What are 260 years? Goldoni’s “The Impresario from Smyrna” can be effortlessly transferred to our time, for people still risk their necks in the theatre business today. Ľubica Čekovská’s new opera makes a musico-dramatic tragicomedy out of the subject matter.
A foreign magnate sends a group of singers overseas for auditions for a new opera house, an agent organises the meeting in a hotel with a surprising outcome. Back in 1759, the scenario of Carlo Goldoni’s play L’impresario delle Smirne provided the opportunity for a witty and profound satire on the vanities and pitfalls of the opera business. Not least, it exposed the merciless downside of artistic striving: he showed people who risk their necks and get worked up about their crazy roles in order to cover up their precarious living conditions, hoping to please and to succeed.
Ľubica Čekovská and her librettist Laura Olivi have created a contemporary version of this subject matter in their opera Impresario Dotcom, which was commissioned by the Bregenz Festival and the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava. Goldoni contrived his ‘theatre within the theatre’ in several comedies. He was always interested in the development of his newly-invented character comedy – the characters involved are no longer stereotyped as in the commedia dell’arte, but become individually fleshed-out characters. In L’impresario delle Smirne six characters – five singers and an agent – seek a financial backer. The comedy shines a virtuoso and witty spotlight on the opera world of its time, with all its highs and lows.
Laura Olivi and Ľubica Čekovská turn the screw one twist further: their protagonists are called Olympia, Violetta, Carmen, Tamino and Orfeo, and come from all over the world. The authors use the eponymous role profiles to allow the people behind them to step forward and to develop their relationships. The inherent tragedy of the characters in their roles resonates in each case. Dotcom – allusions to the internet gambler are no coincidence – speaks in broken Italian and makes surprising demands of the singers with abstruse punch lines.
From the outset, the concept of Ľubica Čekovská’s opera was developed in conjunction with librettist Laura Olivi, director Elisabeth Stöppler and Olaf Schmidt, the dramaturg of the Bregenz Festival. People today are expected to play a part as personalities in the plot, and therefore interviews with singers are slipped into the libretto.
In her setting of the libretto, Ľubica Čekovská works with several polystylistically developed layers. The international cast on the stage is also subject to a musical masquerade. The composition quotes music from the past and subsequently deconstructs it in order to show the characters behind the roles. These are increasingly revealed, and they finally stand there naked in the true sense of the word. Dotcom appears with robotic, fragmented speech – he comes from a high-tech world.
“We all play roles in our lives”, says Ľubica Čekovská, “and it’s about the question of who we are, who the people behind these are. For me, it was particularly important in this composition that we allow the characters to perform with their arias from the operatic repertoire, to counter it with my own musical language, and to develop genuine characters out of the individual archetypes. As artists, we want to survive and therefore to play our roles. This opera shows how we attempt to portray ourselves in the best possible light in front of the authorities or agents. The singers in the opera adopt certain attitudes to this. The challenge for the composition was to work with the historic elements without being too eclectic. Therefore, from the beginning I play with the musical material and develop rhetorical figures from it. The composition strides through different stylistic spheres, including Dotcom’s computer-like music.
The Italian libretto is very densely written, the language very bustling, almost neurotic. On the other hand, the music has to create the tempo, the rests in which it is also possible to draw breath. The robotic language of Dotcom is a counterworld to that of the singers, yet this is the authority they want to please by appropriating it so that they get the job. And still they want to be perceived as individuals. The agent Conte Lasca stands between, he too would like to be engaged, he too is ambivalent. And last but not least, what is special about the singers is that they, their bodies, their spirits, are their own instruments. I work musically with this too. For me, the composition is a journey into the bodies, minds, souls and hearts of the characters, into their sensitivities. At the end the plot escalates in an abstruse and almost ferocious way, the auditions become a kind of shark pool for the singers. The surprising and absurd ending makes for some humour, but I don’t want to give too much away here.
It is of course a particular challenge to write a comic opera, for ultimately comedy isn’t calculable and only occurs in combination with many components. And this story has much that is sad and tragic for me too. When I put myself in the position of the singers in this situation, I suffer with them. And what happens to them also happens to all of us every single day.”
As with Goldoni, theatre is here, a reflection of the world.
Marie Luise Maintz
(from [t]akte 1/2020 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson)