EIt seems as if the Prague State Opera has found its household god again. His name is Alexander Zemlinsky, he ran the house for sixteen years, from 1911 to 1927, and in the process shaped an era that, in retrospect, has legendary features: not because of his own works that he brought to the stage there, in what was then the New German Theater but less so through the contemporary music he performed in Prague: works by Franz Schreker, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, who was his brother-in-law (and admirer). Anyone who lived in Prague at the time and went to Zemlinsky's opera house was extremely well informed about new directions in music. Hans Wilhelm Steinberg, who later made his career in America as William Steinberg, and George Szell, who also fled the National Socialists to the USA, continued Zemlinsky's legacy after he moved to the Berlin Kroll Opera.
The memory of that time has almost been lost. It would have been a late triumph for the National Socialists, who, after the occupation of the Czech Republic, disbanded the house's orchestra (the musicians later formed the basis for the newly founded Bamberg Symphony) and allowed the theater to degenerate into an event space for guest performances. This meant that one of the centers of Jewish cultural life in Prague was shut down. It was the German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie who initiated and financed the construction of the theater – it opened in 1888 – as a direct response to the establishment of the Czech National Theater. Under communist rule, the clear-cutting became a memory gap after reservations were now cultivated not only against Jewish but also against German. Soon hardly anyone spoke or knew about the Zemlinsky era; next to the magnificent National Theater, the State Opera led an existence as a wallflower.
Young audience, enthusiastic applause
When the Norwegian Per Boye Hansen took over as director of the Prague music theater in 2019 – in addition to the National Theater and the State Opera, this also includes the Estates Theater, where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's “Don Giovanni” was premiered – he first had to search for an identity house. And ended up at Zemlinsky's time. Connections in German politics helped finance a project that was intended to bring back awareness of the important period of the New German Theater. “Musica non grata” – unwanted music – was the title for the planned duration of four years (it ended up being five because of the pandemic), and the federal government contributed four million euros.
The project has now come to a conclusion with a festival weekend that focused on Zemlinsky's work. Jetske Mijnssen's fine production of “Clothes Make the Man” was shown once again, the rare case in which a composer managed to put understandable irony into sound. The hall was heavily attended at the midday performance on Sundays at 2 p.m., the audience was young and the applause was enthusiastic. Things were different three years ago, when there was a Zemlinsky festival at “Musica non grata” and the then general music director of the State Opera, Karl-Heinz Steffens, conducted orchestral works by the Viennese native in front of a moderately large audience. The memory of the cultural life of the interwar period seems to have entered the consciousness of those interested in culture in Prague, says Tomáš Kraus, who, as the now former president of Prague's Jewish community, actively supported the project. There is also a renewed interest in the Jewish community in the State Opera, which, as the New German Theater, has played such an important role in Jewish cultural life.
In any case, Boye Hansen, the artistic director, will continue to put an opera by an ostracized composer of that time on the program every year (one of the great achievements of “Musica non grata” was the rediscovery of Erwin Schulhoff’s wildly fantastic opera “Flammen”), brought to the stage by Calixto Bieito). The research work associated with the project and which was coordinated by musicologist Kai Hinrich Müller will also be continued. He came across a large number of female composers in Prague during those years and also deepened his research into the composers in the Theresienstadt camp.
Waking the orchestra from its slumber
Aside from now familiar names such as Pavel Haas, Hans Krása or Viktor Ullmann, he and his students identified 430 musicians who were active in the cultural life of the camp. At local academies, students were able to study works created in Theresienstadt; after the end of the “Musica non grata” project, the Dresden Music Festival is now taking over as sponsor.
At the magnificently renovated State Opera – it reopened in 2020 – the task is now to awaken an orchestra from its Sleeping Beauty slumber. What achievements it is capable of can be seen in the concert performance of two one-act plays. Paul Hindemith's “Sancta Susanna”, a play about a nun who discovers her instinctual life, caused an enormous scandal when it was premiered in 1922. Zemlinsky put the sonically wondrous piece on the program in Prague, setting it apart from the late romantics using understated means – as one of the few who dared to do so. Now it is followed by Zemlinsky's “Florentine Tragedy”, a stirring triangle drama based on Oscar Wilde. The conductor Karsten Januschke ensures clarity and line with a committed performance, the gleaming brightness and deep blackness of this music emerge, and again and again a world of emotions flows out in orchestral splendor that seems so raw and uncalculated in Zemlinsky's work. Happy is he who has such a household god.
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