Maddalena (Prokofiev)

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Work data
Title: Maddalena
Original title: Маддалена
Original language: Russian
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Libretto : Magda Gustavovna Lieven Orlowa
Premiere: 1979
Playing time: about 45 minutes
Place and time of the action: Italy, 16th century
people
  • Maddalena, soprano
  • Duenna, soprano
  • Gennaro, tenor
  • Romeo, tenor
  • Stenjo, baritone

Maddalena ( Russian Маддалена ), op. 13, is an opera by Sergei Prokofjew . The model for the libretto was a play by Magda Gustavovna Lieven Orlowa (under the pseudonym Count Lieven ), which she wrote in 1905. The opera, composed between 1911 and 1913, remained unpublished. Prokofiev's fifth opera was the first to receive an opus number , but was never performed during the composer's lifetime. Completed by Edward Downes , it premiered on March 25, 1979 in the BBC London studio .

history

Maddalena and Undine belong to the operas of Prokofiev composed at the St. Petersburg Conservatory ; it remained unfinished. Prokofiev orchestrated only the first of the four scenes in the one-act opera. Maddalena was “a melodramatic, richly decorated work written in pompous language,” wrote Natalja Swankina; “At the same time it is excellently built, the plot is inexorably reaching its climax, and the conclusion is shocking with its complete unexpectedness.” The atmosphere of the opera and especially the character of the main heroine are inspired by the Renaissance era ; the female type that echoes Maddalena , the femme fatale , the female vamp, is very popular at the beginning of the 20th century, u. a. in works like Salomé by Oscar Wilde or Lulu by Frank Wedekind .

Prokofiev's Maddalena is associated with the musical theater of the turn of the century; Some stylistic and dramaturgical peculiarities put the opera in the vicinity of Salome (1891) by Richard Strauss or Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók (1911). "The traits of a successor to the works of Verism are clearly noticeable, including the Russian chamber opera ."

Roshdestvensky judged: “The youth work introduces us to the style of the mature master;” NJ Mayakovsky described the second version from 1913 as “excellent in every respect.” “The scenic effect, which is not entirely without melodrama, the high level of interaction between drama and music, the beauty of the musical material, ”judged Natalja Swankina,“ all of this allows us to view the Maddalena as a work that was inspired by the dramatic chief oeuvres of Verdi and Tchaikovsky. ”

In 1979 the fragment was fully orchestrated by Edward Downes, the world premiere took place around 1980 in Graz.

Performance history

With the prospect of a theater production in 1913, Prokofiev revised the music. However, the project does not materialize; when he left the Soviet Union in 1918, he left the manuscript of the opera in the hands of his Moscow publishing house. It may come back into Prokofiev's possession on his return. When he finally returned to his homeland in 1936, the manuscript stayed in Paris. It finally came into the possession of the publishers Boosey & Hawkes in London in 1960. The composer's widow, Lina Prokofiev, who turned out to be the rightful owner of the manuscript, commissioned the English musician Edward Downes to write a complete version. This version premiered with the broadcast of Maddalena in a studio recording on BBC Radio 3 on March 25, 1979, with Jill Gomez in the title role, which had the lead role in the performance at the Graz Opera under the direction of Edward Downes on November 28, 1981 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Worldcat
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Natalja Swankina: Prokofiev's operas written in the Conservatory . In: International Music Festival - Sergei Prokofiev and contemporary music from the Soviet Union. Program book. City of Duisburg, 1990, p. 148 ff.
  3. ↑ Joel Flegler Fanfare - Volume 13, Issues 5-6, 1990, p. 250
  4. ↑ Donal Henahan: Opera: Maddalena, a fragment from Prokofiev (1982) in The New York Times
  5. ↑ Wierzbicki, pp. 19-20
  6. ^ McAllister, 206
  7. ↑ Nicky Adam (Ed.): Jill Gomez. In: Who's Who in British Opera. Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1993
  8. ↑ James Wierzbicki: Maddalena: Prokofiev's Adolescent Opera. Opera Quarterly, Vol. 1, 1983, pp. 17-35