Jules Massenet: Don Quichotte

In association with the Mime Department of the Faculty of Music, Academy of Music and Drama in Prague. Featuring members of the SACRA CIRCUS Prague acrobatics team.

The protagonists of Jules Massenet’s operas and oratorios are mostly female, as is indeed implied already by the names of his works: Thaïs, Hérodias, La Navarroise, Sappho, Ariane, Thérèse, Grisélidis, Cendrillon, Cléopâtre, Manon, Marie-Magdeleine. Setting an exception to the rule, the hero of Massenet’s last opera is a man, after all. Namely, Don Quixote, in the eponymous opera subtitled “comédie héroïque.” Massenet’s librettist, Henri Cain, drew his material from a French stage adaptation of the Cervantes novel, from the pen of Massenet’s contemporary, Jacques Le Lorrain, entitled Le Chevalier de la longue figure. The role of Don Quixote was made to measure for the legendary Russian bass, Fyodor Shalyapin. The latter triumphed in the opera’s premiere, in Monte Carlo, on February 19, 1910, and it was doubtless thanks to him that the work became widely staged and known. He also guest-appeared at the National Theatre in Prague, on June 1, 1934. The premises of today’s Prague State Opera saw one previous staging of Don Quichotte, a production that ran from 1965–1967 on the stage of the then Smetana Theatre under the baton of Albert Rosen and directed by Luděk Mandaus.

Premiere: Mar 18, 2010

Response in the press

A word of the stage director

When the stage designer Daniel Dvořák and myself started to ponder the concept of the opera’’s stage direction and set design, we wanted to avoid the cliché of established ideas about Don Quixote – the guy clad in armour and brandishing a lance, as the hidalgo has been known from the drawings of the French artist Gustave Doré. Our aim was to find a form of stage imagery corresponding with that which is present in Massenet’’s lyrical music, to capture the feelings of melancholy and nostalgia, while at the same time showing the kind of reality that turns into fantasy without anyone even noticing. Eventually, we found inspiration in the atmosphere of the black-and-white Italian Neorealistic film production of the late 1950s and early 60s, and also to some extent in Federico Fellini’’s films from that period. We suddenly hit at something there that appeared to be emotionally consonant with Massenet’’s music: a melancholy existing in symbiosis with a dreamlike quality, reality alongside a yearning for illusion. We opted for an all but empty stage, a space representing a plot behind a film studio. All of this, however, is perceived merely on the plane of feeling, as we can in fact just as well be somewhere else there, for this is most of all a magic space of stage metaphor. We find ourselves in an interval – as though the shooting of a film has just ended, and the making of another one is yet to start. One illusion has come to a close, and a new one is only just brewing. Dulcinée is a young woman of the kind you see in those Italian films, an actress perhaps, or perhaps not; and as for Don Quichotte and Sancho Panza, they are a pair of retired clowns whom nobody needs any more, whose fame, if there ever was any, has waned. We may take a laugh or two at their tricks, yet at the same time we feel compassion. To be sure, though, we can just as well exploit them, feeling no remorse. All that said, the two figures as known from Doré’’s illustrations do appear on stage after all, on several occasions – as a sort of mirror held up to our pair of clowns, as another element of the dream world.

This indistinct borderline between illusion and reality suggests that the credo of our staging is – and here I get back to what I said earlier on – the imparting of emotions and atmosphere present in Massenet’’s lyrical music. Of course, it does also include epic sequences, like the down-to-earth dance in Act One, the story with the necklace and bandits in Act Three, or the party in Dulcinée’’s house in Act Four, involving a society of decadent types not unlike that seen in Fellini’’s La dolce vita. But in the final analysis, even the improbable scene with the bandits fits in and on the whole corresponds with our concept: it, too, contains a bit of truth (even the most wicked thug can be won over by a demonstration of goodness), as well as a bit of the big illusion that even something like that could really happen.

The Rosinante will be a Fiat 500 with a folding top, and Sancho’’s ass will be a motorbike. This also fits in with the atmosphere of 1950s and 60s Italian films. The Fiat and the motorbike are actually compatible with that road-movie parable of a journey in pursuit of an illusion… Of that special kind of eccentricity which prods Quixote on his expedition, driven by the yearning for an ideal. In the end, he loses his illusions – and he dies. There is no longer any place to go.

Jiří Nekvasil