King Roger

Opera in three actsLibretto: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Karol SzymanowskiOriginal Polish language version with English subtitles Performances are held with the permission of Universal Edition A.G. The license for the performance of the work was issued by the Zaiks Authors' Association.Premiere: 19.06.1926, WarsawPremiere of this staging: 2.12.2018, TW-ONKOProduction: Kungliga Operan, Národní DivaDuring the performance strobe lights were used

A show designed for adult viewers

The opera King Roger by Karol Szymanowski to the libretto by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz is a great Polish national good. “King Roger has found no successors among Polish artists, and it is also difficult to find direct precursors in European music; it remains a magnificent and solitary work,” wrote Józef Kański in the Opera Guide. The story about the search for meaning, about the meeting of tradition and religion was also an expression of Szymanowski's personal - intellectual, moral and philosophical - reflections. The subject matter of this story is also particularly inspiring for Mariusz Treliński, who has prepared three productions of this title so far. In his interpretations, he explored both ritual threads and ways of self-knowledge. As in a fairy tale in which the protagonist has to answer three riddles, Treliński, in preparing this realization of King Roger, takes us on a journey through the labyrinths of “a wonderful and lonely work”, and at the same time along the meanders of his own imagination — an artist who is mature but still in search.

King Roger is indeed a work with broad intellectual and artistic horizons, the aftermath of Karol Szymanowski's colorful travels to the south of Europe and his interest in ancient and Arab culture deepened by many readings. The exoticism of the Orient and the Dionysian myth, which absorbed it so much, also in the context of reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, merged precisely in this opera.

In 1911, Szymanowski went to Sicily with a wealthy friend, Stefan Spiess, an industrialist and art lover. They returned there after three years, expanding the scope of the expedition to Algiers, Biskira and Tunis, and in 1917 the idea of creating a “Sicilian drama” arose in the head of 35-year-old Charles and his beloved cousin, poet and writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Szymanowski was drawn to the opera, although his first attempt, the one-briefcase Hagith from 1914, a work with a biblical and erotic theme, was not very successful — the composer failed to avoid the mistakes inherent in a debutant in this difficult musical and stage genre. And yet the opera continued to tempt him: “Stage music is truly a magical means,” he believed.

The first sketches of King Roger were made in Elizavetgrad at the turn of 1917 and 1918, where Iwaszkiewicz stayed and where the Szymanowski family moved from Tymoszówka. Seeing the collapse of the world known to each other, both artists sought escape in magical fiction created in their own imagination.

Iwaszkiewicz closed the libretto in 1920, and Szymanowski added a lot to it, adding garlands of words. His work was difficult because times had changed. The composer was already thinking elsewhere — in the mountains, at the folklore of Podhale, which he admired during his first stay in Zakopane in 1921. It is as if settling permanently in Poland, where he settled after the war, having abandoned the Ukrainian steppes where he grew up, and travels to the South, awakened him from the oriental dream of his youth.

He completed the “Psiakrewa Opera”, as he called it at that time, in the summer of 1924, and the instrumentation of the entire, albeit not very extensive, work took him the most time. The premiere staging took place at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw on June 19, 1926 — conducted by Emil Młynarski, directed by Adolf Popławski, set design by Wincenty Drabik. The premiere Roger was Eugeniusz Mossakowski, Pastor Adam Dobosz. The composer's sister, Stanisława Szymanowska played the role of the royal wife, Roksana.

King Roger closed the period founded on the fascination with antiquity and the Orient in the work of Karol Szymanowski, in which such beautiful, sensual works were created as Hafiz's Love Songs, Myths for violin and piano, Symphony No. 3 “Song of the Night” to the words of the Persian poet Rumi or the First Violin Concerto. When Roger was playing in Warsaw, his creator had already had Stabat Mater inspired by popular Catholicism behind him and was thinking seriously about the Harnasis. And yet, years later, he recognized King Roger as the best music that came out of his pen. In 1949, the work was staged in Sicily, in the Teatro Massimo towering above Palermo. The witness of this event was Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who wrote that the play, directed by Bronisław Horowicz, a student of Leon Schiller, “was close to perfection.” However, to Iwaszkiewicz's daughter, who watched the play with her father, the real Sicily seemed distant from the dreamy, dreamy, mystical that Karol Szymanowski portrayed in the opera. However, it could not be otherwise. “King Roger's Sicily is the territory of the composer's soul,” Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz admitted in Meetings with Szymanowski.

King Roger's international renaissance came in 1998 when Simon Rattle, head of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted Roger at the London Proms and recorded it in full on EMI records. Since then, the “psycho-Greek opera” has been played in Paris, London, Madrid and Bilbao, Santa Fe, Frankfurt and Bregenz, Sydney and Melbourne, among others. Szymanowski would be pleased.

Choir and Orchestra of the Great Theatre - National Operas, dancers, actorsand children from the Władysław Skoraczewski Children's Choir “Artos”