BEDŘICH SMETANA
THE BARTERED BRIDE
DIRK SCHMEDING (DIRECTOR), ROBERT SCHWEER (SETS) AND ALFRED MAYERHOFER (COSTUMES) TALK TO SERGIO MORABITO
“ON THE FENCE, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS” sm
The first question is to all of you. Was there a moment of tension, of curiosity, of uncertainty, perhaps even worry if a particular piece of staging would work? ds That applies generally to my approach to the piece, which I have a very personal history with. When I first set foot in an opera house, this the first piece I experienced, and I fell in love with it and the genre of music theatre along with it. And approaching directing a piece you love so much is a tricky business. Love can be very quickly disappointed, or it can set you on the wrong track if you think you already have all the answers, so that you don’t really look at the object of your love any more – in this case, that’s the piece. For me, the critical question is, can I manage it so that this totally positive feeling I have about this piece, the vitality it’s awakened in me since my first encounter with it – will this continue? sm What brought you to the opera back then? ds Simple curiosity. The desire to experience something previously unknown. That’s how it started.
rs Personally, I’ve only worked on The Bartered Bride once as a director, and that’s a while ago – it played in the classic fairground where festivals and weddings are held. It was very quickly clear to our team that we wanted to shake the piece loose from folklore to some degree. And we looked for the stories behind the folklore. We discovered fragile figures, a fragile society, and we tried to find images for this. The vulnerability of a village society like that can be found everywhere. In our rehearsals I can identify with the weaknesses of the individual characters. In the performances of The Bartered Bride I’ve attended or worked on before, this was completely covered by the folklore. ds The piece can become humdrum and remote very quickly if you put a traditional setting on the stage. But the characters are all extreme lone wolves – and perhaps this is in fact a very contemporary feature. Right to the end they fight for survival, acknowledgement, honour, for emancipation from the family. All of them for very different reasons. But they all fight with tooth
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“ON THE FENCE, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS”
and claw, mercilessly, and each of them is somehow isolated in this. rs And there really isn’t that much at stake: they simply want a touch of happiness, but there always seems to be so much in the way. I find this very touching. And all very universal. ds And this is why in our approach we’ve got rid of the everyday dimension of a rural village. rs We’ve chosen a hybrid image of development. It’s entertaining to see how things successively complete a particular atmosphere. And in fact I initially had some concerns about whether this approach would work. But so far it’s turned out well in rehearsals. am I was pleased to be asked, because this is a piece I didn’t know at all. I admire Dirk and his work, and so I took a leap of faith. And then I listened to the piece and immediately fell in love with the music. When I read the libretto, I felt very much at home. I come from a village myself, and the characters are very familiar. These are really villainous villagers, and each of them is fighting for themselves and bullying everyone else. It’s great that we can leave out the folklore and concentrate on the human beings with all their needs. ds Naturally, the decisive keyword is the annual fair. Things get wild in the village when they finally start pouring the beer and people start to let their hair down. Control goes out of the window, and they start raising hell. We meet the village in an unusual state, and the external sign of this is the annual fair, a group binge. The characters are also in emotional turmoil, and have to try not to lose their senses, or to recover them on this roller coaster. am And then there are the quiet moments again which give the characters
depth and let their vulnerability show through. sm You think in a village like that everybody should know everyone else. But at the same time the most incredible misunderstandings and disagreements emerge, within the characters and between them. The degree of social alienation, to put it dramatically, is extreme. There’s the landowner, and there’s the peasant fighting to survive on his plot of land. Money plays a major role. And we learn that Mařenka has already been bartered as a bride at the start of the piece, as her father wants to use her forced marriage to pay off his debts. ds These are the problem areas which Smetana develops. To do them justice, we must also be able to free ourselves to some degree from specific expectations or preconceptions. sm In every work there is always a moment when you feel, now I’ve got my foot in the door, or found a key which gives me access to the world of this piece. Did you have a moment like this? Sometimes it’s only a tiny detail that shows you the way. am I was totally hooked by Robert’s draft for the set. rs We realised that the piece is a nightmare for the bride. And then we decided to develop sequences which portray this nightmare aspect. This opened a door, aesthetic and structural, and we saw how the sequences follow each other. That was one point. The other was that Dirk had worked out relatively early on that he wanted to use the circus troupe, which is written
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ÉTIENNE BARILIER
THE RETURN OF MOZART TO PRAGUE When listening to The Bartered Bride, one is often reminded of Mozart. There is even a moment when you have the feeling you are listening to the very notes of Don Juan: it is in the third act, when the clumsy Vašek, summoned by his parents to explain why he refuses to marry Mařenka, stammers that a lovely girl had warned him about this vixen who would be unfaithful to him. This lovely girl is none other than Mařenka herself. The sweet, naive melody that characterises her here echoes each and every note (and in the same key, F major) that Zerlina sings to win over Masetto at the end of Don Juan’s first act. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it was in Prague, after all, that Mozart created Don Juan. There is no doubt that his shadow loomed large over Smetana. The Bartered Bride is also reminiscent of The Magic Flute, even more so than it is of Don Juan: the stammering Vašek can’t help but evoke Papageno’s delightful lallation. And his whole personality, with its dreams of childlike love, is a reincarnation of Mozart’s tender bird-catcher.
In his book on Smetana, Bohumil Karásek states that “never before The Bartered Bride and never again thereafter has anyone succeeded in reviving the Mozartian ideal of joy and gaiety in such an original way”. This is probably true. This is not to say, however, that Smetana simply pastiched Mozart. Almost a century later, it was a different world that a composer, influenced by Liszt, inspired by Wagner and Berlioz, and driven by a burning desire to invent a Czech national music, was living in to the one of the author of Don Juan. But having said that, perhaps what sets Smetana most apart from Mozart is not his wild romanticism or his exaggerated patriotism. It’s something much more subtle. We’ll come back to this later. For now, let’s take a look at what makes them alike. Both composers share the same love of life, the same tenderness for human beings, the same way of enveloping drama and misfortune in melodic grace. The same art of mixing light-heartedness and seriousness, of giving depth to
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THE RETURN OF MOZART TO PRAGUE
characters, and of making us love them: we laugh at them and cry with them. With them, we can walk alongside the abyss without ever sinking into it. But what abyss is that in The Bartered Bride? Not the one in Don Juan, that’s for sure. At first glance, Smetana’s opera is thoroughly cheerful and upbeat, far removed from tragedy or even drama. It all begins with an opening of Rossinian, almost frenzied alacrity, a far cry from the dramatic chords of Don Juan, or the solemn chords of the Flute. From the very first scene, the choir sings a song with a reassuring message: “Why not rejoice when God gives us good health?” The act ends with a cheerful cabaret polka, and the next act, set in the same cabaret, opens with a lively scene of jubilation. Nor does the song of the drinkers give any call for alarm: “Beer, my friends, is a divine gift from heaven.” And it is in the midst of the dancing that Jeník and the matchmaker Kecal fraternise and do business. As for the third act, it opens with a thunderous “actors’ march”, followed by a frenzied dance. The opera ends with these powerful words: “True love conquers all, the struggle is well and truly over, long live the wedding and happiness.” Yet don’t be fooled: the opera is not simply characterised by blanket euphoria. While it is true that, in the end, “true love conquers all”, this sentiment does experience more than a few ups and downs along the way. In many respects, the story of The Bartered Bride could be a tragic one and end very badly. Jeník’s scheme is either shockingly reckless or astonishingly cruel: without a second thought, he “sells” Mařenka, his love, to a stupid but wealthy suitor. Or so Mařenka thinks. In reality, the beneficiary of this shameful generosity,
“Micha’s son”, is not the simpleton Vašek, but his elder brother, Jeník himself. But strangely, the young man fails to explain the plan to his sweetheart, leading to him experiencing her hatred, the jeers of the villagers, and his father’s violent disapproval. To be perfectly honest, it must be said that some of the characters in the opera are far from being paragons of pure love and candid integrity: the matchmaker Kecal is a self-serving old cynic; Háta, Jeník’s stepmother, positively hates him. As for Vašek, he is a simpleton who will be duped by two women, Mařenka and the dancer Esmeralda. Persuaded to wear a bear skin, he will be subject of considerable ridicule as the opera approaches its climax. All this could be seen as quite harsh. There was certainly a need to add some spice to the plot: if Jeník had explained his plan to Mařenka, we would have been deprived of the bride’s songs of sorrow, not to mention the suspense. Is that to say that the supposed “bartering” of the bride is merely a plot device and so should not be taken seriously? No, it’s more complicated than that. If we did not believe in this story at all, nor in the feelings that drive the characters; if we did not suspect that Jeník, perhaps unconsciously, wanted to put his love to the test, the result would be an opera lacking wholly in psychological substance and human depth. If we did not fear, at the very moment when Mařenka believes she has been betrayed, that she might actually take her own life; if we did not believe in the reality of her pain, we would not believe in her ultimate happiness either. We wouldn’t believe anything. The entire opera would then be nothing more than
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