King Roger

Tickets
Address Plac Teatralny 1, Warszawa
Tags Opera
Venue's website www.teatrwielki.pl…
Length 130 min
Director Mariusz Treliński
Release 2018
Author Karol Szymanowski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz

Performing: Łukasz Goliński, Ruslana Koval, Tomasz Rak, Pavlo Tolstoy, Lukas Jakobski, Anna Bernacka

Mariusz Treliński has staged "King Roger" three times already. Each new staging, he claims, is a new journey and the Szymanowski work is one of the milestone in contemporary understanding of opera.

King Roger is indeed a work of broad intellectual and artistic horizons, a result of Karol Szymanowski’s colourful journeys to the south of Europe and his interest in antique and Arab culture which he read about extensively. The opera brings together the exoticism of the Orient and Dionysian myth, which were so absorbing to the composer also in the context of Nietzsche’s works.

In 1911 Szymanowski went to Sicily – six years later, he and his beloved cousin, poet Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, came up with the idea to write a ‘Sicilian tragedy’. The first drafts for King Roger at the turn of 1917 and 1918 in Elysavet (present-day Ukraine), a city where Iwaszkiewicz stayed and where the Szymanowski family had moved from Tymoshivka. Seeing the world they knew collapse before their eyes, the two artists sought refuge in magic fiction conjured up by their imagination. Iwaszkiewicz completed the libretto in 1920, following which Szymanowski introduced considerable additions, putting in garlands of worlds. The work was not progressing as he would have wanted: the composer’s mind was somewhere else, in the mountains, pondering Podhale folklore which enchanted him during his first visit to Zakopane in 1921. It was as if the move to Poland where he settled after the Great War having been forced to leave his native Ukrainian steppes and his travels to the South have woken him up from the Oriental dream of his youth. He finished the ‘goddamn opera’, as he then called it, in the summer of 1924. The most time-consuming part was the instrumentation of the not very long piece. It opened at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw on 19 June 1926 under Emil Młynarski.

King Roger concluded a period in Karol Szymanowski’s art that was inspired by ancient history and the Orient and that produced such beautifully sensual works as The Love Songs of Hafiz, Myths for violin and piano, Symphony No. 3 ‘Songs of the Night’, a musical setting of poetry by Persian artist Rumi, or Violin Concerto No. 1. When King Roger was played in Warsaw, the opera’s author had already written Stabat Mater inspired by folk Catholicism and was giving serious thought to Harnasie. Still, years later, he came to the conclusion that King Roger had been the best piece of music he had penned. In 1949 the opera was staged at Sicily’s Teatro Massimo that overlooks Palermo. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who was in attendance, wrote that the production directed by Bronisław Horowicz, a student of Leon Schiller, was ‘close to perfection’. Iwaszkiewicz’s daughter who watched the show alongside her father noted that real-life Sicily was nowhere close to the mythical one deemed up in Szymanowski’s opera. This is no coincidence: ‘King Roger’s Sicily is a region in the composer’s soul,’ stated Iwaszkiewicz.

conductor: Michał Klauza set designer: Boris Kudlička costume designer: Konrad Parol lighting designer: Marc Heinz video projections: Bartek Macias choreography: Tomasz Jan Wygoda dramaturgy: Piotr Gruszczyński hair and make-up designer: Waldemar Pokromski chorus master: Mirosław Janowski children’s choir master: Danuta Chmurska

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