Maciej Jabłoński
How to live in the world of opera – not only in the anniversary year?
A few reflections prompted by the 100th anniversary of the Poznań Opera Theater.
When working on The Tragedy of Carmen in 1981, Peter Brook, an excellent director, said that “[working] at the opera is a constant struggle which is an utter waste of time and energy” . When I read about the early plays of the Grand Theater in Poznań, listen to the tales told in a lofty voice, when the names of Walerian Bierdiajew and Zdzisław Górzyński, Wacław Domieniecki and Antonina Kawecka, Ewa Werka and Józef Kolesiński, Marian Kouba and Jan Czekaj, Olga Sawicka and Conrad Drzewiecki, Danuta Baduszkowa and Teresa Kujawa are mentioned, when I pore over the reviews from past decades, and finally – when I take part in the life of the Theater, I am fully convinced that neither time nor energy have been wasted here. And any minor slip-ups and big mistakes – as there are bound to have been some – attributable to an equal extent to incompetent managers, directors with a poor ear for music (there have been plenty), decision-makers with little understanding of the intricate nature of the opera theater (we have had plenty of those as well), and a pain of every opera – whimsical prima donnas, are but a proof that the theater has lived its life to the full.
Those who claim that opera is an intriguing subject are right only to a certain extent. First and foremost, opera is no small problem that we have grappled with for centuries, every so often announcing the fall or even death of this form of art. Now then, what is this strange construct, this explosive mixture whose fuse is the singer (actor) and which is lit by the director and conductor? Who invented opera and with what purpose in mind, thus propounding a riddle to the tired humankind, a riddle which the history has tried to solve for the past 400 years with the mighty voices and pens of the artists ranging from Claudio Monteverdi to Krzysztof Penderecki? Opera is the tower of Babel, it is a surplus, a contradiction, an excess, an accumulated fiction, a tangled web which cannot be cleaved, not even with the sword of an ancient warrior. Opera calls for imagination and original ideas more than any other form of art, paying for this effort with ingratitude. L’opera e mobile, however, it is to opera that the greatest authors dedicate their talents, hoping that artistic success in the field of opera theater will make them ride the crest of a wave. It is all true –grumbling (whether sincerely or not) about opera and its sulks, however, is just one side of the coin. The other side is beautiful and inviting, it is the opposite of all prodigality. This other side shines with uncontrollable light, for the life of an opera house is the life of entire societies, an opera theater is always the cultural center of its city, it sets the tone and is a place of special cult.
The Grand Theater in Poznań has also made a historically significant contribution to shaping the image of opera in Poland and the position which the city upon the Warta once held on the cultural map of our country. When reflecting upon the history of the Theater, it is impossible not to reflect upon the virtues and absurdities of opera: does the incomprehensibility of the libretto of The Troubadour by Giuseppe Verdi still matter, once we have had the opportunity to admire Aleksandra Imalska and Stefania Toczyska as Azucena, to await Józef Kolesiński’s profuse phrases or to revel in Joanna Kozłowska’s legato? Don’t the unending death scenes in Don Carlos or La Traviata lose some of their absurdity when the voices of Wojtek Drabowicz or Jolanta Wrożyna still echo in our minds? Why should we bridle at the exaltation of Salome giving vent to her monstrous libido when singing over John the Baptist’s head, if we find this fascinating love duet rewarding and which – thanks to Ewa Iżukowska’s charm – we do not wish to forget? Doesn’t the unleashed power of Mozart, Rossini and Verdi’s coloraturas, the singing which takes our breath away, elevating us to the levels of pure artificiality as beautiful as the long hair of the nearly incorporeal Ophelia or Melisanda, send unforgettable shivers down our spines? Wacław Borowy called this shiver the most important measure of great poetry; let us recall Krystyna Pakulska in the role of the Queen of the Night, Ewa Podleś in Semiramida or Antonina Kowtunow as Violetta in the first act of La Traviata. Didn’t Ewa Werka’s phenomenal singing for ever light up the “paths of the night” treaded by the characters from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Black Mask? Doesn’t Antonina Kawecka’s portrayal of Tosca, marked by the deepest devotion to music, make us forget all the shallow moments and weaknesses of composers who created their works before and after Puccini? Do we not cherish the images from Eugene Onegin with Kozłowska, Drabowicz, Tomasz Zagórski and the statuesque Radosław Żukowski? Is it possible to resist the charm of Marian Kołodziej’s visionary stage setting in Carmina Burana by Orff and Prince Igor by Borodin? Didn’t the characters of Jedidja Potter (The Black Mask) and Aschenbach (Death in Venice), portrayed by Aleksander Burandt, capture our imagination? How not to be moved when thinking back on Krystyna Kujawińska’s Turandot or Aida? How not to take pride in the Poznań Opera Choir, which for years has aroused admiration of the audiences and which now ranks among the greatest choirs in Europe, not just because of its artists but, first and foremost, thanks to Jolanta Dota-Komorowska?
Memorable events continue to fall out of the Horn of Plenty: did we not leave the Grand Theater engrossed in discussion after the opening of Verdi’s Requiem directed by Ryszard Peryt, marked with “Solidarity” symbols, on a January night of 1985? Didn’t Don Carlos, which Mieczysław Nowakowski chose for the opening of his term of office in the building topped with Pegasus, take our breath away? Were we not dying in anticipation of such plays as The Fiery Angel by Prokofiev, to which we should in a single breath add Joan of Arc at the Stake by Honegger, Death in Venice by Britten and Moses by Rossini? Do we not cherish the memories of the fading arbor from Eugene Onegin, collapsing into boundless blackness, which Janusz Nyczak chose as a hallmark for the scene of his farewell to the stage of the world? Didn’t Mariusz Treliński’s Andrea Chenier revive us and stir our lazy imagination with a dramatic vision of the universal order of oppressive authority?
To talk or to write about the history of the Theater, especially in the year of its anniversary, means to awake memories and to track the past. The memories, which fade as more and more witnesses of past events pass away, are more than just the most important documents remaining of a play, once the curtain has dropped. First and foremost, they are a proof of admiration for the uniqueness of the experience, which Goethe called the most important feeling known by man. We cherish the unique moments spent in Our Theater and disremember the mistakes or false notes. The latter are irrelevant. The traces of the past are stronger, more durable, they lay on archive shelves in the form of photographs, letters, memoirs, or reviews, frozen in time, and yet within easy reach; traces of the past can also be found in stage directions of authors and managers from long ago, which we are more or less respectful of when planning to revive and reviving their works. When trying to read traces we either need to activate our own memory or rely on past generations. Even though faith is not a personal experience, I will always remember the stories of Bierdiajew, Górzyński or Latoszewski and I will not escape the thoughts of Halina Dudicz-Latoszewska, Karol Urbanowicz and Barbara Kostrzewska; I will never be able to turn my back on the energy that gushes from Drzewiecki’s dancing; I will not dare to erase Albin Fechner, Józef Prząda and Stanisław Romański from my imagination – all those brilliant artists who are too distant in the past for me to remember.
Opera is theater. Its most vital component – the play – hides numerous meanings in its multiple layers and resists description, whose completeness is always questionable. The play is governed by disappearance and return, as the spectacle “appears” repeatedly over time in the form of the said fragments, traces and imprints in our defective memories. All this, mixed up and dispersed, persists in culture once the last sound has died down, the last gesture and scene of a premiere or any subsequent performance has faded away. What remains, however, comes from a process which has always been – at least to some extent – mysterious, and which I once referred to as ascension into the work. It can be defined as the settlement of thoughts and feelings of the author of the theatrical aspect of an opera in his/her work . The purpose of this somewhat heavenly metaphor is clear – it is to demonstrate the power of the artist’s personality, his/her ability to brand the work with ideas which often give rise to dramatic controversies, creating inspiring or unacceptable tension with music. After all, opera does not belong entirely to theater, music is the blood in its veins, but every encounter with theater is a challenge. The question: how to stage a good opera (whatever “good” means in this context) is as perverse a question as: how to act in order to sing well? History knows thousands of answers to these doubts, none of which, however, settles the issue. Traditionally, opera’s esthetic seam runs between realism and its various forms and (often radical) antirealism, escape from the illusion of the mundane and the specific. A similar situation may be observed in the sphere of acting, dominated by the singer – actor, where the specific coldness of stage characters, „stone-cold acting” clashes with its opposite – genuine involvement in the development of characters, thus being a testimony to the famous ambivalence (distance – involvement), whose timeliness has long been sealed by Diderot.
Poznań Theatre, too, has been the scene of the struggle between these two approaches to opera. The realism of Sławomir Żerdzicki’s works, ascetic abidance by the conventions of the epoch, adherence to detail, embellishment with historical paintings and lively images, especially in the works of Polish and European Romanticism, has always revealed great respect for music and the crucial role it plays. Noticeably enough, this type of realism often overlapped with a patriotic thread, which dominated the productions of the operas of Moniuszko’s (Żerdzicki’s The Haunted Manor or The Countess). There is room here for emphasis and patriotic ardor, so typical of Maria Fołtyn’s opera visions, and reaching the level of sentimental simplification in Polish Christmas by Barbara Wachowicz. The theater of Robert Skolmowski, on the other hand, was characterized by a very different kind of realism, often surprising in its clearly rhetoric ideas. In Poznań Skolmowski is remembered for his Fallstaff, overcome with rhetoric excess, for The Turk in Italy, in which Skolmowski the director transformed himself into a trick juggler, gesticulated with ideas, lost his breath, distracted and amused at the same time. Finally – for the superb Force of Destiny, both rich and balanced, soothing Skolmowski’s vibrating theatrical ambitions, a play that must not be forgotten.
Over the last decades, however, the Grand Theater in Poznań has been dominated by the talent of Ryszard Peryt who, together with Mieczysław Donajewski, the artistic director in the Building topped with Pegasus for over 15 years, and professor Michał Bristiger, a musicologist, opened a new, historically unique era abundant in unforgettable plays. Strong metaphysical attitude, deep excitement with music and unwavering faith in the sacred aspect and mission of art are the features of the Peryt’s theater, which made a great impression on the audience. The director’s pious attitude towards the composer’s score, attention given to detail, in which Peryt had always found a symbolic meaning, perfectly harmonized with the musical aspect of each production, particularly in situations where the shape of the contemporary opera theater, capable of “discussing” important problems of an individual and of humankind, was at an artistic stake. It was in those particularly esthetically troublesome situations that Mieczysław Dondajewski’s baton infallibly pointed out the musical message. Peryt claimed that paying heed to “... [the score’s] theatrical traces transforms the work on an opera into searching for a body to be inhabited by a soul. An opera becomes the music’s body. If the director succeeds in constructing the opera’s theatrical reality in such a way that it is fully immersed in music and it is the music it derives its energy and shape from, the sung word – libretto – finds its right place and time”. Our memories center around the aforementioned Prokofiev, Honegger and Penderecki on the one hand and Verdi’s Otello and Rossini’s Moses on the other. What is more, irrespective of the fact that the last decade in the Polish opera belongs to Mariusz Treliński, Peryt’s achievements, in particular those from the years spent in Poznań, have entered the history of the Polish opera theater for good.
Opera is the arena of thoughts. Magdalena Dziadek rightly pointed out: “I’m not denying that my desire to reconstruct the discussion revolving around opera, which is developing in Poznań (and in connection with Poznań) in the context of the discourse on the Polish opera of the past century, has dominated the way in which I see the history of the Theater in Poznań.[...] I believe that the will to reveal the continuity of this discussion and its impact on the Poznań stage is the most important reason for delving into the intricate life of opera both in Poznań and in the whole of Poland”. Ever since the pre-war period until the present day we have come across the same or similar bumpy problems on this opera way of “thoughts”, problems associated with regarding opera as a single musical and theatrical entity, with the place of the director and the boundaries to his freedom as regards treating music, submissive to theatrical message, the role of the singer, the choice of the repertoire. The demands voiced in the history of opera to remove “100-kilogram divas”, as Witold Noskowski put it, from stage, have met with patient endurance of the heavy frame, as long as it went hand in hand with a divine voice (Pavarotti is one of the recent examples to illustrate this theory). The singer – actor has been the subject of volumes of written works and numerous public debates, attempts were made to divide the history of opera into the “pre-“ and “post” Maria Callas periods, in the belief that acting and expression are more important than sweet tones. Between Franciszek Freszel’s work entitled For the Sake of Acting in an Opera, and the opinion voiced by the aforementioned Peter Brook that “[a singer] does not need to do all that much. Sometimes it is simply enough for him/her to be there”, there is a vast space inhabited by various views, ideas or esthetic models which define the theatrical duties of the singer and the director.
The examples which can be found in the artistic concepts of the Dołżycki brothers, Adam and Leon, in the 60s of the 20th century, when Robert Satanowski was the manager and – as I have already mentioned – the Dondajewski–Peryt–Bristiger triumvirate spread their rule, demonstrate the extent to which the issues related to the role of the theater, the place of the director and the repertoire policy have dominated the history of our Stage. Looking into the important periods in the history of the Grand Theater in Poznań, we can see how heated this discussion was at the time when Leon Dołżycki removed theatrical templates from stage (in The Players and The Rustic Chivalry of 1920, in the numerous examples of Slavonic operas, such as The Bartered Bride by Smetana or the works by Tchaikovsky, and subsequently – Wagner’s tragedies), toyed with the division into the stage and the audience, introducing the achievements of the Great Reform, promoted anti-realistic thinking in the famous Old Fable by Władysław Żeleński, demonstrating that the work of a Polish composer can be a perfect source material for a contemporary vision of opera; and there was “confusion, there’s the murmur of indignation, there’s the helplessness of reviewers, glittering with uncertain allusions” – Witold Hulewicz commented – and I would still gladly dedicate his words to many music critics, including those in Poznań.
Robert Satanowski dominated the Polish operatic culture for many years, managing the Poznań stage for nearly 8 seasons. The controversy surrounding Satanowski stemmed from many aspects of his artistic life, but also from other spheres. His interest in experimenting, however, was evident in his choice of repertoire (the famous “flop” of Jonny spielt auf by Krenek, a composer who is currently being rediscovered by the European theater and recording industry), as well as in productions of Wagner’s works. As an ardent supporter of “problem art, internally and emotionally engaged” , Satanowski reaches both for The School for Wives by Liebermann and Odysseus Weeping and Abandoned by Tadeusz Szeligowski, and finally – for Katherina Izmailova by Shostakovich, which proved to be an artistic theatrical success ranked “between” conventions and realism. Tannhauser with Kawecka, Roman Węgrzyn and Marian Kondella paved the way for Swornowski’s undoubted artistic and intellectual achievement – Tristan and Isolde by Wagner. The stakes were high, for it was not so much the bold choice of Wagner’s masterpiece and its production that mattered, but rather Satanowski’s strong belief that in order to keep up with modern times, an opera theater must accept the most demanding challenges. A provocation, an epoch-making event, as the critics referred to Tristan, sealed the conductor’s fate...
***************************************
It is 2010, the year of the 100th anniversary of the opera stage in Poznań. Irrespectively of the temperature of the anniversary celebrations, regardless of whether it will be close to the Mediterranean fascination with opera, or to the lukewarm indifference to the unusual, so typical for Poznań, we are exulted and respectful.
Living the past of this Theatre, its unique atmosphere, which inspired the culture of the city and the region, sparked debates or even heated disputes, stirred emotions – both esthetic and political, I am waiting (and perhaps I am not the only one who is) for a clear sign, which would allow me to believe that the Poznań stage has a bright future ahead of it. What should it be like: strong with the voices and the cult of prima donnas? Shocking with the scale of mega-performances? Heated up with theater which moves us deeply through a dialog with ideas and not with excrements? As of today, I do not know the answer to this question. However, I do have the right to wish that the next book dedicated to the Great Theater in Poznań would also deserve to be called: the history of stage and thought.
2010 was a jubilee year as we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Poznan Grand Opera House »
