ORPHEUS ’68
Set in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, during the “Prague Spring”, ORPHEUS ’68 portrays
an opera company preparing a production of a (fictitious) Baroque opera based on the
Orpheus myth. As the production develops, so does the political situation, and the
individuals involved face momentous choices in friendship, art,
politics and love. The director of the production, a Frenchman, has had an affair with
the leading soprano years earlier, and now as the tanks arrive he wants to rescue her
from the living hell of mounting repression.
Paul Schwartz’s music for this work is at times passionate and lyrical, at others fierce
and angular. It maintains a sense of theatricality, and an approach to writing for both
the voice and the orchestra that is at the same time contemporary, seductively
attractive and emotionally involving. Simon Crow’s libretto is taut, dramatic, and
emotionally and psychologically insightful.
Despite the fact that the opera has only six singing parts and a small
orchestra, it will feel like a much larger, more expansive work: one that will appeal to
both seasoned opera lovers and newcomers alike, and one that will deserve a lasting
place in the repertoire of 21st century music.
Operaen I Midten 2009
Flemming Vistisen
Opera director
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Paul Schwartz on Orpheus ‘68
When Flemming Vistisen and Pernille Elimar approached me about writing a new
opera for Musikdramatisk Teater they made one stipulation: it had to be based on the
Orpheus legend.
Throughout the history of opera, the story of Orpheus has been a mainstay of the
repertoire. In fact, the first two operas generally considered to have ever been written
were based on this myth: Jacopo Peri’s EURIDICE, and Claudio Monteverdi’s
ORFEO. The attraction is simple: it’s a story about the power of music, the power of
art in general to move people, or even Gods, it’s about love, destiny, death and
sorrow. How can a composer resist that?
In keeping with the self-referential aspect of the story (music representing the power
of music), we decided to set our piece within the framework of a group of singers and
artists who have come together to rehearse and perform a fictitious 18th century opera
called ORFEUS. The lives of these singers and artists also mimic the myth: someone
loses their love, and tries to win her back from the forces of darkness.
In my lifetime, the nearest thing (geographically) to a hell that a person could not
escape from was Eastern Europe under the Soviets. I visited Czechoslovakia and
Hungary as a young man, and worked with Bulgarian musicians at conservatory in
Italy. The countries were grey and drab, the people desperately poor, and terrified of
saying anything out of line.
Our “Euridice”, Katarina, tried once to escape the clutches of the secret police with
Olivier, our “Orpheus”, but was stopped by an informer. Now, a decade later, in the
tumultuous year of 1968, when during the so-called Prague Spring there was a
momentary lifting of the Soviet fist, Olivier has come to Czechoslovakia to direct
ORFEUS. However his real motives are different: he wants to reconnect with
Katarina, and finally rescue her from this grey place and bring her out into the
sunshine of the West.
A great deal is at stake for these characters, their emotions are so large and so raw.
For me that means that there is a great deal to sing about: a reason for characters to
raise their voices and let fly. Additionally, having the “other” Orpheus opera built into
the story gives me the chance to refer to an earlier, more graceful musical period, and
to weave musical themes in a complex and interesting way. Just as the stories
comment on each other, the two musical styles create contrast and richness.
All in all, it’s a composer’s dream.
Paul Schwartz
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Simon Crow on Orpheus ‘68
Why Orpheus and Eurydice? Why Czechoslovakia, 1968? Why opera?
To take the last first – for generations who have grown up with the instant emotional
hit of the 2’30” pop song, the TV commercial, the (purported) realism of TV and
cinema, how on earth can an art-form of great length, complexity and preposterous
artificiality possibly have anything to say to us now?
In fact, we have reached a point where there need be no more ideological struggle
between ‘realism’ and more overtly artificial forms. Media-literate generations
understand that the realism of cinema or television is just as artificial a construction as
ballet or opera, that it depends just as much on conventions every bit as contrived as
the da capo aria or proscenium arch. In fact opera imposes fewer demands on our
credulity, because it does not even try to masquerade as a representation of life. It
pretends to be only what it is: an evocation through sound, words, image, and
movement of moments of heightened intensity, moments when we are happily,
tragically, furiously, melancholically, comically, hatefully, lovingly, but always most
fully, alive. And length and difficulty are virtues which we can learn to enjoy, if only
we are seduced and gratified along the way.
Why Orpheus and Eurydice? I am not a musician, and I did not grow up knowing any
musicians. But the music I grew up on - David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols
and the Revillos, the classical symphonies, the usual diet – entered my bloodstream,
provided some of my most intense experiences and the soundtrack to others, and
affected how I experienced life. I think that is true for most people. Then as a
teenager I was taken on a first date to see Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden. There
was no second date, but I did fall in love. Soon afterwards I heard Wozzek on a tiny
transistor radio, and I fell into an addiction. To write a version of the Orpheus story is
to have the chance to write a love letter to music, and especially to singing.
Yes, the myth is attractive because it is about love lost, and about music; but it has
always seemed to me more interesting than the traditional treatment allows. First,
Orpheus uses art to defy reality – the death of his beloved – and then to change it. He
almost succeeds, but at the crucial moment he turns back too soon, and loses her.
What was really going on in his heart that he could do that? And Eurydice: surely she
wanted to return (didn’t she?) – and yet, did she do (or not do) something to make
him so fatally desperate? It is, in part, a story of how love turns out differently from
how we hoped, and how this happens partly because of our own unacknowledged
motives.
The stories of Orpheus are also about the heroic power of song. Again, there may be
more here than we think. The beauty of Orpheus’s art is described in terms of what it
makes others do. People, the natural world, are reduced to submission by his song.
He can even persuade the gods to bend the rules of life and death. Art aims always to
affect us, to alter our thoughts, feelings, perceptions of the world. But where does
gratification end and manipulation, even coercion, begin? Should art intervene to
make people better, to make society and the world better, according to the artist’s
criteria? If not (as Orpheus must have asked himself once he had lost Eurydice a
second time), then what on earth is it for?
But why Czechoslovakia, ’68? Because this was a moment when a mass of
individuals were confronted with urgent unrelenting choices: between expediency,
self-interest, even self preservation on the one hand, and something far less concrete,
less well defined, more dangerous, disastrous even, but somehow fatally appealing: to
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try live and work conscientiously and authentically under a system designed to make
this impossible. The choice was particularly harsh for artists and intellectuals, anyone
whose trade involved the integrity of personal perceptions and creative decisions,
respect for the individual conscience, and the truth. Faced with the same choices,
which of us, now, would risk losing everything for an ideal?
As a non-musician for whom music is as vital for survival as water, I always believed
that one day composers would come along who would manage to crawl out from
under the stifling blanket of academic modernism – composers for whom the
language of the Second Viennese School and its intellectual heirs would be not an
ideology, but just a part of their vocabulary – composers who would have grown up
listening to rock, to jazz, to twelve-tone rows, to minimalism, to show tunes, to
Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and to African, Cuban, or Chinese music with the same
unselfconscious enjoyment as I do – and that these composers would be able to write
music which speaks – creates – a musical language rich enough to reflect the world as
we hear it, and not just to reproduce dutifully what they see lying on a desk in the
academy. Paul Schwartz is such a composer. To be asked to collaborate with him on
an opera is the consummation of the love affair that began at Covent Garden and in
front of that crackly little radio all those years ago.
Simon Crow
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Curriculum Vitae
Paul Schwartz - Composer
The American-born Paul Schwartz was raised in London and received his
musical education at the Royal College of Music there, where his
principal studies were conducting with Norman Del Mar, and
composition with John Lambert. Upon completing his degree, he
graduated first in a class of 140 students.
In 1988 Mr. Schwartz was invited by Peter Martins to supervise New
York City Ballet’s American Music Festival. Additionally, he composed
two commissioned scores for the company. Other ballet commissions
include scores for Milwaukee Ballet, Ohio Ballet, Nederlands Dance
Theater, and the Lucinda Childs Dance Company. Mr. Schwartz’s theatre piece Summer won a
major award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been presented twice in
New York and once in the UK. He has written music for several plays, most recently the
critically acclaimed Southern Comforts which opened in New York in 2007. He has also very
selectively composed film scores, including the documentary Les enfants Jouent a la Russie
for director Jean Luc Godard.
Mr.Schwartz has been commissioned by the Milwaukee Symphony, the Arden Trio, the Brass
Trio of New York, as well as other ensembles in the United States. Additional prizes and awards
include the Adrian Boult Conducting Scholarship, composition awards from the New York
Foundation for the Arts (twice), and composition prizes at the Academmia Musicale Chigiana in
Siena and Hans Werner Henze’s Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte in Montepulciano.
Recent compositions include two sets of songs: Cummings Love Songs, and Glimpses of
Sappho. This latter piece was recorded and released in 2007, and will have its concert premiere
in Copenhagen in 2009. Other new pieces completed in 2008 include both a string quartet and a
string trio.
His future activities include the composition of a new chamber opera commissioned by
Musikdramatisk Teater in Holstebro, Denmark. The new piece will be a deconstruction of the
Orpheus myth and is set to premiere in the autumn of 2011. In addition he has been asked to
write a new piece for the ensemble miXte. Other plans include the composition of a double-cello
quintet for the 2009 Langvad Chamber Music Jamboree, a set of songs for soprano and small
orchestra based on Inger Christensen’s five-part poem LYS, and the development of a new
theatre piece based on the life of the painter Egon Schiele.
As a conductor Mr. Schwartz has served as first assistant conductor and assistant chorus master
with the Washington Opera. He was the William Steinberg Fellow of the Pittsburgh Symphony,
where he served as Andre Previn’s assistant, and as conductor and coordinator of their
contemporary music programme. He has conducted for New York City Ballet, Ballet Rambert
in the UK and various opera and music festivals in his home state New York as well as
elsewhere in the US. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1991 leading the gala event for the
Museum of the City of New York.
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Simon Crow – Libretto
Simon Crow (b. 1956) was a prize-winner in a national poetry competition
while still at school. He lived for some time in Japan where he translated
contemporary plays and short stories from Japanese. He has worked as a
diplomat (dealing with the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe), and later
as a producer, director, writer and presenter of radio and TV
documentaries, on a wide range of subjects including music history. He
has collaborated as lyricist with composer Paul Schwartz on numerous
songs. He is working on a series of novels due to be published from next
year.
Daniel Bohr – Stage director
Daniel Bohr is the first-born son of the legendary actor, singer, composer,
film and TV producer José Bohr and of his wife Bertita, a professional
musician and sociologist. Daniel was born i Buenos Aires (Argentina) and
spent his childhood and younger years in Chile, where he completed his
education, studying languages, music and architecture. He speaks perfect
spanish, english, italian, french, danish and norwegian, and manages in
german and portuguese.
Daniel Bohr started his theatrical activities in Chile, in the 60’s being the first one to present
authors like Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and Samuel Becket, also becoming one of the
pioneers of chilean TV, creating and producing programmes for Channel 13 in Santiago. Daniel
Bohr moved to Spain with his family in 1964, and thus began a stay in Europe which has now
lasted for more than 40 years. Here he founded and directed El Nuevo Teatro Experimental,
introducing authors like Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Silvio Giovaninetti, Jean Tardieu, JeanClarence Lambert, René de Obaldia, Rubén Dario, Pablo Picasso and many others for the
spanish audiences.
Daniel Bohr was awarded the Prize to Best Director at the Festival Internacional de Teatro
de Barcelona in 1967 and the Theatre Prize “Yorick" the year after, being also acclaimed by the
critics for his theatre productions and for his work for Television. He was appointed director of
the Compañía Nacional Moratín, he directed a series of short films and he produced
programmes for Radio Nacional de España and TVE, also being responsible for national tours
over all of Spain with his theatrical productions.
Daniel Bohr established himself in Denmark in 1972, and his work during these past years
includes dramas, comedies, classic tragedies, operas, operettas, musicals, productions for Radio
and TV, as well as experimental theatre. He was a resident director at The Royal Theatre in
Copenhague, The Artistic Director of Den Jyske Opera (National Danish Opera), the General
Manager and Artistic Director of the Aalborg Theater and has directed big productions for
almost every theatre in the country. Some of his most interesting productions having been the
operas: "Faust" by Gounod, "La Traviata" by Verdi, "Cavalleria Rusticana" by Mascagni,
"Pagliacci" by Leoncavallo, "Le Nozze di Figaro" by Mozart, "The Holy Communion" by
Arrabal/Werner, “Eight Songs for a Mad King” by Maxwell Davies, "Blue Beard’s Castle" by
Bartok, and eight different versions of "Cosi Fan Tutte" by Mozart.
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In 1985 Daniel Bohr was appointed Managing Artistic Director of The Bergen International
Festival in Norway. Here he worked with some of the major figures in the international music
of our time: Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Birgit Nilsson, Teresa Berganza, Sherrill Milnes, Christa
Ludwig, Gundula Janowitz, Katia Riciarelli, Simon Estes, Aldo Ceccato, Miriam Makeba,
Lucia Popp, Alicia de la Rocha, Rafael Frübeck de Burgos, Sixten Ehrling, Leif Ove Andsnæs
and Paavo Berglund, among many others.
The activities of Daniel Bohr in Europa, appart from his long lasting relationship with The
Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, include productions for L’ Ópera de Marseille ("Der
Rosenkavalier" by R. Strauss), for Sadler's Wells in London ("The Garden Wall" by Nørholm),
for Le Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris ("Bris/Collage/K" by Lambert), for the Opera in
Gothenburg ("Werther" by Massenet), for the Grieghallen in Bergen ("Don Carlos", "Il
Trovatore", “La Traviata” and "Aida" by Verdi and "Eugen Onegin" by Tchaikowsky), for the
Norske Teater in Oslo (the musicals "The Wizard of Oz" and “Musical Musikal”, and the
dramma "Master Class" by Terrence McNally), for The National Opera in Warsaw ("Rigoletto"
by Verdi and New Year’s Galla 1995), for Vest Norges Opera (“La Cenerentola” and “Il
Barbiere di Seviglia” by Rossini , “Cosi Fan Tutte” by Mozart), “La Traviata” by Verdi at the
Grieghallen in Bergen, “Some Sunny Night” in The Great Hall of the People, in Bejing and
Theatre du Residence Palace in Brussels, as well as lectures and Master Classes in Sweden,
Norway, Holland, Italy, the USA and Latin America.
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