The joy of Kafka

There have been many treatments of Kafka's seminal novella The Metamorphosis. But none, it's safe to say, quite like the version playing this weekend at Alfred ve dvoře.

The Tokyo opera company Konnyakuza has turned the work into a chamber opera, composed in Western style, sung in Japanese and performed by 11 singing actors and four musicians playing piano, violin, clarinet and bassoon. It incorporates text from Kafka's letters and diaries and, instead of relating the usual story of Gregor Samsa's transformation, looks at it from the viewpoint of his family.

The piece was composed by Konnyakuza Artistic Director Hikaru Hayashi, who has done similar treatments in the past of material ranging from Shakespeare to the popular Japanese comic novel I Am a Cat by Soseki Natsume. Born in Tokyo in 1931, Hayashi has been composing original music, including operas, symphonies and film scores, for nearly 60 years. His desire to bring Kafka to the stage has been brewing for a long time.

"For me, The Metamorphosis is not an unusual subject for opera," Hayashi says via e-mail from Japan. "In the 1950s, there was H. W. Henze's radio opera of Kafka's Ein Landarzt [A Country Doctor] and G. von Einem's opera Der Prozeß [The Trial]. I avidly read the vocal score of Der Prozeß, and from that time composing a Kafka opera was my dream."

As for the unorthodox point of view, Hayashi explains, "Gregor, who became an insect, couldn't have a dialogue with his family. Today, especially in Japan, the difficulty of communication within families strikes many people. It is possible that this difficulty made me and the dramaturgist, Kiyokazu Yamamoto, choose the view of a domestic drama."

Konnyakuza was founded in 1971 specifically to create and promote new operas sung in Japanese. The original idea was to make operatic works more accessible to Japanese audiences, but the productions have also played well on the road, especially in Europe. The language may be unfamiliar, but Hayashi taps genres familiar to Western ears - chanson and blues in The Metamorphosis, for example - and the works are designed and performed as physical theater. So, given a basic familiarity with the story, anyone can watch and enjoy them.

"The characters' physical language and intonations are internationally recognized, and strongly connected to the emotions expressed in the music," Hayashi says. "I believe that audiences can instinctively understand the works without knowing Japanese."

The company is already on the road, performing The Metamorphosis in Bucharest, Budapest and Vienna (in observance of the Japan-Danube Friendship Year) before bringing it to Prague. Aside from the obvious Kafka connection, the Golden City holds special significance for Hayashi.

"Prague is the European city my wife and I have visited most often," he says. "I remember being at Vyšehrad in 1989 - the metro stop was called 'Gottwaldova' then - attending a Karel Čapek festival, standing in front of his grave in the frozen cold. There was a sheet-music shop near Legii Most that I visited regularly, and we enjoyed knedliky and řízek in the pubs."

As for the resonance his Kafka opera will have here, Hayashi says, "Prague is the place where Kafka was born and also my spiritual home. On this special occasion, my heart is too full for words."

But he does manage a few when asked what he hopes audiences here will take from his work. First, there's the enduring impact and relevance of one of the great pieces of 20th-century literature. "At the time, only Kafka could write The Metamorphosis," Hayashi says. "Nowadays, everyone in the world reads this novella as a reflection of himself. This is Kafka's incomparable, far-sighted ability."

But don't expect the downer that most versions of the man-turned-bug story bring.

"Please watch The Metamorphosis not momentously, but with joy," Hayashi says. "This is the allure of opera. The world is full of troubles, but I believe opera is the way to see this troubled world with pleasure."

- Translation services were provided by Futaba Tanaka.

Frank Kuznik can be reached at
fkuznik@praguepost.com