The Bartered Bride Bedrˇich Smetana
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Contents Pg 3 Pg 4 Pg 5 Pg 6 Pg 8 Pg 12 Pg 15 Pg 18 Pg 20
Introduction, What is Opera? How to pronounce Czech names Characters in the opera The synopsis Talking to the Director Daniel Slater Talking to the Conductor Anthony Kraus Smetana’s Bohemia Gavin Plumley Prettified Folksiness Martin Pickard Glossary of terms
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Welcome to Opera North’s learning resource on The Bartered Bride by Czech composer, Bedrˇich Smetana. This resource is designed for use in the classroom, for further reading and provides schemes of work relating to the music and drama curriculum for key stages 3 & 4. This resource includes contributions from a number of people connected to the Opera North production of The Bartered Bride, but we hope that it will be useful if you are seeing any production of the opera.
What is Opera? Opera is a hybrid art form consisting of music, text, drama, and design elements. It is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (called a libretto) and score, usually in a music theatrical setting. The term ‘opera’ comes from the Latin word ‘opus’ meaning work. Opera has a musical accompaniment throughout, performed by an orchestra and singers. Some operas include spoken word and dance and, in the case of the Opera North production of The Bartered Bride, circus performers. Opera includes many styles of classical music that has developed from the Italian tradition over more than 400 years. As with any art form, individuals may enjoy one style of opera over another.
Glossary Act – the main division of an opera i.e. Act I, Act II etc. Hybrid – something made by combining two or more different elements Libretto – The text of the opera, like the script in a film or a play. Literally ‘little book’some of the most extraordinary music ever written for the human voice. Score – a book of musical notation showing all of the music of the opera, including the instrumental parts, chorus and vocal soloists Orchestra – The group of instruments (strings, woodwind, brass, percussion) that play the musical accompaniment in an opera Composer – a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition. Literally ‘one who puts together’ Throughout this pack, words in pink can be found in the glossary.
Essentially, like any drama, opera is about people and their stories, but told through music and song. In opera you can find some of the most extraordinary music ever written for the human voice.
The Bartered Bride by Bedrˇich Smetana The Bartered Bride by Bedrˇich Smetana is an opera in three acts, telling a story of young love and how that love wins through in the face of parental expectations and opposition. The opera was first performed in Prague in 1866 and has richly colourful and tuneful music, full of dance rhythms and drawing deeply on Czech musical traditions. This pack refers to the Opera North production created in 1998 and staged again in 2014. The design and staging of the production are updated to the period of the communist occupation of Czechoslovakia, in 1968.
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How to pronounce Czech names Please note that operas can be sung in many different languages, but Opera North’s production of The Bartered Bride is sung in English. The stress is almost always on the first syllable. s in Krusina, Tobias, Vasek = sh as in ship r in Marˇenka = zh as in measure ch in Micha = Scottish ch as in loch, or German ch as in ach c in Kecal = ts as in its j n Jenik = y as in you c in the diminutive, e.g. Jenicku and Vasicku = ch as in church Krusina = Kroosheena Marˇenka = Mazhenka Tobias Micha = Tobeeass Meecha Kecal = Ketsal Vasek = Vashek Jenik = Yaynik Jenicku = Yaynichkoo
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Characters In The Opera
Krusina a countryman who has got himself into trouble financially; he considers himself to be the head of his family but both his wife and daughter appear more capable Ludmila Krusina’s wife, a strong and practical woman Marˇenka Krusina and Ludmila’s daughter; a clever and determined girl, used to getting her own way
Vasek Tobias Micha and Hata’s son son; a gentle, shy young man who has been bullied into a state of stammering anxiety
Tobias Micha a city-dweller with a sharp eye for a bargain and a quick temper; he has powerful friends and a great many business interests Hata Tobias Micha’s second wife, who is deeply disappointed in her only son and determined to get him safely married off
Jenik a young man in love with Marˇenka; he is a shrewd operator who won’t let the manipulative Kecal get the better of him Kecal the village mayor; a character who operates by a combination of bribery, intimidation and questionable financial dealing Esmeralda a member of the circus troupe; an anarchic group of performers, under surveillance by the authorities
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The Synopsis
Setting: a small country village in Czechoslovakia (c. 1968)
Marˇenka has fallen in love with a young man called Jeník, a stranger to her village. Marˇenka’s father, Krusina, owes a lot of money to a man called Tobias Micha. The local mayor, Kecal, tries to help; He has arranged that if Krusina agrees to a marriage between Marˇenka and Micha’s son, the debt will be cancelled. The villagers are preparing to celebrate a national holiday. Marˇenka has heard that the man her father wants her to marry is about to arrive. She is determined to marry Jenik instead. Kecal reminds Marˇenka’s parents, Krusina and Ludmila, of the arrangement made with Tobias Micha. He insists that the marriage must go ahead. but Marˇenka refuses. Marˇenka comes across Micha’s son Vasek, a shy and timid young man. Without telling him who she is, she describes the girl he has been told he is going to marry in such a terrifying way that he swears he will never marry her.
Kecal tries to persuade Jenik not to marry Marˇenka. Jenik listens to him but spots a loophole in his argument: the deal made by Kecal states that the husband proposed for Marˇenka must be ‘the son of Tobias Micha’. Jenik agrees to give up Marˇenka in return for a lump sum of money and on condition that she does indeed marry ‘the son of Tobias Micha’ and that Krusina’s debt is written off. The villagers are shocked and disgusted by his behaviour, believing that he cannot still love Marˇenka. Vasek is still worried about the woman who his parents want him to marry but he is distracted by the arrival of a travelling circus troupe, especially their star performer, Esmeralda. The circus manager is furious because the actor who normally dresses up as a dancing bear is too drunk to perform. He and Esmeralda persuade Vasek to take his place.
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The Synopsis continued Kecal brings Micha and his wife Háta to make the final arrangements for the marriage between Vasek and Marˇenka. They are outraged and shocked when Vasek, refuses to get married. When Marˇenka and her parents arrive, she discovers that Jenik has backed out of marrying her. She swears that this can’t be true. When the villagers turn up to find out what’s going on, Jenik announces to everyone that he is, in fact, the elder son of Tobias Micha, who has been away in the army for many years. He now claims Marˇenka as his bride, under the strict terms of the contract. Reconciled with his son, Micha gives his blessing to the marriage of Marˇenka and Jenik.
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TALKING TO THE DIRECTOR DANIEL SLATER Q: What happens when you’re asked to direct an opera? Does someone from the opera company just ring you up and ask if you’re interested? A: There are lots of different ways in which it can happen but being asked to direct The Bartered Bride was a bit unusual. It was also a very long time ago now – way back in 1998! It’s not something I’ve ever done since but I happened to hear that Opera North were planning to perform The Bartered Bride and it was an opera that I really wanted to direct so I pretty much pitched for it. I wrote to Christine Chibnall, who’s the head of planning and who makes many of the artistic decisions, and sent her an essay, outlining my thoughts about the piece and my ideas for a production. And, fortunately for me, I got the job. Q: There are some basic decisions to be made about performing an opera. For example, deciding whether it should be sung in the original language or in an English translation. A: Yes. You’d have a discussion with the conductor and with the opera company about that. In this case, I never thought that it would be appropriate to perform it in Czech because it struck me that, although it’s a very touching, moving piece in many ways, essentially it has to work on a comic level. And if you’re going to do a comedy, it really does have to be in the language of the audience. You want to be able to communicate very directly and really make use of the language. As it happens, like many Czechs at that time, Smetana [1824-1884] spoke German as his first language and was not at all fluent in Czech, so even the composer wasn’t completely familiar with the way the language should sound, and there are quite a few places in the music where he puts the stress on a word in the wrong place, which would make any Czech speaker wince.
Director – the person who is in charge of the creative direction of a production
‘And if you’re going to do a comedy, it really does have to be in the language of the audience.’
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TALKING TO THE DIRECTOR continued
Most translations of opera aim to be as faithful as they can be to the original. What can happen then is that the original words might clash with the way in which a director decides to stage an opera. For example, an opera text might refer to a character threatening someone with a knife, while the staging has been given a contemporary slant so, in the performance, that character is actually seen with a gun. If the opera is in Italian and refers to a knife when the audience sees a gun, then you just have to live with that. If you translate the opera into English then, within reason, you can make the changes you need so that words and action match each other. Of course you still have to respect the original story and the music. Q: Who does a director collaborate with to put an opera production together? A: The director assembles a team to work with: a designer (sometimes two – a set designer and a costume designer), a lighting designer and often a choreographer or movement director. And directors often have an assistant as well, to take notes, share ideas, and keep things ticking along. I was still in my 20s when I was asked to direct The Bartered Bride and pretty cheeky so, when Opera North suggested that I should go to Prague to meet the conductor, Oliver von Dohnanyi, I said that I should not only go to Prague but that I should make it a research trip, take my designer, Robert Innes Hopkins, hire a car and go travelling around for a week. Amazingly, they agreed!
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TALKING TO THE DIRECTOR continued
Q: Do you have to do a lot of background research and preparation? A: The first thing I do is get hold of the score of the opera and then I read it through while listening to a recording. I’ll probably listen to about three recordings, with different singers, orchestras and conductors, before deciding which one I like best. Then I’ll listen to it until I’m really familiar with the music and the text. With this production I’d already come up with an idea so I proposed that to the designer I wanted to work with, Robert Innes Hopkins, and – luckily – he liked it immediately. Since The Bartered Bride we’ve worked together on around 15 operas and nowadays we might take longer discussing options before deciding what we want to do. Q: What made you decide to present the story in the way that you do in this particular production?
‘The opera has plenty of humour but it’s important to take it seriously and to have a genuine understanding of the characters’ predicaments.’
A: A lot of people have staged The Bartered Bride in what I think of as a very ‘folksy’ way, and I absolutely did not want to do that. If all the characters are wearing multi-coloured, embroidered costumes with funny hats, I think it’s impossible to see them as real people. The opera has plenty of humour but it’s important to take it seriously and to have a genuine understanding of the characters’ predicaments. I knew a certain amount about Czech history – how it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then came under the control of the Nazis – and I thought that the period that was most fresh in people’s memories was when Soviet tanks rolled into the country in 1968 and the whole place came under communist rule. That timeframe felt instinctively right to me and it made a lot of sense in particular for the character of Kecal, who could be a minor communist official coming into this small village where the action is set and ruling the roost, keeping control by giving the impression that he has a file on everybody. There are lots of references to documents and contracts in the opera so I had an image in my head of official records and how they can be used to make people uneasy. And Robert loved that period of the late 1960s/early 1970s from a design point of view, with people wearing shabby, mismatched clothes, whatever they could lay their hands on.
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TALKING TO THE DIRECTOR continued
Once you start researching, one thing tends to lead to another. I think I must have read almost every Czech novel written during that period – Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal – and I also watched a lot of Czech films. Czech friends recommended the work of the director Jiri Menzel and they were absolutely right. His film Capricious Summer had exactly the feel and atmosphere I wanted to capture. My way of coming up with ideas for staging is always narrative- and character-driven. With The Bartered Bride I started from the image of these two characters, Marˇenka and Jenik, a pair of lovers united against the rest of the world, trying to cling on to what they have together in the face of various forces pulling them apart. That seemed to me to be the emotional core of the piece. The other key role for me was Kecal. The music that accompanies his first appearance is the music of pomposity and someone taking themselves far too seriously but as I listened to it, I thought that it could also be the music of someone who is genuinely powerful – a big fish in a small place. He is the main opposing force to those two coming together so once I had that trio of characters clear in my head, the whole story could unfold and develop from that point.
‘My way of coming up with ideas for staging is always narrative- and character-driven.’
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TALKING TO THE CONDUCTOR ANTHONY KRAUS Q: What makes this opera appealing and a good musical challenge for performers; both singers and players? A: It’s got enormous energy – a lot of the music is based on dance rhythms and it whizzes along at quite a pace. There are great characters and great tunes, and from very early on you can sort out the goodies from the baddies and identify the characters you really want to root for. You can see the plot unfolding and you can tell how it’s probably going to end but that won’t stop you wanting to live through the journey and go along for the ride. The music grabs you from the opening bars of the overture. It’s very fast and very difficult to play, and to my mind it’s one of the best opera overtures ever written. Q: What is the role of an overture for an opera? A: In the 19th century, when this was written, the overture was a curtain raiser, something to get you in the mood for the performance that’s going to follow. Sometimes a composer will concoct a selection of themes or ‘top ten’ tunes, from the opera and at other times, as with The Bartered Bride, it’s a complete and independent piece of music that can stand as a concert piece in its own right. It sets the tone and conjures up the spirit of the opera. When you hear it, you know you’re in for a high-octane evening. Q: You mentioned dance rhythms earlier – how are they used in the opera? A: Smetana composed three specific dances for the opera: a polka, a very fast dance called a furiant, and a galop, which is known as the Dance of the Comedians. In addition to that, there are dance rhythms in many other parts of the opera. In Act Three, when the hero and heroine, Marˇenka and Jenik, have an argument, the music feels like a Hungarian dance called a czárdás, which starts slow and gets faster and faster.
Conductor – the person who directs the performance of the orchestra and the musical performance of the singers Overture – an orchestra piece at the beginning of an opera Polka – a lively dance of Bohemian origin, with music in duple meter (i.e. music in with the time signature 2/4) Furiant - a rapid and fiery Bohemian dance in 2/4 and 3/4 time signatures with frequently shifting accents Galop – a lively round dance from the 19th century in fast duple time Act – the main division of an opera i.e. Act I, Act II etc. Czárdás (or csárdás) – a traditional Hungarian folk dance with a name derived from csárda (an old Hungarian word for tavern)
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TALKING TO THE CONDUCTOR continued
Q: How do you prepare to conduct an opera? A: You start with the music – I work my way through the orchestral score, which is a very large book – in fact this one comes in two volumes! – in which all the orchestral detail is written out, the music for every single instrument and all the different voice types laid out clearly. I read up about the history of the opera, how it came to be written and the context of the time when it was first performed. Not everyone does this but I listen to recordings to hear how other conductors approach the music. Then I make my own mind up about what I want to achieve, and make a lot of notes, going through the score, highlighting vocal lines in one colour, chorus lines in another. I’ll have a clear idea of how I’d like the music to go but it’s very important to be open and flexible, so that it’s possible to discover things during rehearsals. There should be a lot of give and take so that singers can express their own ideas musically. I’d never just turn up and say ‘Right, this is the way it’s going to go.’
Voice Types – the common categories into which soloists’ voices fall dependant on their vocal pitch range (how high or low they can sing) Score – a book of musical notation showing all of the music of the opera, including the instrumental parts, chorus and vocal soloists Chorus – a group of singers who sing together in the opera Orchestra – The group of instruments (strings, woodwind, brass, percussion) that play the musical accompaniment in an opera Conductor – the person who directs the performance of the orchestra and the musical performance of the singers Sitzprobe - a German term used in opera and musical theatre to describe a seated rehearsal where the singers sing with the orchestra, focusing attention on integrating the two groups
Q: How do you rehearse an opera? Do you work with all the singers and the orchestra at the same time? A: It gets broken down into chunks. You start in a rehearsal studio with singers and a piano, and you progress to the point where you rehearse on stage, with sets and costumes, and – eventually – the full orchestra. The conductor has some rehearsals with the orchestra alone and then there’s what’s known as a Sitzprobe, the German word for a sitting rehearsal, when the performers sing their way through the whole opera with the orchestra for the first time, without any stage business or production. After that, there are stage and piano rehearsals, when the director’s in charge, and stage and orchestra rehearsals, when the conductor’s in charge. Finally there’s the dress rehearsal, which is as close to a finished performance as possible.
‘I listen to recordings to hear how other conductors approach the music.’
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TALKING TO THE CONDUCTOR continued
Q: Do you need to find very varied types of singers for all the different characters? A: The two half brothers, Jenik are Vasek, are both tenors but the quality of voice needs to be different in each case. Jenik needs a big, strong, heroic sound and Vasek is a lighter, more lyric tenor. Marˇenka is a role for a young woman but the music is written for a singer with the sort of vocal maturity that younger people don’t always have, so that’s a challenge. Then there’s Kecal, who’s a bass. In opera, basses are usually fathers, comics or villains – sometimes a combination of all three. And there’s some great music for the chorus to sing as well, including a big number right at the beginning. Q: And what about energy and stamina? The singers and players all get a rest every now and again but the conductor has to keep going. Is that very tiring? A: You forget about the physical challenge in the heat of the moment – conductors tend to live a long time, often conducting well into their eighties. It must be good for their hearts!
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SMETANA’S BOHEMIA
Gavin Plumley – Writer and Musicologist Sketch of Bredrich Smetana
parliament and officially unable to express themselves in their own tongue – German was the Empire’s official language – the Czechs began to wonder if they’d ever make their voices heard. The situation in Bohemia and the neighbouring state of Moravia during the 19th century was not dissimilar to the scenes we have seen unfolding recently in Ukraine and parts of the Middle East. People desperately wanted the right to act democratically, to form groups and, most importantly, to think of themselves as a nation. Denied these powers, the Czechs, like many others in the Habsburg Empire, revolted during the 1840s. The Emperor Franz Josef, an essentially good man but resistant to change, responded by abolishing forced labour, however simultaneously introduced an absolute monarchy. As agricultural workers began to move into town to find work, they brought the Czech language with them and Prague in particular, previously dominated by German speakers, began to change. Even Bedrˇich Smetana, the great musical hope of the Czech nation, had been raised speaking German. Now, surrounded by countrymen and women speaking Czech, he quickly began to learn his supposed mother tongue.
Look beyond the bow-ties, the gilded prosceniums and the velvet curtains and you’ll soon see that opera isn’t all about pomp and circumstance. It certainly wasn’t in Prague on 30 May 1866 at the first performance of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. Rather than just providing mere entertainment, this opera was one of the most vital works of the Czech National Revival. 150 years ago, Smetana’s Bohemia was part of the Habsburg Empire, governed from Vienna. The Habsburgs had controlled the Czech-speaking world since the early 16th century; by the middle of the 19th century, tensions were running high. Lacking their own
For Smetana and many others like him, language became a vital part of creativity and the bid for freedom. As the Habsburgs failed to crush rebellions in the various corners of their Empire, they were forced to take a more lenient approach to cultural and linguistic matters. Czech newspapers started to appear in print and a Provisional Theatre was built on the banks of the River Vltava in Prague. It opened in 1864 with a Czech play as well as a translation of a French opera, but the savvy, linguistically independent Czechs now needed operas of their own. That was where the enterprising Smetana came in.
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SMETANA’S BOHEMIA continued
Smetana wrote his first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, in response to a competition for new pieces for the Provisional Theatre. Nobody responded at first, but after the deadline was extended there were four entries and Smetana’s was deemed the winner. The competition terms and conditions had asked for an opera about ‘the history of the Czech crownlands’ and Smetana’s piece features events in Bohemia during the 13th century. Hugely popular at its premiere on 5 January 1866, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia might now seem a little heavy handed with its marauding Brandenburgers clearly representing the oppressive Habsburgs.
The performance was significant not only for the Czech people but also because it marked the state visit of Crown Prince Rudolf to Prague shortly after his (ultimately disastrous) marriage to Princess Stephanie of Belgium. Although the Habsburg heir’s mind was undoubtedly on other matters he was a largely sympathetic figure and could not have failed to appreciate the opera’s powerful expression of Czech nationalism; as Libuše, the fabled founder of Prague, predicts a glorious future for her homeland. Nor could he have missed the slogan emblazoned over the top of the proscenium arch: ‘Národ sobrˇ’ (the nation to itself).
For his next opera, Smetana decided to sweeten the pill with a bit of humour, and so, rather than showing the defiant locals as they had been 600 years ago, he put present-day Czechs on stage. Five months later The Bartered Bride opened at the Provisional Theatre. At first, people in Prague didn’t take to the new jokey romp – nationalism, after all, is a serious business – but Smetana continued to tinker with the opera and he released the final version in 1870. This revised version, with a handful of exciting national dances, began to win over audiences and other young composers alike; as among them was Dvorˇák, who played the viola in the Provisional Theatre orchestra.
The Bartered Bride continued to spread Smetana’s name and the language and rhythms of Czech life far and wide, however the opera’s happy-go-lucky story of mistaken identity, marriage and a visiting circus has a more serious vein, not least when the ‘bartered’ bride herself decides to speak out. Appalled by her fiancée’s apparent disloyalty, our heroine Marˇenka delivers an aria in the third act of great punch and pathos. While any wrongs are ultimately righted and the shrewd Jeník proves to be Marˇenka’s rightful spouse, her confession really makes a mark. Dazzled though we may be by Smetana’s dances and circus antics, The Bartered Bride has a serious message about making your point of view heard and song, as Smetana well knew, always impresses more than speech.
While the Czechs had been unable to speak up in the political arena, they were making considerable strides on the cultural front. Choirs and choral societies flourished, the number of Czech books, plays and operas increased and, most impressively, money was raised for a grand new National Theatre to replace the original ‘provisional’ building. It finally opened in 1881 and it was Smetana, now Czech nationalism’s chief composer, who provided a new opera called Libuše for its inauguration.
In the context of Czech history, Marˇenka shows the pluck and spirit that a flourishing nation needs, however it wouldn’t be until 1918 and the break-up of the AustroHungarian Empire (after World War I) that the freedoms the Czechs sought were finally granted. Czechoslovakia was formed and, until Hitler’s troops seized control in 1938, the Czechs enjoyed independence for the first time in hundreds of years.
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SMETANA’S BOHEMIA
Provisional Theatre
continued
After the Nazis were finally defeated, Russian troops promptly poured over the border and the fight to be Czech began again; this reached a violent peak in 1968 with the Prague Spring (when Opera North’s production of The Bartered Bride is set). With the Velvet Revolution and the end of communist rule in 1989, independence was once more theirs.
Whilst many of us watching The Bartered Bride will not have experienced these hardships first hand – or even second hand, through the TV and radio – we can draw an important message from Smetana’s opera and the time in which it was written. Everyone has the right to express themselves, whether their needs are personal, political or cultural. Marˇenka makes her voice heard and provides an example to us all, extending her message far beyond the borders of the country that Smetana and his fellow Czechs dared to imagine.
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PRETTIFIED FOLKSINESS
Martin Pickard – Head of Music at Opera North I used to think that The Bartered Bride wasn’t my kind of opera. The most famous numbers – the overture and the orchestral dances – were terrific, but they felt as if they belonged in the concert hall rather than the theatre. The first productions I saw were full of a kind of prettified folksiness which actually did the piece no favours. The opera came across like a series of tableaux from a Czech folklore festival. It didn’t feel like a drama about living, breathing people.
suggest something historical and deeply-rooted. They suggest that some things never change, that this is a story whose essentials could have been played out here in any era: love and money will always be driving forces, parents will always (with the best of motives) try to steer their children in unwanted directions, lovers will always be plagued by doubts about their beloveds, and the results can be comic, tragic or a combination of the two.
But then I was lucky enough to work on two productions, at Opera North and Glyndebourne, which saw beyond the prettiness of the music and brought out the touching, funny, mischievous and dark story at the opera’s core. They showed the main characters as real people, not just cardboard cut-outs in traditional costume. I realised that these characters, like all of us, were capable of both good and bad actions. Even Marˇenka and Jenik, the heroine and hero of the piece, were no angels. Marˇenka cynically deceives the naïve Vasek when it suits her purposes. Later in the opera Jenik, piqued by Marˇenka’s initial refusal to listen, deliberately delays telling her the truth which would put her out of her agonies of doubt.
So the folk-based music gives the piece a unique charm. It also lends the story a kind of universality. But it is the other music, the music of drama and emotion, that makes this piece truly operatic and truly great. Smetana has an uncanny ability to track the passions of his characters, often with deceptively simple musical gestures. The little meandering tune on two clarinets which accompanies Marˇenka and Jenik’s first duet returns later to remind us of their love, even when this love appears to be threatened. On paper this tune consists of nothing much at all – there are very few instruments and very few notes – but in my experience it continues to haunt the listener long after the curtain has fallen.
For me the music reflects this rounded nature of the characters. It has an extraordinary range of colours and textures. There are two main musical strands in the score: the consciously Czech elements, in particular the furiant and polka dance rhythms (which the world grew to love even more in Dvorˇák’s Slavonic Dances) and the dramatic music, which delineates the individual characters and tells their particular story. The Czech ‘folk’ elements serve two main functions: they place the story of Marˇenka and Jenik in a particular Bohemian landscape, but they simultaneously
Glossary Furiant - a rapid and fiery Bohemian dance in 2/4 and 3/4 time signatures with frequently shifting accents Polka – a lively dance of Bohemian origin, with music in duple meter (i.e. music in with the time signature 2/4) Dvorˇák – Antonin Dvorˇák (1841 – 1904) was a Czech composer of Romantic music, following the Nationalist example of Smetana. Dvorˇák’s most well-known work is his Symphony No.9, ‘From the New World’
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PRETTIFIED FOLKSINESS continued
If I were forced to choose two of my favourite moments in the whole piece I would nominate two numbers in Act Two. In the sextet ‘Think it over, Marˇenka’ both pairs of parents and the marriage broker Kecal try to persuade Marˇenka to marry Vasek. It is five against one, and we, the audience, are on Marˇenka’s side as she faces the concerted pressure of the older generation. However even here the parents are not presented as caricatures – their music is beautiful, persuasive, anguished. When Marˇenka eventually responds after 50 bars of emotional blackmail, it is with a soaring, heart-rendingly beautiful phrase. I love this ensemble not only because of its underlying humanity but also because it does something that only opera can do: it can freeze a moment of time and use that to tell us six simultaneous personal stories. My other favourite number combines this kind of emotional truthtelling with the Czech folk elements which give the score such warmth and rootedness. It is the duet between Marˇenka and Jenik which follows not long after the sextet. Marˇenka is furious with Jenik. She believes that he has been persuaded by a cash bribe to sell his claim on her. She sings, ‘You lied and cheated, that is clear. I will not have you near me!’ and her spiky, leaping lines culminate in a blistering top C. Jenik meanwhile, who knows more of the truth than she does, tries to soothe her with a more friendly, lyrical line (‘I tell you, I’ll explain it all’), but she is having nothing of it – her music remains angry and uncomfortable to the end, like a series of jabs with a knife. The wonderful thing about the duet is not just Smetana’s brilliant characterisation but the way in which the whole number is wrapped up in the music of a polka. The foot-stamping rhythm of the traditional dance is transformed into the aggression of the quarrelling couple. Marˇenka and Jenik sing of their anger and frustration in the musical language of their Czech homeland. That is the alchemy which makes The Bartered Bride one of the great operas, one which will speak to audiences for many centuries to come.
Glossary Duet – a performance by two singers (or instrumentalists) Sextet – a group of six singers performing together Duet – a performance by two singers (or instrumentalists)
‘it does something that only opera can do: it can freeze a moment of time and use that to tell us six simultaneous personal stories.’
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Glossary of terms
Aria – a long accompanied song for solo voice
Orchestra – The group of instruments (strings, woodwind, brass, percussion) that play the musical accompaniment in an opera
Chorus – a group of singers who sing together in the opera
Overture – an orchestral piece at the beginning of an opera
Composer -– a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition. Literally ‘one who puts together’
Polka – a lively dance of Bohemian origin, with music in duple meter (i.e. music in with the time signature 2/4)
Conductor – the person who directs the performance of the orchestra and the musical performance of the singers
Score – a book of musical notation showing all of the music of the opera, including the instrumental parts, chorus and vocal soloists
Czárdás (or csárdás) – a traditional Hungarian folk dance with a name derived from csárda (an old Hungarian word for tavern)
Sextet – a group of six singers performing together
Act – the main division of an opera i.e. Act I, Act II etc.
Director – the person who is in charge of the creative direction of a production Duet – a performance by two singers (or instrumentalists) Dvorˇák – Antonin Dvorˇák (1841 – 1904) was a Czech composer of Romantic music, following the Nationalist example of Smetana. Dvorˇák’s most well-known work is his Symphony No.9, ‘From the New World’ Furiant – a rapid and fiery Bohemian dance in 2/4 and 3/4 time signatures with frequently shifting accents Galop – a lively round dance from the 19th century in fast duple time Hybrid – something made by combining two or more different elements Libretto – The text of the opera, like the script in a film or a play. Literally ‘little book’
Sitzprobe – a German term used in opera and musical theatre to describe a seated rehearsal where the singers sing with the orchestra, focusing attention on integrating the two groups Soloists – principal singers taking on the main roles in the opera that perform by themselves, or as part of small ensembles (groups) Voice Types – the common categories into which soloists’ voices fall dependant on their vocal pitch range (how high or low they can sing) Female voice types, from highest to lowest: - Soprano - Mezzo-soprano - Alto Male voice types from highest to lowest: - Counter-tenor - Tenor - Baritone - Bass Some operas use children’s voices as soloists or as a chorus. These are high pitched like sopranos, and are often called trebles.
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