French twist

"I'm the Phantom of the Opera!" Michel Swierczewski declared last week after another long day of rehearsals at the National Theater.

Swierczewski, a French conductor and 25-year veteran of the opera stage, was exaggerating only slightly. Since mid-January, he's spent most of his waking hours at the theater with the orchestra, chorus, cast and director of Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Tales of Hoffmann), a new production that premieres March 6. The National Theater has paired Swierczewski with an outstanding local stage director (and musician himself), Ondřej Havelka, and brought in some good guest voices, notably Belgian lyric tenor Marc Laho.

But Swierczewski is more than just the conductor for Hoffmann. He's the point man for French opera, a distinctly different variety of opera than is normally performed in Prague, and a stickler for detail. To get the language right, he arranged French lessons for the singers. To get the music right, he's painstakingly worked through every bar of the three-hour, 15-minute score with the orchestra, crafting just the right nuances and colors. And, to set the proper tone and context, he's been offering a primer on the history and milieu of Jacques Offenbach's complicated opera to anyone who will listen.

"They've had me doing everything except sweeping the floor," Swierczewski says.

Which is not a complaint. Even in the best of circumstances, Hoffmann poses some significant challenges. And Swierczewski is a high-energy enthusiast who throws himself into everything that he does.

But, beyond the usual judgments of how good the singing, playing and direction are, a larger critical question looms over the Saturday premiere: How successful will Swierczewski and, by extension, the National Theater be at grafting a foreign import onto a staid Central European repertoire?

One thing is certain: Audiences are going to hear a lot of new music. Offenbach died in October 1880 during rehearsals for Hoffmann at the Opéra Comique in Paris, leaving behind many pages of music but no single definitive score. The version that was used at the premiere, cut in many places to keep it short, became the standard that was performed for more than 100 years.

In 1990, an Offenbach scholar unearthed 1,250 missing pages of Hoffmann. Two musicologists, Jean-Christophe Keck and Michael Kaye, subsequently used the new material to create an "authentic" version of the opera.

"That's the one we're doing," Swierczewski says. "It contains many numbers and pieces audiences here have never heard, maybe an hour of entirely new music."

Opera fantastique

Working with obscure French opera material is an area of expertise for Swierczewski, who spent 16 years as principal conductor at the Théatre Impérial de Compiegne, which specializes in revivals of the 19th-century French repertoire. Understanding that period, he says, is critical to performing Hoffmann properly.

"It's the era of Rimbaud and Verlaine, a time when artists discovered opium and drank absinthe in the cafés," Swierczewski explains. "So there's a dreamlike, hallucinatory quality to Hoffmann - it's an 'opera fantastique.' Most of it is a series of flashbacks that take place in Hoffmann's mind."

This will thoroughly confuse anyone who comes to the work cold, as the flashbacks are of unrequited love with three different women - one a mechanical doll - who, in the end, turn out to be idealizations of the same woman, named Stella. Offenbach's original idea was to have one singer do all the parts - a nearly impossible task, given the strenuous vocal demands. The National Theater production stands that on its head by having the three different women in the flashbacks all reappear as Stella in the final act.

The music can seem equally incoherent at times. "There's one part that sounds like a vinyl record skipping, the same phrase playing over and over," Swierczewski says. "There are sad scenes with joyful music. And there's never really an established tempo, which has given people here problems. The tempo constantly changes, following the flow of the French language. Beats can even change within a single bar."

Hoffmann is hardly unique in having a convoluted plot and difficult music. The key to making it work, according to Swierczewski, is to not approach it as an opera.

"It's primarily a theater piece," he says. "Of course, it has arias and other opera conventions, but Offenbach was a man of the theater. We've even kept one part as spoken dialogue, rather than recitative, to show the melodramatic effect."

Swierczewski is willing to make musical sacrifices to support the theatrical framework. Before rehearsal one day last week, Havelka stopped him in the hallway and asked, "Do you really have to play that prelude?", a reference to a musical interlude between acts four and five. "It slows things down."

"I'm sorry, we do," Swierczewski told him with an encouraging smile. But, by the end of the day, he had changed his mind.

"Ondřej was right," Swierczewski says. "It's not such an important piece of music. He asked me to cut it, and I will."

By Swierczewski's account, his working relationship with the orchestra and the singers has been just as good. Though there were rough moments - particularly early on - the music, direction and singing seemed to be jelling quite nicely last week. As a stage veteran, though, Swierczewski was characteristically cautious.

"It's a big work in progress, and we hope to bring it to a climax for the premiere," he says. "For me, the most important thing is the style of performing, to get that right. The French text, if 30 percent of it is clear, I'll be happy."

That seems a modest goal after so much work, and one that raises a question: What would the production be like without the proper approach and preparation?

Swierczewski thinks for a moment, then gets a mischievous smile on his face. "Like the Wehrmacht invading Poland in 1939!"

Frank Kuznik can be reached at
fkuznik@praguepost.com