Dvořák Prague promises programme treat
The Dvořák Prague Festival is preparing the world premiere of a concert staging of Antonín Dvořák’s first opera Alfred on September 17. The almost forgotten piece is set to be performed by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno and soloists helmed by German conductor Heiko Mathias Förster. The main singing roles will be taken by Petra Froese (Alvina), Jarmila Baxová (Rowena), Ferdinand von Bottmer (Harald) and Felix Rumpf (Alfred).
The score of Dvořák’s debut opera Alfred with an original libretto in German was not performed during the author’s lifetime (1841–1904) and was not even published. The work was first performed in Olomouc in 1938, although in a Czech translation.
This year’s premiere of the original German version will be recorded and released on CD. Czech Radio, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the ArcoDiva music label, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Czech-German Fund for the Future have cooperated on the project.
The antonin-dvorak.cz website describes the circumstances surrounding the writing of the opera Alfred thus: “At the time of the composition of his first opera Alfred, the 29-year-old Dvořák had for eight years been a member of the orchestra at the Provisional Theatre as a viola player. Performing varied operas of past and present on an almost daily basis had a major influence on his approach to writing music. In addition, important Czech-produced works began to appear in the repertoire during the 1860s, above all Bedřich Smetana’s The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, The Bartered Bride and Dalibor. At that time, Dvořák had already produced a great number of pieces in various genres: symphonies, string quartets, songs, etc. The composer’s determination to also master the opera form was, however, conditional on obtaining a suitable libretto, which was far from easy: the Czech libretto literature was relatively scant and also of questionable standard. As Smetana lamented in an article: There is a greater shortage of good librettos than of good composers.” In addition, Dvořák was still completely unknown as a writer and did not have the funds to purchase a new libretto. He therefore decided to use a German text that was almost 60 years old, Alfred der Grosse (Alfred the Great), written by the German neo-romantic poet Carl Theodor Körner (1791–1813). Before Dvořák did so, the libretto, which is set somewhere in England in 878 during a war with the Vikings, had been set to music by Johann Philip Schmidt, Josef Joachim Raff and Friedrich von Flotow, while even before them Ludwig van Beethoven had apparently expressed interest in the material. Gaetano Donizetti had composed on an opera based on the same story, though his Alfredo il Grande is composed to a different text. It was the only case of Dvořák setting a German libretto to music and if he originally considered staging it at the Provisional Theatre he could have expected a Czech translation to be ordered. This practice was far from unusual at that time; examples include operas by Škroup and Skuherský, while even the libretto of Smetana’s Libuše was originally written in Germany.”
The seventh edition of the Dvořák Prague festival will take place from September 8 to 22.
