realist tragedy set the heroic individual against the oppression of society, a tendency which Witold Rudzi ski’s Janko the Musician (1953) demonstrates particularly clearly. On the other hand, Tadeusz Baird’s Tomorrow (1964–6), based on Joseph Conrad’s short story, harks back to the rural operatic tragedies of the region, while moving beyond them in musical dramaturgy. The opera is set in a remote fishing village and based on human longing: an ageing father longs for his son to return home; the son returns and another ageing father longs for him to wed his own daughter; the daughter falls in love with the son. The music’s investigation of Mahlerian and Bergian harmony was a departure for Polish opera, as was the use of the chamber orchestra as a vehicle for the human subconscious, in which emotions such as joy, anger and frustration are represented by certain musical motives. Characters’ actions are delineated by instrumental groups, but the most striking dramatic effect is that the son never sings, but only speaks. He destroys all hopes of happiness on the parts of the other characters, raping, robbing and abandoning the girl.

The operas of Penderecki take a more critical stance of the society around themselves and, as if attempting to drive the messages home as firmly as possible, they maximize the exposure of violence, torture and exorcism, frequently within a libretto rich in scatological reference. In The Devils of Loudon (1966–8), based on John Whiting’s dramatization of Huxley, the battle of the individual against society’s pressures underlies the plot: a priest has opposed the King’s strategy for obliterating resistance to royal supremacy. Simultaneously, he is the target of the sexual fantasies of a convent of nuns. Innocent of the charges of debauchery against him, he refuses to ‘confess’ even under torture of leg-breaking and fingernail-pulling. The sexual and religious obsession of the society around him condemns him to the stake, an event anticipated in the dream of the convent’s Prioress at the opening of the opera which sets up the dramaturgical tension.

Penderecki’s characteristic instrumental effects such as tone clusters, glissandi and woodwind ‘clucking’ are further enhanced by contributions from electric guitar and taped bell sounds; their unpleasantness ensures that the priest’s calm resistance is set into maximal relief. In the meantime the church is represented by monotone chanting. All four of Penderecki’s operas communicate directly rather than subtly: the use of quotation from other music serves to make specific points rather than blend into a seamless dramatic whole. Paradise Lost (1975–8), The Black Mask (1984–6) and Ubu Rex (1990–91) continue to explore humanitarian concerns, the last two with a more specific focus on Poland (see Schwinger 1989 ).

Door Seven: Hungary (II)

Communist Hungary’s two most successful operas were realist tragedies: Emil Petrovics’s C’est la guerre (1961) and Sándor Szokolay’s expressionist Blood Wedding (1964). Whereas the latter concentrated on tragedy in human relations, once again in a rural setting, C’est la guerre explored the unhappiness of Hungary’s Nazi participation in the Second World War. It cast the misery as an indomitable condition in which human love struggled in vain to survive. Tacitly avoiding the fact (transparent in 1961) that Hungary’s ‘liberation’ from fascism had brought a further regime of oppression, it participated in, rather than opposed, the official climate of denial in which it was written (see Beckles Willson 2003 ). (Penderecki’s The Devils of Loudon is a pointed contrast.) Zsolt Durkó’s Mózes (1977) returned Hungarian opera to the more mythical passion-type narrative of nineteenth-century grand opera, whilst Péter Eötvös’s chamber opera Radames (1975) demonstrated the composer’s close contact with progressive currents in Germany where he studied and worked – while in close contact with music in Budapest – from 1966.

Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (1974–7), on the other hand, while a response and contribution to music in Europe, marked the beginning of a rapprochement with the composer’s earlier influences from Hungary. Along with ‘deep-frozen’ musical ideas from the past (Ligeti 1983 , x), the theme of despotic destruction is an obvious sign, although its exploration of human fate is different from operas discussed so far. Only The Emperor of Atlantis set up a tragic situation and then stuck a spanner in its works in a way that might be compared with Le Grand Macabre . In Ligeti’s opera, disaster is announced blatantly at the opening: no mere individual crisis is predicted, rather, the end of the world is to occur at the stroke of midnight. Death is pronounced for all. As the plot proceeds, further ominous predictions confirm that it is indeed on the way, while a stream of grotesquery, frivolity and debauchery flows without check. Yet at the foretold hour of doom the disaster does not take place at all and life continues along its banal course.

Figure 10.1 Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre , directed by Peter Sellars with set designs by George Tsypin (Salzburg Festival, 1997). By permission of Ruth Walz.

The sense of disorientation that this creates is present from the first prediction of catastrophe, because the character who makes the announcement confounds all notions of such characters. He is no Jonah or Noah figure suggesting reform will bring redemption, and no Faustian devil who offers a contract for an alternative path to would-be salvation. Rather, he is the personification of death itself, seemingly able and prepared to bring an end to all around him. Thus there is no potential even for Ullmann’s notion of resistance to a despot from ‘Death’ itself. The obliteration of norms and also of drama is played out in the endless parodies of the music, conjoining an ‘imperfect’ twelve-tone theme with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Scott Joplin with a Greek Orthodox hymn and folksong, and Monteverdi’s Orfeo in a passacaglia of car horns. Even a pair of lovers is satirized, provided with overblown lyricism and elaborate ornamentation. There is no ‘good’ to set all the ‘bad’ against, no framework within which to see it: the disaster is a disaster, but lacks the tension and longing of a tragedy.

Thus, whilst understood as a post -anti-opera, and so as an opera ‘for’ rather than ‘against’ opera as medium, Le Grand Macabre does scorn serious opera’s prime concern: the burden of humanity’s sense of destiny. The opera’s final scene makes this very clear. Nekrotzar, it seems, was simply too drunk to bring about the end of the world at the appointed time: the question remains as to whether he really was Death (in which case Death ‘died’ and the characters are in eternal life), or he wasn’t (in which case there is a further period of respite). Either way, ‘death’ turns out not to be so important after all. The two lovers who have been enjoying one another in private during the central section re-emerge to celebrate the joys of love which remove all unnecessary fears of Judgement Day. The rest of the characters join them to sing of the futility of worrying about death. The moral is simply to ‘live merrily!’ Le Grand Macabre therefore initially recalls Martin ’s Tears of the Knife – which prevented tragic expectation from being set up despite two deaths – and later, his Julietta , which came to question whether or not anything at all had ever happened. Le Grand Macabre ’s ‘affirmative’ moral chorus at the end, despite its debt to epilogues in historic operas such as Don Giovanni , Falstaff and The Rake’s Progress , scorns all the fear, tragedy and seriousness that have been the themes of opera for so long.

Such mockery finds a gentle echo in the last major opera of the century, Eötvös’s Three Sisters after Chekhov (1997), which in many respects brings us full circle to Duke Bluebeard’s Castle . The world of the sisters is presented as a semi-closed society, from which only ‘outsiders’ (their admirers) might rescue them; in fact only their brother Andrej’s wife really penetrates it, and simply causes grief. The sisters long for something apparently out of their reach (to go and live in Moscow), without being able to bring it about: each of their lives, as well as that of Andrej, constitutes a mini-tragedy, a path of unfulfilled ambition and hope. The inevitability of this self-perpetuating closure is established by the opera’s cyclic structure. Rather than following Chekhov’s gently directed narrative, three ‘Sequences’ present extracts of the play from the perspectives of Irena, Andrej and Masha. Causality of actions and events is completely undermined. The lack of a temporal line is emphasized by symbolic events such as a clock being smashed (in two separate Sequences) and the quasi ritualistic nature of such repetitions. Casting the sisters as countertenors abstracts them yet further from their representation of ‘sisters’, the sound of the accordion evokes a nostalgia for Russia, from which the opera is nonetheless remote. Hints of irony, such as Masha’s constant whistling – a callousness in the face of the misery around her? – contribute further to the distancing strategies.

The opera thus sets itself against realist tragedy, yet strives to comment on reality. It suggests that some lives seem tragic, but that they actually have a universality which makes them normal, rather than exceptional. In the prologue of the opera (the epilogue of Chekhov’s play) the sisters try to find a reason for their torment, and present themselves as suffering on behalf of the future of humankind:

A time will come when we shall know the reason for our suffering. Our suffering will turn to joy for those who live after us, and they will remember those who live now with kind words.

(Chekhov 1959 , 329–30)

But at the close of the opera, Masha’s whistling, now her defence-mechanism against the sadness she feels on the departure of her lover, renders the tragedy comical. Suffering and longing, in all its absurdity, are simply the substance of life itself.