Antonin Dvorak is the featured composer on this week’s Sunday Opera (3/23 3:00 p.m.), and it’s not “Rusalka”! Instead, we’re turning to his “pastoral comedy” entitled “Die Jakobiner” (“The Jacobin”). This intimate look at the relationship between a father and son which has been soured by false information and innuendo is said to be one of Dvorak’s most subtle and realistic operatic works. The libretto was by Marie Cernvinkova-Riegrova and is set in a Czech village during the 18th Century. It was initially presented in Prague in 1889 but was then revised, and that final version was premiered in 1898.
Bohus (Bohumil Benoni) is the son of Count Vilem (Kare Cech), but they are estranged because the count has heard that Bohus is a Jacobite, a religious sect he despises. The truth is that Bohus and his wife Julie (Berta Foersterova-Lautererova) have been living in relative poverty in Paris, earning their living by singing on the streets, mostly songs of their Czech past. Actually, Bohus is sympathetic to the Girondists in Paris, and this will play an important role later in the plot.
Bohus and Julie return to their village in disguise, just as the count names his nephew Adolf (Vaclav Viktorin) his sole heir. Adolf is not a respectable character, and he helps the count’s chief-of-staff, Filip (Vilem Hes) in his plot to discredit one of the count’s gamekeepers, Jiri (Karel Velely), who is in love with Terinka (Johanna Cavallerova-Weisova), the daughter of a kindly music teacher named Benda (Adolf Krossing).
Through the course of the opera, Adolf and Filip are thwarted in their attempt to steal Terinka from Jiri, the truth is revealed about Bohus and Julie, and there is a reconciliation and happy ending.
As Miss Prism says in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “The good end happily, and the bad end unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
You’ll also hear Ema Maislerova-Sakova as the castle’s keeper of the keys, Lotinka, along with the Prague Chamber Choir, the Boys of the Cologne Cathedral Choir, and the West German Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra of Cologne. Gerd Albrecht conducts.
There will be more music of Dvorak after the opera including one of his wonderful tone poems “The Wood Dove” which centers around the mournful cooing of a wood dove sitting in the tree that has grown over a woman’s first husband’s, whom she murdered) grave on the day of her second wedding. It’s performed here by the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi.
We’ll finish our time together with Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6 in D major in a performance featuring Ivan Anguelov leading the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Join us for an afternoon of lovely music without a single water sprite in sight!
