Tragœdia temporis Interview by Kata Kondor before the premiere of Act I, Fidelio.hu
This year is Imre Madách’s anniversary, but judging by your previous statements, you have been interested in The Tragedy of Man for much longer. Where did the idea to compose a piece of music come from?
In 2018, the scholarship application of MMA (Hungarian Academy of Arts) was announced for the first time, and I was already the composer-in-residence of the Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra. I once sat in their office and we talked about how good it would be to apply – but with what? The director of the orchestra, Réka Ortutay, recommended Madách’s work, which I thought was impossible at first, but then the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. After all, how well it fits into my repertoire as an opera author, my previous piece, The Master and Margarita, also represents a kind of magical realism.
In a well-defined, realistic world, the supernatural appears all of a sudden – I’m not saying that it crawls under the door, but rather kicks the door in, as heads immediately fall when Woland enters the scene. If you look at the history of opera, baroque composers worshiped transcendental beings, then Mozart began to portray more and more human characters. This was the beginning of the more realistic trend of opera, which culminated in Carmen or Wozzeck, the characters are very lifelike, the goal is to make the otherwise unnatural thing that the characters sing on stage seem as real as possible. In the meantime, the supernatural reappears in Wagner, but he also humanizes mythological creatures. You can join this trend. So far, I have only reached Woland, but now I have gone one step higher, because in my new play the Lord also appears.
The Tragedy of Man is also related to your previous operas in that you again worked on very significant literary material. Isn’t it risky to touch such large works?
We can approach the question from two points of view: on the one hand, it is difficult to set them to music because their size is overwhelming. On the other hand, Madách’s work is one of the peaks of the entire European literature. I realized this at a theater performance, the play was directed by Silviu Purcărete at the Csiky Gergely Theater in Timişoara, and my friend András Visky was the dramaturg. They brought the show to Budapest, I watched it twice, and it brought tears to my eyes when a Romanian director informed me that The Tragedy of Man is part of the European mainstream. I felt that it was no weaker than Goethe’s Faust – well, when does a Hungarian person have such a feeling? Perhaps only with Bartók and Liszt. In addition, Madách’s play is also a very exciting philosophical work, even if we do not agree with it on every point. Although I understand his pessimism, despite all his genius, I don’t necessarily sympathize with him – the basic dramaturgical principle of the play is that the world is perpetually going bad. An idea is created, then devalued and fails. Then we also considered the anti-feminist, anti-woman overtones of the work to be problematic, which is somewhat understandable, since Madách is disappointed in his wife, but still not nice to her.
Bringing philosophy and theoretical issues to the stage is also not an easy task, and you are also attracted to works that are not easily adapted, since your previous two operas, The Master and Margarita and The Stork Caliph were also based on novels.
It was clear from Purcărete’s direction that The Tragedy of Man is perfectly capable of acting as a drama on stage, creating dramatic tension and a real confrontation. But really, you can see that I tend to push myself out ( laughs). The Stork Caliph today, but in your twenties you rely on your instincts. After graduating from the Academy of Music, we still don’t know anything, during the course we have to learn professional skills and what we want from music. At the same time, the opera is also a logistical issue, The Stork Caliph worked, among other things, because Zsófia Balla wrote the libretto with skillful stage dramaturgy, but now Tragoedia temporis , the already mentioned András Visky. There is no more important actor in opera writing than the dramatist.
How did it come about who you collaborated with on the upcoming play?
This is an important question because being a librettist is a difficult profession, and few people can do it well. The poet has to step back a bit and do lumberjack work at the same time, but still be artistic. Metastasio’s librettos are not famous for their expressive power either, but rather that they work well and give the composer good opportunities. The Master and Margarita was Szabolcs Várady, who did an excellent job, for the new play he first recommended someone instead of himself, but that person left the work during the creative process. At that time, the MMA competition was already underway, and we had the chance to work with András Visky on the piece. He is also from Cluj, like me, and he is an important figure in the artistic life of the city, they run an excellent art theater with Gábor Tompa. When I asked her out, she immediately said yes, much to my delight. The Tragedy of Man better than him, he has already worked with several great directors on it. I went to see him in Cluj, and we worked on the play for days. When it turned out that we still didn’t have a librettist, we finally asked Judit Ágnes Kiss, who quickly prepared the text.
You mentioned that you made changes to the Madách work. What exactly changes in your piece?
I wanted to write a work with five operatic characters, but Madách’s Tragedy there are only four: in accordance with operatic traditions, the Lord is a basso profondo, Adam is a lyrical tenor, and Eve is a soprano. I originally thought of Lucifer as a countertenor, but then I realized that it could cause a lot of orchestration problems, because such a delicate voice is easily suppressed by the orchestra. He was a countertenor in both of my previous operas, so I know his advantages, but also his disadvantages. Eventually, Lucifer became a baritone. Then I thought, we need someone who vocally stands above all this, a child’s voice or a coloratura soprano. When I told András, after a little thought, he remembered that in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs, someone who existed before creation speaks. He also showed the beautiful quote: “From the beginning, I was with the Lord. I was there before he began to create the earth. At the very first, the Lord gave life to me. When I was born, there were no oceans or springs of water. My birth was before mountains were formed or hills were put in place. It happened long before God had made the earth or any of its fields or even the dust. I was there when the Lord put the heavens in place and stretched the sky over the surface of the sea. I was with him when he placed the clouds in the sky and created the springs that fill the ocean. I was there when he set boundaries for the sea to make it obey him, and when he laid foundations to support the earth. I was right beside the Lord, helping him plan and build. I made him happy each day, and I was happy at his side. I was pleased with his world and pleased with its people.” See, this is what a good dramaturg is like: I ask a musical question, and he already puts the ideological background behind it. We fell in love with this idea so much that we decided to make the Child the main character. If I want, he is a prototype of the Messiah, or an angelic child, the embodiment of humor and light, definitely a very positive figure. Of course, it is a complicated opera dramaturgical question, how do you shape a metaphysical character. Even the fact that the Almighty has to appear on stage is extremely difficult, this does not happen in many stage works, Madách also only has “the voice of the Lord”. We quickly realized that the only option left for us was the well-proven Wagnerian path: we had to humanize the characters. A small child and his grandfather appear, who sometimes behave like supernatural beings, for example creating, but at the same time they are ordinary beings, since they create the world as a child draws. They have human feelings, but they are capable of more.
In your cases, what will be the alternative to Madách’s pessimism?
The basic conflict for us comes from the fact that the Child creates the world together with the Lord, just as the grandson plays with his grandfather. They are captivated by the fever of creation, which is full of happiness. But then everything turns bad. About two-thirds of the way through the play, at the golden intersection, the child turns to face the Lord and says to him: “You didn’t promise that. I went into it with the idea that we would create something that would be more beautiful than anything else. But it didn’t happen that way. You created an imperfect world, through me, with me, and I can’t stand that. So I get out. Put me in the stones, in the grass, in the trees.” There will be a big coloratura aria, a very sad scene, one’s heart will be crushed. Of course, the child also appears in the work after that, but in both modern colors, the phalanster and the Eskimo, he appears in circumstances where he is vulnerable, where he is abused. Then the end of the work takes a turn for the better, with us it does not end with “man: fight and trust with confidence!”, but with an even more radical thought: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” We don’t see this in our world, that’s why we wrote it.
Are there any quotes left from the Madách text?
Rather, we only used the text as a raw material, leaving out the sentences that became verbs. In the original, these mean very different things, which is why we changed the title of the work. The tragedy of the times – because this is the biggest tragedy in human life, that everything is limited and bound by time. Time flies by.
As far as I can tell, you was more interested in the transcendency of the Tragedy than in its philosophical thoughts on history or the structure of society.
They are not missing from our piece either. Eight of the fifteen colors remained, the Egyptian, the Greek, and then the Roman, but expanded. First we see the frolicking youths on the scene, then a dead slave is brought to be buried, and the revelers mock him. It’s a repulsive scene, and when you can’t go on enjoying yourself anymore, the apostle Peter (played by the same singer as the Lord) arrives and converts everyone. But while the main dramaturgical game is taking place between the Lord and the Child (does creation make sense), another one runs parallely, between the Lord and Lucifer, as with Madách. When Lucifer sees the people on their knees, he steps in as the anti-pope and starts a revolution that results in general slaughter. This is the second act finale, Lucifer has won. At the beginning of the third act, the Lord sits broken and thinks that he would rather do it all back, wipe everything off the face of the earth. But suddenly he sees the child playing in front of him and changes his mind.
Similar to the way that Adam will not commit suicide with Madách when he finds out that he will have a child.
Exactly. After that, however, an interesting change follows: the London color, which showed Madách’s present, is omitted and replaced by a Hungarian color. I always found it strange why it wasn’t in the original. Perhaps Madách did not consider Hungary an important enough place in world history. The protagonist of this is the Hungarian personification of freedom, Sándor Petőfi. It starts with a love scene, essentially a bed scene, but Petőfi has to leave Júlia Szendrey alone, he has to go to battle. The figures of the French Revolution appear in the picture, a trio of guillotines, and they tell Petőfi that he cannot expect anything good, that freedom will never come. He leaves anyway, and even though Eve and the Child wait for him home, he does not return. Freedom is lost. The feeling is more and more suffocating, which causes the child to collapse. He cannot bear it when he sees adults, including the Lord, as helpless.
Isn’t Lucifer relegated to the background because the child’s conflict with the Lord will be so prominent?
No, because it is incredibly rewarding to set a negative opera character to music. He has the best scenes. For example, after creation, when the Lord and the Child add Adam and Eve, the first sex scene in history follows, and Lucifer watches. As a result of what happened, he makes serious accusations to the head of the Lord, who breaks down and says that Lucifer should only test people, he is sure that he will win even then, they will pass the test. Lucifer draws the attention of the human couple that they too can find out what the truth is, and the tree of knowledge lights up, so beautifully, the likes of which have not even been seen in Paradise. This is a musical moment reminiscent of Wagner. In the meantime, the couple is terrified, as God has forbidden them to touch the tree. “I know this God, I was here at the beginning of creation ,” says Lucifer, “offensive, envious and afraid of power. No one understands why he is God.” These stage machinations can be set to music so well that everyone will remember Lucifer from the scene.
Will we now hear the first act of the four-act work, which is still being prepared, at the Palace of Arts?
Yes, but this is the longest act. Originally, I wanted to split the play into two parts, but then I realized that the structure is so complicated, with everyone changing into everyone else, that I wouldn’t mind if the first act remained completely linear. God creates the world, and everything follows in a cause-and-effect relationship, falling into sin and punishment. The triple unit is a dramatic device that works extremely well.
I can see in the score that there are a lot of percussion instruments in the piece.
Not so much, I already wrote a batting competition for Amadinda, there was much more in that ( laughs). And I rarely use them. The basic concept is that at the beginning of time we start from completely a cappella vocals. In the prologue, which takes place even earlier, “minus one”, there are two synthesizers, then when the creation starts, first a choir is heard, then the percussion instruments, then the strings, and the wind instruments as they create one thing, one by one. After that, the batsmen don’t have as much of a role anymore.
If we look at the score, we also see that you call the piece an opera, while the description of the concert includes a scenic oratorio, which can be performed with or without a stage performance.
What really distinguishes an opera from an oratorio? Most of all, oratorio can focus on musical instruments, while opera has to think in stage actions. However, the history of opera has blurred the boundaries many times. For example, at the end of creation, I have a magnificent closing chorus, which is typical of oratorios. At the same time, I can see more and more what the characters are doing, Lucifer, who is in the chorus for the first time, how he gets upset when the Lord creates people, how he desires Eve, whom he can never have, and how he becomes an enemy, begins to machinate. How he becomes a monomaniacal obsessive who can neither laugh nor relax, sees the bad in everything and wants everything immediately. These forms of behavior make the play stage-like. How the Child is terrified to death, when the Lord is merciless and knows no mercy at the time of sin. And he tells him: you are a compassionate, loving god, you can’t do this. The characters are very human, they behave like mortals.
To what extent do you use the stylistic games that are typical of you in the representation of this plot, which is broken down into colors?
It is very difficult for me to answer this, because the work of a composer is a mixture of awareness and instinct. By the time I was 47, I realized a few things about the style in which I compose, and I see the dangers of this eclecticism: you will constantly feel that you have heard this style before, only then it was much better ( laughs). I try to make it according to my own taste, so that the listener doesn’t wonder what he’s looking for here with so many styles, but that the various musical materials create unity. In this work, the leitmotifs help, there are roughly five easy-to-remember details that recur in the piece and also guide the listener through the stylistic games. The creation begins with the fugue of the children’s angels – girls’ choir – and right away we hear the light motif repeated many times: C-G-D-C. It will be sung a million times, in different situations, and when the Lord expels the human couple from Paradise, the motif changes to a tritone, which is said to be the devil’s interval. In that context, the audience will feel this is quite a rude intervention.
Will each color have its own music?
I imagine that classical music styles rule in Paradise, that post-Mozart world, which is very close to me anyway, and then as we get to earth, pop music will creep in as a logical consequence.
Isn’t there a kind of value judgment in this?
Of course (laughs). But I love people no matter how stupid they can be. The same goes for women, without them the world would be completely meaningless. Assuming that God is omnipotent, he probably also took into account the fallibility of man and loves these creatures even when they turn out to be weak, vulnerable, gullible, and gullible. Even if they are sometimes mean.
