The first and at the same time the last opera by the composer Pavel Haas, who was sent to the gas chamber in Auschwitz by the Nazis in 1944, will be performed by the Moravian-Silesian National Theatre. The tragicomic story called The Charlatan is directed by Ondřej Havelka, with music by Jakub Klecker.
Thursday’s premiere at the Antonín Dvořák Theater is followed by the nearest reruns on October 12 and 16.
Pavel Haas was the older brother of the more famous actor Hugo Haas and one of the most talented students of the composer Leoš Janáček. He wrote the libretto for The Charlatan himself based on the novel Doctor Eisenbart, which was published in 1928 by the German writer Josef Winckler. The musical tragicomedy depicts the life of a wandering doctor, charlatan, ointment maker and wounder Pustrpalko, who performs at fairs.
Conductor Jakub Klecker and director Ondřej Havelka have now decided to commemorate the work. “We were faced with an unexplored and unperformed title, which is the composer’s first work and, unfortunately, his only operatic work. The musical material of the opera bears the traits of Haas’s teacher Leoš Janáček, but the author builds the structure and construction of the areas in a very distinctive way,” says the conductor.
Havelka describes the opera as wonderful, mysterious and mysteriously beautiful. “When I started thinking about staging The Charlatan, I first searched for the reason why Pavel Haas chose this particular topic, what he wanted to tell the audience through the story of Dr. Pustrpalek,” he mentions. He finally accepted the author’s attempt to pay tribute to the medical profession as a plausible explanation.
Haas, a native of Brno, composed the opera between 1934 and 1937. It premiered on April 2, 1938, in today’s Mahen Theater in Brno. Three years later, the author was interned in Terezín due to his Jewish origin. On October 17, 1944, he perished in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
Miloš Horák, Pavol Kubáň, Ivana Ambrúsová or Eva Dřízgová-Jirušová will play the main roles in the Ostrava production. Costume designer Kateřina Štefková and scenographer Jakub Kopecký also participated in the project.
The Moravian-Silesian National Theater presents the new product as part of the free cycle of the Terezín Composers’ Opera, in which it has already presented works by Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann. On October 16, 1944, all three artists were forced to board the same transport from Terezín to Auschwitz. Shortly afterwards, the Nazis murdered them.