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Flights of fancy

A renowned Japanese opera takes wing in Prague
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By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
January 9th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Czech singers worked for a year to learn their parts in the original language, a first on European stages.
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Yuzuru

When: Friday, Jan. 11, at 7
Where: Estates Theater
Tickets: 150–450 Kč, available at National Theater box offices

It’s nothing new for local opera productions to be performed in languages other than Czech. Still, when the Opava Silesian Theatre announced plans to stage an opera entirely in Japanese, some singers and patrons were skeptical of something being lost in translation. But the ensemble’s conductor, Jan Snítil, was not one of them.
“Beauty has a universal effect,” he says. Snítil should know, since he has both a personal and professional history with the transformative power of art across cultures. He met his wife, a native of Japan, when she visited Prague to study Czech music years ago.
The “universal effect” of beauty worked its magic as they collaborated together as musicians (she is a piano teacher), and today their daughter is credited as the translator of Czech subtitles for Yuzuru. Snítil staged the famous Japanese opera in Opava in October and is bringing it to the Estates Theater this Friday.
Famous in Japan, anyway. Since its Osaka premiere in 1952, the opera has continually delighted audiences with its Eastern take on a Western art form. The libretto of Yuzuru (“The Twilight Crane”) is based on a centuries-old Japanese folktale about a simple man who saves a crane, which is then transformed into his wife.
“The music is normal European opera” with touches of Japanese artistry, explains Snítil, who says it reminds him of works by Puccini. “It’s a traditional Japanese fairy tale,” he adds. “But the motives are universal.”
Yuzuru premiered in Europe with a 1957 performance in Zurich, which was sung in German. It has continued to be performed by numerous opera companies worldwide, but never in its original Japanese in Europe. This is where Snítil saw an opportunity for his Silesian company to stage a groundbreaking event. “Our attempt is for the first time in Europe to sing it in the Japanese language,” he says, crediting his wife with the idea.
Snítil loved the story and the music of Yuzuru, and never saw any practical advantage to localizing it. “It’s quite impossible to do a good translation,” he says, noting the vast differences between the Japanese and Czech languages. “It can’t be exact.”
For the same reasons that the language didn’t lend itself to translation, it posed unique hurdles for the singers. “The greatest problem in studying this opera is the Japanese language,” Snítil says. The four soloists worked diligently with native Japanese speakers to nail the libretto, and Snítil praised lead soprano Katarina Jorda Kramolišová for her “good ear for the small difference of Japanese pronunciations.”
“I was looking forward to meeting a new culture and a new language,” Kramolišová says. “I didn’t expect it would be such an extensive role, but I enjoyed taking part in a fairy tale in the role of a bird.”
“The Japanese language is very good for singing,” Snítil notes, but learning the parts required a full year of diligent effort on the part of the company’s soloists. “It was for everybody a great test of patience and good nerves,” Kramolišová confirms.
Based on the reviews so far, the work appears to be paying off. The premiere of Yuzuru drew large crowds, with many patrons returning to repeat performances two or three times, according to Snítil. Also, as part of a cultural partnership between Opava and the Japanese city of Tsukuba, about 20 representatives from Tsukuba and the Japanese Embassy attended the October premiere.
Snítil is planning a 2009 visit for the Opava Silesian Opera to Tsukuba, not only to perform Yuzuru on its native soil but also to export Czech opera. He hopes to stage a production of Smetana’s Dalibor in what he sees as an opportunity to heighten Tsukuba’s cultural scene — the Japanese city was founded only 20 years ago, and Opava has a rich artistic history to share.
In the meantime, the company will keep busy performing Yuzuru in Prague and possibly other cities within the Czech Republic, sharing its accomplishment of combining European opera with Japanese folklore and language.

Brooke Edge can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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