Musical Theatre

The Diary of One Who Vanished

Gaiety Theatre

October 15th and 16th; preview, Thursday 14th, 8 p.m.

Twentieth-century writers of artsongs turned to sources that would have been unimaginable to 19th-century composers. Darius Milhaud set trade catalogue descriptions of agricultural machinery and flowers. Alexander Mossolov set newspaper advertisements, and both Charles Ives and Leos Janacek also found inspiration in newspapers. The poems of Janacek's Diary of One Who Vanished were published in the Fuelliton section of the Brno paper Lidove noviny in 1916 as being From the Pen of a Self-taught Writer, with an elaborate back-up on the authenticity of the events they described (the latest view is that they were, in fact, the work of the Moravian writer, Ozef Kalda). They tell of a young man's infatuation with a dark-eyed gipsy girl, and his eventual disappearance from home when he takes off with his new-found love. For Janacek, 63 when he started composing the song-cycle in 1917, there actually was someone he regarded as a dark-eyed gipsy in his life. 1917 was the year he first met Kamila Stosslova, 38 years his junior, and married to an antique dealer. For the remainder of his life, Janacek, whose own marriage was not particularly happy, was obsessed with Kamila. It was a one-sided relationship that proved extraordinarily productive to his creative life.

In spite of much burning, literal as well as metaphorical, over 700 letters survive, and Janacek even titled his Second String Quartet Intimate Letters, documenting specific moments of the relationship. The heroines of his operas reflect Kamila just as the Diary of One Who Vanished does. "Katya, you know," he wrote, referring to his opera Katya Kabanova, "that was you beside me. And that black Gypsy girl in my Diary of One who Vanished - that was especially you even more. That's why there's such emotional heat in these works. So much heat that if it caught both of

us, there'd be just ashes left of us. Luckily it's just I who burn - and you who are saved." acek wanted a theatrical presentation of these remarkable songs, "if possible with reddish lighting to heighten the erotic mood", he suggested. English National Opera's production, premiering a new translation by Seamus Heaney, is directed by Deborah Warner and features British tenor of the moment, Ian Bostridge.

The Wall of Cloud

Gate Theatre

Samuel Beckett Centre, TCD,

October 15th and 16th, 8 p.m.

It's hardly surprising that Raymond Deane, as a published novelist, should have chosen to write the libretto for his own new opera, The Wall of Cloud. He has reached back in time to an eighth-century Chinese play from the Yuan Dynasty, Ch'ien's Soul Leaves Her Body. The list of characters - Daughter, Mother, Youth, Soul of Daughter - reveals that it's a ghost story, and the plot finds the estranged participants in an arranged marriage being reunited through the intervention of the girl's spirit. Deane's earliest work drew heavily on the piano music of Scriabin and Stockhausen, after which he wrote a number of simple but strangely haunting pieces in the mid-1970s, before joining what you might call a European avant-garde mainstream. Touches of an older style of expressionism have been surfacing in his music of late. It will be interesting to see how he handles a full-length chamber opera with four characters and an ensemble of seven instrumentalists.

Wolfie: Le petit Mozart and Sonate a a Constance (Fringe)

Alliance Francaise

October 12th-16th, 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.

A "theatrical and musical" double bill on the life of Mozart, each evening, in French, but with an English translation available.

I'm a stranger here myself

Bank of Ireland Arts Centre

October 13th-16th, 10 p.m.

Singer Eva Maier and pianist Conor Linehan offer a late-evening of German and American cabaret songs - Kurt Weill, Friedrich Hollaender, Peter Raben and others.