A Czech national opera – in a first critical edition
Antonín Dvorák
(1841-1904)
Vanda
Tragic Opera in five acts, op. 25
Text by Václav Benes-Sumavsky after Julian Surzycki
Edited for the first time from the original sources by Alan Houtchens and Jaroslav Holecek
SOLOISTS
|
Vanda, daughter of the deceased Polish Prince Krak............................ Bozena, her sister................................................................................. Slavoj, a knight of Cracow................................................................... Pagan high priest.................................................................................. Lumír, a bard of Cracow...................................................................... Homena, a sorceress............................................................................ Roderich, a German prince................................................................... Herold................................................................................................. |
soprano mezzo-soprano tenor bass baritone mezzo-soprano baritone tenor |
|
Velislav, Vserad and Vitomír (tribal chieftains)
Chorus: Lesser nobles, soldiers, elders of the Cracow nation, maidens from Vanda’s retinue, pagan priests, foreign knights Orchestra: 2 (picc), 2 (ca), 2, 2 - 4, 2, 3, 1 - perc - harp - strings Antonín Dvorák composed Vanda during the months of April through December 1875. It is the fifth of his eleven operas and shows real maturity and individuality of style, yet, for reasons not connected with the musical worth or dramatic viability of the opera, it has been performed fewer than twenty-five times since its première on Easter Monday, April 17, 1876. Rudolf Wirsing had chosen it to inaugurate his tenure as director of the Prozatímní divadlo (Provisional Theater), the home of the budding Czech National Theater troupe until a new building could be built. After only four more performances during the 1876/77 season, however, it was withdrawn from the repertoire. Under the next director, Jan Nepomuk Mayr,Vanda was given another four times in 1880, but in a drastically cut version. Like the first production, this one suffered from the fact that there were neither enough singers nor adequate facilities at Prozatímní divadlo or Nové ceské divadlo (New Czech Theater, another venue where the opera was performed once during each production run as summer fare) to stage it effectively. Plans to perform the opera in Vienna, in Budapest or in Prague seasons never were realized. During the remainder of this century, various attempts have been made to mount the opera on the stage in truncated versions, including at Plzen in 1925, at the National Theater in Prague in 1929, and in Olomouc in 1989. According to the title page of the printed libretto and reports in contemporary newspapers and journals, the text was prepared by Václav Benes-Sumavsky and Frantisek Zákrejs based on some kind of pre-existing material written by a Professor Julian Surzycki from Warsaw, whose real identity remains elusive. It seems extremely unlikely, in this case, that Dvorák would have chosen a text based on the work of a person completely unknown as a writer and unknown to him personally. The possibilities cannot be ruled out, therefore, that the original source for Vanda was authored by someone closer to him who wished to remain anonymous for some reason, and that the name Surzycki was appropriated as a ruse. Perhaps the reason was political; perhaps the original source was written in French or, more likely, German. In view of the political climate created by the Czech national revival movement during the 1870s, it would have been especially embarrassing for Dvorák if his compatriots learned that the libretto of Vanda had been based on something written in a language other than Czech or one of the other Slavic languages. The libretto is based on the legend of the Polish princess Vanda and deals with her struggle against the German prince Roderich and her suicide in the depths of the River Vistula in order to save her country. The librettists were at pains to obtain favourite motifs from the mythological text, especially the conflict between the pagan Slavs and Christianized Germans. Several motifs are also closely related to the Bohemian legends surrounding Princess Libuse: the conflict among the suitors for her hand, her choice of a man of lower birth as husband and ruler, and the transition from female to male rulership. The initial impetus leading to the preparation of the present edition came from the conductor Gerd Albrecht, who has unflaggingly maintained a determination to make this opera known to the general public in the same way as he has championed and recorded Dvorák operas Dimitrij and Armida in recent years. Productions of Vanda after those given in 1876/77 and 1880 have been defeated by the fact that, once Dvorák sold the publishing and partial performing rights to August Alwin Cranz in 1881 and sent the autograph score to Leipzig (possibly as late as 1883), the original manuscript parts and even the full score itself fell into terrible disarray. Except for a libretto printed at the time of the première, all of the primary source materials for the opera proper are in manuscript form and thus have never, until this moment, been published. The autograph score seems to have been destroyed during an Allied bombing raid on Leipzig at the beginning of December 1943. A diplomatic copy, prepared by one of Cranz’s music copyists, has survived, but it is far from satisfactory. Furthermore, many serious discrepancies exist between this score and the original performance parts. In 1900 Dvorák himself tried to sort everything out, but, being limited by time, he only managed to solve some of the more obvious problems. For the most part, his emendations and additions can be deciphered in the extant score, which Cranz sent to him instead of the autograph. During the past seventeen years, however, many of his corrections have been rendered illegible through insensitive additions or outright erasures. Until now only three pieces of music from Vanda have been published, among them the new overture Dvorák composed towards the end of 1879 for the revised version of the opera staged the following year at Prozatímní divadlo. Special attention should be drawn to the fact that our new edition of Vanda incorporates all of the additions and revisions Dvorák himself made during the course of the quarter century following its première in 1876; more precisely, up to 1901, when he hurriedly tried to prepare the score – in some cases actually having to reconstruct passages from the original performance parts – for the production that was planned as part of the cycle of his operas presented at the National Theater in honor of this sixtieth birthday. The most significant of these revisions were occasioned by the decision made by the director of opera, Edmund Chvalovsky, and the chief conductor, Adolf Cech, to mount a new staging at the National Theater in 1880. Dvorák’s music is noteworthy for its rich harmonies, multi-colored orchestration, subtle and diaphonous texture and lively rhythms. Throughout the opera, broad lyrical melodies undergo frequent transformations to suit the various dramatic situations, and large-scale scene complexes in the grand opera manner are made up of impressive solo arias, intricate ensembles, ballet tableaux, and, above all, magnificent choral numbers. Alan Houtchens  |