2: Sarlatan

Pavel Haas

Conductor : Israel Yinon

Designer : Fotini Dimou

Director : John Abulafia

First performance : Moravian Theatre, Brno, 1938

A travelling doctor named Pustrpalk arrives in a central European village; when a crowd gathers, he uses trickery to "cure" the beautiful young Amaranta of her hypochondria. Her guardian, the monk Jochimus, threatens to expose Pustrpalk as a charlatan; undaunted, Amaranta joins Pustrpalk's theatrical troupe, incurring the wrath of both Jochimus and - not surprisingly - Pustrpalk's wife.

In a drunken brawl, the town's mill is set on fire. Pustrpalk goes from success to success with his shows and miracle cures, but at the height of his fame he discovers that Amaranta has gone away with Jochimus. Time goes by, and a gravely ill Jochimus comes back to seek Pustrpalk's forgiveness and ask him to save his life. Pustrpalk agrees to try, but Jochimus dies, whereupon an angry mob accuses the "charlatan" of murder, forcing him to flee.

Years later some of his old friends meet at an inn and talk about how he has become a paranoid alcoholic. A drunken Pustrpalk shows up, and after a bit of singing, carousing, and striking out at a vision of Jochimus, dies.

John Abulafia

John Abulafia founded Mecklenburgh Opera in 1988 with the aim of staging 20th-century works in an accessible way, using the technique and ideals of ensemble theatre. However, he has also worked in a wide range of operatic styles: he wrote and directed a new version of Purcell's The Fairy Queen for the Purcell centenary year, created a production of The Barber of Seville for English National Opera which has been revived five times, directed Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni at the Mozart Festival in Madrid and worked with a group of young offenders to help them write a new opera which he directed at the Coliseum.

Is it a romp, is it a battle between good and evil, is it L'Elisir D'Amore all over again, should it be interpreted in the light of Pavel Haas's subsequent imprisonment at Terezin and death in the gas chambers at Auschwitz? Not so fast, says director John Abulafia; Sarlatan won't fit easily into a neat little box. "I've called it a `tragicomedy', because the tragedy is there in the nature of the plot although the content is sometimes extremely funny." A jolly quack doctor, then, peasant dancing, that sort of thing? "Well, Haas's roots are obviously with early Czech opera so, yes, you get a lot of polka-based dance music - but what he has done is filtered everything through a 20th-century sensibility. So everything in Sarlatan is in transition, everybody is changing and nobody's life is completely resolved.

"I think it's really quite close to the sorts of things that were going on in literature in the 1920s, Eliot and Joyce reinterpreting myths, for example - you can sense that everyone in the opera, Pustrpalk especially, would like it to be like The Bartered Bride where the hero ends up with the heroine and everyone lives happily ever after. But it's mock heroic in the way that Joyce is mock heroic - Pustrpalk can't live up to his own image and the times are against him anyway." Because the action takes place over 30 years, Abulafia and his team have decided to set their production in the years 1885 to 1914, so that visual cues such as changing fashions and the arrival of electricity will help the audience to identify with the passage of time. "When the curtain rises what you'll see is a completely grey world, just chaos and rubble . . . Abulafia feels that Haas's experience of being part of the generation immediately following the first world war - he was in the Austrian army and he witnessed the creation of Czechoslovakia - is crucial to an interpretation of the piece; but he insists that a retrospective interpretation based on the composer's terrible death would be a mistake. "When Haas wrote Sarlatan, he didn't know what was going to happen to him. It would be so easy to say, `oh, it's really taking place in a concentration camp'; but Auschwitz is actually irrelevant to this opera. Except that what happened was not just the horror of Auschwitz - which, obviously, is overwhelming if you start to think about it - but also, in the longer perspective, the destruction of a musical culture, a melodic central European tradition which owed something to Schoenberg but is basically in a line from Dvorak through Smetena and Janacek and Mahler."