Desire versus reality on this week’s Sunday Opera (3/15 3:00 p.m.) as we look to a 1938 work by Bohuslav Martinu that was based on a French surrealist play by Georges Neveux entitled “Juliette, or the Key of Dreams.” “Julietta” is the object of desire of a travelling bookseller, and he travels to the world of dreams to find her, even though he’s never seen her. He’s just heard her singing.
Michel (Kurt Streit) finds himself in a seaside town looking for a girl he heard singing three years before. In a short period of time, he finds out that the people of this world are not able to remember the past. He speaks to a police officer (Beau Gibson) who welcomes him and promises Michel to help him find Julietta (Juanita Lascarro).However, he leaves for a few moments, returns dressed as a postman, and has no memory of speaking with Michel at all.
Eventually, Michel and Julietta meet in a forest, but Julietta leaves, causing Michel to shoot at her which brings the townspeople running. They want to execute Michel, but he begins to tell them stories, and they forget. He tries to find Julietta at her home, but an old lady (Judita Nagyova) who lives there says she lives alone.
Michel is frustrated, and when he hears Julietta singing again in the distance, he decides to board a ship and go home. Once home, he finds himself in the Central Bureau of Dreams where several other “dreamers” ask him for their fantasy dream. Michel is then told that if he returns to the world of dreams, he’ll never be able to return. He decides to go back to look for Julietta and immediately finds himself in the seaside town once again as the opera ends.
Other members of the cast include Boris Grappe, Andreas Bauer, Nina Tarandek, Maria Pantiukhova, and Michael McCown. Sebastian Weigle leads the Frankfurt Opera House and Museum’s Orchestra and the Frankfurt Opera Chorus.
We’ll enjoy more music of Martinu after the opera by sampling two of the six symphonies he wrote after emigrating to the United States in 1941.We’ll hear the Symphony No. 1 performed by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Jiri Belohlavek. The second is his final symphony, Symphony No. 6 “Fantasies symphoniques” in a performance featuring the Bamburg Symphony conducted by Neeme Jarvi.
We’ll close our time together with a previously unrecorded piano piece entitled “Song Without Words” in a 2008 recording featuring pianist Giorgio Koukl.
