Lady Sarashina

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Opera dates
Title: Lady Sarashina
Fujiwara no Sadaie: Calligraphic copy of the diary, 13th century

Fujiwara no Sadaie : Calligraphic copy of the diary, 13th century

Shape: Opera in nine scenes
Original language: English
Music: Péter Eötvös
Libretto : Mari Mezei
Literary source: 11th century Sarashina Nikki
Premiere: March 4, 2008
Place of premiere: Opéra National de Lyon
Playing time: about 70 minutes
Place and time of the action: Japan, 11th century
people
  • Lady Sarashina ( soprano )
  • soprano
    • princess
    • young lady
    • girl
    • Dream lady
    • Lady in waiting
  • Mezzo-soprano
    • empress
    • mother
    • sister
    • Dream lady
    • Lady in waiting
  • baritone
    • Guardian
    • Jester
    • delivery boy
    • father
    • cat
    • priest
    • noble sir

Lady Sarashina is an opera in nine scenes by Péter Eötvös (music) with a libretto by Mari Mezei based on Sarashina Nikki , the diary of the Japanese court lady Sugawara no Takasue no Musume from the 11th century. The world premiere took place on March 4th, 2008 in the Opéra National de Lyon .

action

Overture (vocal trio). The sounds of the temple bell at the end of the vigil create the feeling of having watched a hundred autumn nights.

First Scene. Spring (Lady Sarashina, vocal trio). Every year, when the flowers come out in spring, Lady Sarashina is reminded of the death of her wet nurse.

Second scene. Guardian (Lady Sarashina, princess, empress, guardian / court jester / messenger). A long time ago a palace guard was responsible for keeping the "great fire". While he is sweeping the garden, he sings a longing song about his home. The emperor's favorite daughter asks him to show her this place. The guard carries her on his back to Musashi for seven days and nights. The messengers sent by the emperor and empress did not find the princess for three months. However, she is happy in the home of the guardian and informs them that fate has led them there. The Empress realizes that she will not get her daughter back. From now on only women are used to tend the fire.

Third scene. Pilgrimage (Lady Sarashina, young lady, mother, father). Lady Sarashina suffers from loneliness in her remote mountain village. She dreams of regular visits from a nobleman and hopes that her situation will change when her father gets a better position. Eventually the father is given a position in a very distant province to which he cannot take his family with him. After his departure there are even fewer visitors. Lady Sarashina persuades her mother to go on a pilgrimage with her. However, the mother is so afraid of the dangerous path that they only reach the nearby temple of Kiyomizu.

Fourth scene. Dream with the cat (Lady Sarashina, young lady, sister, cat). At the end of a spring night, Lady Sarashina finds an unusually beautiful cat. She puts them in the north wing of the house. In a dream the cat tells her that she is the reborn daughter of the Dainagon (a high civil servant) who was close friends with Lady Sarashina's sister. From then on, the cat stays in the main house. In the next year the cat dies in a fire. The scene ends with a requiem from all four singers.

Fifth scene. Moon (Lady Sarashina, vocal trio). On a bright, full moon night in autumn, Lady Sarashina cannot fall asleep. She has the impression that the moon is crying and becomes melancholy.

Sixth scene. Mirror dream (Lady Sarashina, girl / dream lady, mother / dream lady, priest). Lady Sarashina dictates a letter in which she writes that her mother ordered a mirror for the Hare Temple. After a prayer, a priest wants to predict the future of Lady Sarashina. In the mirror he sees a plaintive figure on the ground and on the other side the blooming garden and songbirds. Lady Sarashina ignores the dream and writes a poem about the gloomy fate and the happy life.

Seventh scene. Dark night (Lady Sarashina, young lady, lady-in-waiting, noble gentleman). The young lady and a lady-in-waiting sing of the fruitless search for shells on the beach. On a very dark night, Lady Sarashina and another lady-in-waiting watched the priests of a chapel. You are impressed by the appearance of a noble gentleman. The Lord speaks with Lady Sarashina about the appearance of heaven on the nights of the different seasons. After he leaves, Lady Sarashina realizes that he had no idea who she was.

Eighth scene. Memory (Lady Sarashina, young lady, noble lord). In the eighth month of the next year, Lady Sarashina accompanies the princess to the imperial palace. There she unexpectedly meets the noble gentleman again, who had never forgotten that dark night. He promises to play her on the flute the next night like that. But it never comes to that.

Ninth scene. Fate (Lady Sarashina, monologue). Lady Sarashina recalls the priest's prophecy. She now feels like the sad figure in his dream.

Epilogue. Instrumental.

layout

The original text is known under the Japanese title Sarashina Nikki . A Nikki is a kind of poetic diary that not only contains chronologically listed events, but also legends and short poems of the genus Tanka . These consist of five verses with 5–7–5–7–7 syllables, so a total of 31 syllables or moras .

Eötvös uses the actors' voices in different ways. There are whispered passages and passages spoken in different ways. Occasionally, microphones are used. For example, the vocal trio already performs a whispered tanka reinforced with microphones during the overture. The large orchestra contains extensive percussion with many Far Eastern instruments. In Eötvös' previous work As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams , the sound effect of Lady Sarashina's diary writing was achieved in real time by bells with microphone amplification. In the opera, on the other hand, these sounds are prefabricated and recorded from CD at the beginning and end of the piece.

Eötvös and Mezei described the structure as follows: “The first, fifth and ninth scenes are monologues for Lady Sarashina, while the remaining scenes are devoted to invented things, anecdotes, little stories and dreams. The whole opera is nothing more than a portrait of a woman. ”The fifth scene forms the center of the opera. It is also the most intimate of the nine scenes and consists of five tankas. Four of them (the first, second, fourth and fifth) refer to the moon and are sung by Lady Sarashina. The middle third tanka, on the other hand, is assigned to the vocal trio and speaks of spring.

The instrumental prelude of the ninth scene processes the music of the vocal quartet from the end of the previous scene. The opera ends with a short instrumental epilogue of musical material from the final movement of As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, entitled “Bells” .

The opera is steeped in Eastern symbolism. The musicologist Yan Mikirtumov pointed out in this context that the nine scenes of the opera can be related to the city map of the old Japanese imperial capital Heian-kyō . This followed the strict rules of Chinese town planning and was modeled on a chessboard with eight rows and columns. The large main street ran from the Imperial Palace in the north to the south and crossed nine smaller cross streets. Each scene of the opera corresponds to one of these streets - on the east side from north to south, on the west side mirrored from south to north. These two rows correspond to the two sides of the moon, the new moon and the full moon. The moon as the central image of the opera is therefore in the center in both cases and is orbited by the five orbits of the lunar universe. According to the composer, the two phases of the moon are also represented musically by the number five - by the two fifths intervals C – G and A – flat – E flat. This and the two sixth intervals C – As and G – Es formed by their overlapping form the main motif of the opera. The five has a special meaning in this opera. Another example is the vocal line of the spring scene, in which quintuplets predominate - a symbol of the sakura with its five-fold cherry blossoms.

The nine scenes can be arranged in a magic square with 3 × 3 fields so that the horizontal, vertical and diagonal sums always add up to 15 (the number of days between new moon and full moon):

4
dream with the cat 		9
fate 		2
guards
3
pilgrimage 		5
moon 		7
dark night
8
reminder 		1
spring 		6
Mirror Dream

The scenes in the north, south, west and east relate to the protagonist's life, while the corner scenes relate to the dream world. The moon is in the center.

orchestra

The score names the following orchestral line-up:

Work history

Lady Sarashina is an expanded new version of Péter Eötvös' "sound theater" As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, which premiered at the 1999 Donaueschinger Musiktage . In this work he processed seven scenes from a Nikki (diary) of a Japanese poet of the 11th century with the emergency name Sugawara no Takasue no Musume , who was later referred to as "Lady Sarashina". Eötvös suggested this project after trombonist Mike Svoboda asked him for a concerto for trombone and orchestra. An English translation of the diary was already available by Ivan Morris , from Eötvös' wife, the librettist Mari Mezei , who created the text version he used. It is a mixture of dreams, reality and mystical events, which ideally matched the “dream sounds” of his composition. Musically, according to the composer, the work combines “a radiophonic radio play, the soundtracks of cartoons, that is, soundtracks from cartoons, electronic sound transformations, spatial sound, acoustic art as well as film and theater music” with “simple visual elements”. It is occupied by four actors (Lady Sarashina and three "dream voices"), solo alto trombone (as the lady's alter ego), solo double bass trombone and instrumental ensemble.

In 2007, Eötvös revised and expanded the work into an opera on behalf of the Opéra National de Lyon . This version uses the full text of As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams except for a few sentences . Eötvös added two more scenes (“Guardian” and “Pilgrimage”) and used the music almost like a short score as a template for the now large orchestra. The texts originally spoken by the “dream voices” are now mostly sung by the vocal trio. A soprano takes on the role of Sarashina. At first Eötvös thought of assigning the role of the noble gentleman to its own baritone role, so that the opera would have required five singers. However, he refrained from doing so.

The world premiere took place on March 4, 2008 at the Lyon Opera as part of a Japan Opera Festival. The musical direction was Péter Eötvös. The staging and choreography were by Ushio Amagatsu , the stage design by Natsuyuki Nakanishi and the costumes by Masatomo Ota. Mireille Delunsch sang the title role. The vocal trio consisted of Ilse Eerens (soprano), Salome Kammer (mezzo-soprano) and Peter Bording (baritone). It was a co-production with the Opéra-Comique Paris, where the work was played with Mary Plazas in the title role in February 2009. In April 2013, the production with Anu Komsi in the title role was also played in the Warsaw Teatr Wielki .

The world premiere production was awarded the French Prix du Syndicat de la critique 2007/2008 as “best musical creation” (“meilleure création musicale”).

The Hungarian premiere was in October 2014 by the Franz Liszt Music Academy Budapest as part of the Café Budapest Contemporary Arts Festival. The conductor was Gregory Vajda . The production was done by András Almási-Tóth. The production was also performed in concert at the Milan Triennale in September 2015 as part of a Hungarian opera festival. In July 2018 she was staged at the Armel Opera Festival in MuTh Vienna. A video of this performance was made available at Arte Concert .

The Portuguese premiere also took place in October 2014 at the Teatro São Luiz Lisbon in a production by Rares Zaharia. Pedro Amaral conducted here.

Recordings

literature

  • Yan Mikirtumov: LADY SARASHINA by Péter Eötvös: RESEARCH. In: Piano Reduction: Three Specificities, Chapter 6.3: Piano Reduction of Operatic Genre and Similar. PhD thesis from the University of Évora , May 2013 ( online ).
  • Aurore Rivals: Peter Eötvös, le passeur d'un savoir renouvelé. Pour une archeology of the composition or dix ans d'opéra. Doctoral thesis of the Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010 (several chapters deal with this opera; the libretto is also included; online, PDF )
  • Márta Grabócz (Ed.): Les opéras de Peter Eötvös entre Orient et Occident. Éditions des archives contemporaines, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2813000903 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Yan Mikirtumov: LADY SARASHINA by Péter Eötvös: RESEARCH. In: Piano Reduction: Three Specificities, Chapter 6.3: Piano Reduction of Operatic Genre and Similar. PhD thesis from the University of Évora , May 2013 ( online ).
  2. ^ A b Aurore Rivals: Peter Eötvös, le passeur d'un savoir renouvelé. Pour une archeology of the composition or dix ans d'opéra. Doctoral thesis from the Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010.
  3. ↑ Program of the Donaueschinger Musiktage 1999 on swr.de, accessed on August 14, 2018.
  4. ↑ a b Works of the year 1999 - As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams. Interview of the festival director Armin Köhler with the composer Péter Eötvös in the archive of Südwestrundfunk , as of October 2, 2002, accessed on July 20, 2018.
  5. ↑ Julia Spinola: A date with trauma. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 15, 2016, accessed on August 21, 2018.
  6. ^ As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (1998-1999) at IRCAM , accessed on July 20, 2018.
  7. ↑ a b c Performance information for the Armel Opera Festival 2018, accessed on July 20, 2018.
  8. ^ Opera country France. The Lyon Opera looks to Japan: Peter Eötvös' “Lady Sarashina”, Toshio Hosokawa's “Hanjo” and Benjamin Britten's “Curlew River”. In: Opernwelt from May 2008, p. 40.
  9. ↑ Lady Sarashina at the Opéra-Comique , accessed July 20, 2018.
  10. ↑ a b c information on the work on the composer's website, accessed on July 20, 2018.
  11. ^ Palmarès du prix de la critique ( Memento of March 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  12. ↑ Dietmar Polaczek : The Milan Triennale hosts a Hungarian opera festival - and hardly anyone noticed. In: Opernwelt from November 2015, p. 81.
  13. ↑ Péter Eötvös: As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams - UZME Chamber Ensemble, Gergely Vajda at Allmusic , accessed on July 20, 2018.
  14. ↑ Saturday, September 27, 2009 - Live Offerings on operacast.com, accessed on July 20, 2018.
  15. ^ "Lady Sarashina" by Péter Eötvös at the Armel Opera Festival ( Memento from July 22, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) at Arte Concert, video available until January 3, 2019.