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July 5th, 2008

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A modern composer faces the past

Aleš Březina sheds musical light on a dark time in Czech history

By Frank Kuznik
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 9th, 2008 issue

Březina, above after rehearsal and below with his family, from left: sons Marek, Victor and Vilém, wife Jarmila and, at bottom, daughter Babeta. enlarge

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

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Zítra se bude...

When: Pemieres April 9 & 10; tickets remain for April 20 and May 6 & 13 performances
Where: Kolowrat Theater
Tickets: 350 Kč, at National Theater box offices
Performed in Czech

THE BŘEZINA FILE

Born: September 1965 in Teplice
Family: Wife Jarmila Mothejzíková, four children
Studies: Violin at the Pilsen Conservatory, musicology at universities in Prague and Basel, Switzerland
Current position: Director, Bohuslav Martinů Institute

The rehearsal had been chaotic, with the director barking orders and occasionally stopping the action, two photographers snapping away, and the lighting cues still a work in progress. Composer Aleš Březina sat calmly through the commotion, but confessed afterward that it had been difficult.

“I was really suffering in there,” he confided.

Giving birth to a new work is never easy. And Březina’s opera Zítra se bude... (Tomorrow Will...), which opens this week at the Kolowrat Theater, carries more weight than most.

Its subject is the 1950 show trial of Milada Horáková, a courageous Czech dissident and political activist who was executed by the communists. The wounds from that travesty are still fresh; just last year, former prosecutor Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, 86, was sentenced to eight years in prison for her part in the trial. (The Prague High Court overturned the sentence in February.)

The opera is also a showcase for Czech singer and actress Soňa Červená, who had her own troubles with the communists, spending most of her performing career abroad. She plays a shifting role in the piece, at times portraying Horáková, at other times taking on the voice of the prosecutor reading the indictment, or Horáková’s husband and daughter pleading for her life. As her persona changes, so do the vocal demands, which veer from singing to recitation to a sing-song combination of the two.

The score is so unusual that Březina says, “I wouldn’t feel offended if it was criticized for not being an opera.” What is it, then, exactly?

“A musical story about the trial of Milada Horáková using period texts.”

Zítra se bude... had its genesis in an offer made by the National Theater to develop a vehicle for Červená, after her return to the Czech stage in the theater’s 2002 production of Janáček’s Osud (Fate). Unable to find the right role in an existing opera, she approached Březina about writing a new work. They agreed that the subject should be a great Czech woman, and, after briefly considering opera stars such as Ema Destinnová and Tereza Stolzová, settled on Horáková.

“We both felt that she is the most important person to talk about now,” says Červená, still performing at the age of 82. “It’s almost 60 years since the trial, so two generations have no idea who she was. This was an important event in our history, and it must not be forgotten.”

“Puccini and Verdi would give anything for a heroine like this,” Březina says. “And, for me, this was something like a civic duty. The revolution is over, but our country is still not a perfect democracy. I was looking for someone who could serve as a pillar of hope, and a guide for our thoughts.”

Stage and screen

Though Březina, 42, grew up under communism, he was fortunate to escape its worst effects. Born in Teplice in 1965, he was raised in various parts of the former Sudetenland in west Bohemia, and displayed a musical aptitude early. He remembers being mesmerized by a piece of music he heard on the radio when he was just 5 years old, Václav Trojan’s The Emperor’s Nightingale.

“Can I learn to play that?” he asked his mother after hearing the violin solo.

“Of course you can,” she told him. She also put him in a children’s choir, where he quickly took to the spotlight.

“I was a very small child, but I was not afraid,” Březina says. “So they put me out front and made me a soloist.”

Březina studied for six years at the Pilsen Conservatory, which he calls “the darkest part of my life.” The director of the school, who was also the head of the local communist party, once expelled a friend of Březina’s for accidentally throwing a ball through a window on May Day. “That is an assault against the working class,” he thundered at the young man before giving him the boot.

But Březina blossomed outside the conservatory, absorbing local opera and orchestra performances and playing fiddle in a country-and-western band. In 1985, he made his way to Prague. “It felt like I had come to Paris,” he recalls. “Everyone was talking about the downfall of communism.”

Březina wasn’t around when it finally came tumbling down. Czech composer Petr Eben, with whom he studied in Prague, recommended him for continued studies in Basel, Switzerland. “It was hard work to get out,” Březina says, recalling the reams of paperwork and many permissions he had to get. But he was finally allowed to leave in June 1989, just five months before the Velvet Revolution got under way.

After his return, he quickly rose through the city’s music ranks. He was named director of the Bohuslav Martinů Institute in 1994, a time when the composer was barely known outside the Czech Republic. Martinů enjoys a much higher profile now, thanks in no small part to the Institute’s work collecting, publishing and promoting his music, which included a remarkable four-year detective effort by Březina tracking down the original manuscript for Martinů’s opera The Greek Passion. Still the institute’s director, Březina is a sought-after speaker at conferences and in classrooms around the world (he’s delivering a series of lectures on Martinů in Madison, Wisconsin, later this month).

Březina is also a noted film composer. Some of his better-known scores were done for Pupendo (2003), Horem pádem (Up and Down, 2004), Kráska v nesnázích (Beauty in Trouble, 2006) and Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England, 2007). The latter two were nominated for Czech Lion awards for best soundtracks.

Zítra se bude... is Březina’s first opera, and it posed some problems that he hadn’t encountered before. “Writing for film or theater, the music is only one part of the performance and what you can do is sort of dictated,” he says. “With opera, the music is in the foreground, and you have to find some way to give it shape.”

Though the final product is uniquely Březina’s, he cites three major influences in the writing. “Kurt Weill’s work in music theater, like The Beggar’s Opera,” he says. “Olivier Messiaen, who wrote very complex music on spiritual and nationalist themes. And Frank Zappa, who I think was a great dramaturgist. I like the way he mixed styles and his ability to make separate elements into a creative whole.”

Serving history

Březina’s final product reflects those tastes. Though it follows the dramatic arc of the trial, and uses text taken entirely from the transcript, it’s not a narrative. Instead, it’s a series of 14 scenes that highlight different elements of the trial — the trumped-up charges, Horáková’s cross-examination, her memorable farewell letter. There’s even a treatment of “Tomorrow There Will Be Dancing Everywhere,” a Socialist Realism song used by the communists to stoke false hopes during the ’50s, which provided the inspiration for the opera’s title.

The music, played by a six-piece orchestra, changes from scene to scene, sometimes dramatically. A troubling, insistent series of accusations by the chorus of judges suddenly morphs into a sweet, lyrical listing of the prosecutors by children with angelic faces and bloodstained aprons. Other parts aren’t sung at all, but recited in grim courtroom tones.

“I like surprises,” Březina says when asked about the shifting styles and colors. “As a composer, I should always be one step ahead of the audience.”

More to the point, Březina does not believe an opera score should mimic the libretto. “The purpose of the music is not to double the information in the text, but to show the lyrics from a different angle,” he says. “I didn’t do the obvious with this music — it’s not full of hate. I wanted to create a contrast between the words and music, a tension that would open up different layers of the text. When you make a baroque cantata out of a death sentence, it becomes sort of … well, something scary.”

The music is also in keeping with both Březina and Červená’s determination not to make Horáková into a traditional opera heroine, with the requisite arias and emotive scenes.

“If we were to do that, then the whole piece would be about whether Soňa is playing Milada Horáková well,” says Březina. “In this case, it’s better to lose the link between role and actor. We wanted to serve the text, and this way I think people will listen to it much more attentively.”

In that sense, the opera is an intellectual exercise for Březina. But the same can’t be said for Červená, who had a promising career in this country stopped dead when the communists refused to allow her to accept an invitation to join the National Theater. She was, however, allowed to perform in East Berlin, where in 1962 she managed to escape to the West.

For the next 25 years, Červená had a stellar career that included appearances on many of the world’s most prestigious opera stages, including an 11-year stint with the San Francisco Opera. When she returned to the Czech Republic after the revolution, it was ironically an American — visiting director Robert Wilson, with whom she had worked previously on The Black Rider — who cast her in Osud. Yet there’s no bitterness in her tone, and no thought of payback in her performance.

“It’s an honor to work at the National Theater, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to portray this wonderful lady of courage and character,” she says, adding a caveat similar to Březina’s about her role: “I wouldn’t dare to be Milada Horáková, especially in this unique production. What’s important is that people know about this indecent period in our nation, which must never happen again.”

That is the overriding sentiment among the creators of this opera, and Březina has already seen its effect. The night of the chaotic rehearsal, he was riding home on the tram afterward with his sons Vilem and Viktor, who had accompanied him to the theater, when Vilem asked him, “Daddy, what is the difference between the extreme right and the extreme left?”

Nonplused, Březina replied, “Well, it’s easier to see the similarities. Why do you ask?”

“The opera made me think about that,” he said.

“It was great!” Březina enthused after recounting the story the next day. “If a 9-year-old asks that question, then I’ve fulfilled my mission.”

Frank Kuznik can be reached at fkuznik@praguepost.com

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