The works of the Slovak composer Ján Cikker (1911–89) were performed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The 20th anniversary of his death offers the opportunity for a reassessment of his extensive operatic output.
Operas full of humanist ideals
The Slovak composer Ján Cikker died twenty years ago. He enjoyed considerable success both in Czechoslovakia and in western countries. Following its premiere in Prague in 1962, his fourth opera Vzkriesenie (Auferstehung/ Resurrection, 1959–61) after Tolstoy went on to be staged in 21 new productions, nine in West Germany alone, including the first performance in Stuttgart in 1964, a highly acclaimed production by Günter Rennert. Subsequently, his operas Hra o láske a smrti (Play on love and death) after Romain Rolland, Coriolanus after Shakespeare and Rozsudok (Das Urteil: Das Erdbeben in Chili/ The Judgement: Earthquake in Chile) after Kleist attracted just as much, if not more, attention abroad as in his homeland. This led to Cikker being acknowledged as the most successful Slovak composer by his compatriots and contemporaries Eugen Suchoň and Alexander Moyzes. With gripping subjects and compelling musical form, his operas represent a humanist ideal which attracted interest on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And they were perhaps also provocative for, from time to time, particularly at the beginning of the 1970s, West German critics had to confront the ideological and aesthetic stance of his operas, their Christian-idealistic message, the invocation of a humanist conception of man and, in comparison with contemporary works such as Nono’s Intolleranza or Zimmermann’s Soldaten, a more measured harmonic language. Recently, however, a reappraisal has taken place, for looking back over the period of the thaw and the Prague Spring with its violent end in 1968, Cikker’s choice of themes ultimately constitutes an avowal of humanity free from ideology, something which could not be taken for granted at the time of their composition.
“Mister Scrooge”
“Allow yourself to deal with people without love, and there will be no end of atrocity and brutality, as I have known in my life” (Tolstoy) stands as a quotation at the beginning of Resurrection. From his opera Mister Scrooge onwards (after Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the story of the hard-hearted skinflint who transforms himself into a sympathetic human being during the Christmas period), Cikker’s operas deal with a reforming process experienced by their protagonists. The fate of Mister Scrooge, however, marked a decisive turning point in the life of the composer. At rehearsals at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava in 1959, the work was dropped. Cikker incurred “ideological criticism” at the congress of the Slovak Composers’ Association in December that year and, as a result, became socially and artistically isolated. Linked with illness, the next two years of work on the opera Resurrectionwere a period of deep crisis and a new orientation – “swimming against the tide”, as Detlef Gojowy called it, “in no sense a natural and conflict-free project”. Mister Scrooge received its first performance in 1963 in Kassel under the title Abend, Nacht und Morgen.
“Resurrection”
Resurrectiontells the story of the maid Katuscha, who is a victim several times over. The young Prince Nekhlyudov seduces her at his aunt’s country estate shortly before setting off to war. She becomes pregnant and is expelled from the house after her child dies. A few years later, as a prostitute she is wrongly accused of poisoning a client of the brothel. At her trial, Nekhlyudov is by coincidence called as a juror. He recognises his guilt in her fate but is too weak to avert her sentence. Banished to forced labour in Siberia, he gives up his fashionable lifestyle and wants to follow her. However, she bitterly rejects his offers. Only when he brings the dying Katuscha news of her pardon are they reconciled. The motif of resurrection is taken as a theme on several levels: from the Easter kiss (the traditional Russian Easter greeting) at the beginning to the moral reformation of both protagonists, the re-kindling of their love and finally the death and transfiguration of Katuscha. To the question “Is she dead?” Nekhlyudov answers at the end, “No, she is risen.”
Cikker concentrates the socially critical plot of the novel on the psychological development and the conflict of the main figures and counteracts this with sharp depictions of situations, such as the absurd court case or the garish brothel scene with its rousing cancan. He wrote the libretto himself (in collaboration with Fritz Oeser and additional verses by Ján Srmek), achieving his own form of literature opera which makes possible a stratified plot in an unfathomable simultaneity. The inner monologue of the protagonists is focussed, film-like, in independent intermezzi. In the first of these, Katuscha fantasizes about earlier events in a kind of delirium, in the second, Nekhlyudov recalls the trial and takes responsibility for Katuscha’s collapse, and in the third, both of their awareness processes interact in their movement towards each other.
In a polytonal musical language, the tragic subject is staged highly suggestively by dramatically effective means, such as when Cikker intensifies the court scene by giving voice to the characters, or when he transforms the despair of the prison camp in the third act into a gospel of redemption with quasi-sacred choruses. As Fritz Oeser wrote to the composer, Katuscha’s operatic death was amongst the most effective in the history of music. Musically, Cikker achieves transfiguration at the end by drawing on the young Katusha’s music of carefree innocence.
Resurrection was a unanimous success and gave Cikker an international breakthrough, so that each of his subsequent operas was performed in several cities. As a result, Play on love and death was premiered at the Munich Opera Festival in 1969 and was performed later that year in Wuppertal, in Stockholm in 1970, Berne 1971 in and in Bratislava (only) in 1973. Coriolanus was premiered in 1974 in Prague, then given in Mannheim and in 1977 in Weimar.
“One has to summon up everything terrible which the powers of imagination can envisage, in order to form any kind of picture of the horror in which people find themselves when the earth moves under their feet”, wrote Kant in 1755. Such a story must, “because it has an effect on the heart, perhaps also be able to have one on the improvement of the same”. Kleist’s Erdbeben in Chili recounts a terrible event, the lynching in 1647 of a young couple who had conceived a child in a convent garden: they were sentenced, then as a result of an earthquake in Santiago de Chile they were firstly freed from burning at the stake or imprisonment, but were finally unable to escape the fanatical wrath of the people. In The Judgement 1979), Cikker shaped a genre painting out of Kleist’s story, tightly organised and full of contrasts, with explosive crowd scenes and lyrical episodes. The humanitarian appeal of this one-act opera forms a logical sequel to his preceding operas, which are all tragedies.
“Play on love and death”
With Play on love and death Cikker took an even more decisive turn towards politically accentuated themes. The opera recalled the tyranny of the Jacobins under Robespierre in a concentrated chamber-drama. Romain Rolland’s drama depicts the fatal events at the house of the scholar Jérôme de Courvoisier. The scholar is a member of the monastery and was the only person to disagree with the sentencing of Danton, and therefore becomes a victim of persecution. His wife Sophie loves the Girondiste Vallée, who seeks refuge with her. However, under the onslaught of the henchmen, she decides against fleeing with her lover, and instead to sacrifice her life with her husband. Her demise becomes an appeal for exemplary human suffering and for the raising of moral values. In the dramaturgy of the opera, Cikker again works with various strata. Whilst the action on the stage is intensified into a concentrated love story, the contemporary situation is simultaneously present in choruses, stage music and film projections. Musically, Cikker moves into the realm of twelve-note music and polytonality, entirely excluding tonal passages which he had used in Resurrection.
“Coriolanus”
“A tragedy without mercy, without any glimmer of hope” was how Cikker described Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which he chose as the subject of his sixth opera. The contradictory hero Coriolan – despot, enemy of the people, traitor, a “commander driven by hatred to commit treason” – is portrayed by Cikker in his operatic development “as a complicated human being of our age seeking favour”. His opera intensifies the conflict between the mass and the individual, placing the “ceaseless wrestling for power and against those seizing power” (Cikker) as the leitmotiv of the story in its “ominous topicality” at the forefront of the action. Fourteen scenes relate this conflict, some in garish colours and sharp contrasts, in exciting choral scenes and battle music, contrasted with more muted musical interludes and expressive lyrical solo parts.
“From the life of insects”
Cikker’s last operatic work, composed in 1986, was an absurd comedy – the only one he wrote. With Zo života hmyzu (Aus dem Leben der Insekten/ From the life of insects) the Capek brothers’ 1921 fable portrays the danger of totalitarian rule. A tramp’s progress through the insect world ends in an inexorable ant colony. Three years before the socialist system ended, Cikker’s opera on the then prophetic subject matter seems like a swan song.
Marie Luise Maintz
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
from: [t]akte 1/2009
Ominous topicality. Ján Cikker's operatic works
Ján Cikker’s operas
Juro Jánošík
Text: Štefan Hoza
Opera in 3 acts/6 scenes (1950–53), 1954 National Theatre, Bratislava
Beg Bajazid (Fürst Bajazid)
Text: Ján Smrek,
3 acts with prologue (1955/56); 1957 National Theatre, Bratislava
Mister Scrooge
Text: Ján Cikker nach Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol,
Opera in 3 acts/4 scenes (1958/59)
1963 Kassel as “Abend, Nacht und Morgen”
Vzkriesenie (Auferstehung/Resurrection)
Text: Ján Cikker after Lev Tolstoy, Vozkresenie
Opera in 3 acts/6 scenes and 3 intermezzi (1959–61)
1962 National Theatre, Prague
Hra o láske a smrti (Das Spiel von Liebe und Tod/ The Play on love and death)
Text: Ján Cikker after Romain Rolland
Opera in 1 act (1966–68)
1969 Munich
Coriolanus
Text: Ján Cikker after William Shakespeare
Opera in 3 acts/14 scenes (1970–72)
1974 Smetana Theatre, Prague
Rozsudok (Das Urteil/ The Judgement)
Text: Ján Cikker after Heinrich von Kleist, Das Erdbeben in Chili
Opera in 3 acts/5 scenes (1976–78)
1979 Bratislava
Obliehanie Bystrice (Die Belagerung von Bystrica/ The Siege of Bystrica)
Text: Ján Cikker after Kálmán Mikszáth
Opera in 3 acts/9 scenes (1979–81)
1983 Bratislava
Zo života hmyzu (Aus dem Leben der Insekten/ From the Life of Insects)
Text: Ján Cikker after Karel and Josef Čapek
Opera in 3 acts(1983–86)
1987 Bratislava