Word: slovakian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...religion (Francis Poulenc's The Dialogues of the Carmelites); to intellectual battles of the past (Paul Hindemith's The Harmony of the World, an opera about the astronomer Kepler). Last week two more noteworthy operas held the stage in East Berlin and Naples. Both are by veterans: Slovakian-born Composer Eugen Suchon, 49, and Italian Composer Renzo Rossellini, 50 (sometime music critic and brother of Film Director Roberto Rossellini). Both works are coincidentally and aptly titled The Vortex, but the conflicts they describe are significantly different. While the Czechoslovakian Vortex shows man at war with himself...
...rarely seen by Western critics until its production this month at East Berlin's State Opera. It will be staged in Belgrade, Budapest, and in the Soviet Union, eventually may find its way West. The opera's plot concerns the trials of a Slovakian peasant girl named Katrena whose lover is found murdered in a forest clearing. At first suspected, Katrena is later cleared and promptly marries an earlier suitor named Ondrej. When she bears a child ahead of schedule, Ondrej flies into a jealous rage, reveals in a drunken soliloquy that he is the murderer, later confesses...
...fleshed the bare bones of his plot with some moving psychological insights. The libretto was admirably supplemented by Suchon's muscular score, which reminded the enthusiastic audience of the music of Czechoslovakia's Leos (Jenufa) Janacek and Hungary's Bela Bartok. Strongly rhythmic, it combined rich Slovakian folk flavor with pungently powerful orchestration. In Katrena's lament over her fate, strikingly sung by Soprano Anny Schlemm, and in Ondrej's affecting admission of guilt, Suchon provided crowd-rousing vocal high points that might well place The Vortex in the standard operatic literature...