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| Gergely Vajda |
Gergely Vajda is rehearsing the 85-minute opera for a few days in Budapest with its Hungarian leads: Zoltán Gavodi, who is singing the role of Naphta, and Péter Kálmán, who is playing Hofrat Behrens.
?Everything in the novel focuses on the number seven, thus seven singers and an eleven-member chamber orchestra perform the chamber opera, which has seven scenes and a prologue,? said Vajda, who also conducts the orchestra in the piece.
Vajda said he had first been to Davos twenty years earlier as a clarinetist. Last year, the Ensemble Laboratorium asked him to conduct an interesting concert, and it was then that he first got to know the Schatzalp Hotel, where the Davos Festival concerts were held. The building has maintained the atmosphere from the first decade of the 20th century, Vajda said.
It was then that Katja Mann, the wife of the German writer Thomas Mann, was treated for tuberculosis at the hotel, then a sanatorium, which provided her husband with the inspiration to write The Magic Mountain, one of the great works of modern European literature.
Vajda suggested to festival director Graziella Contratto the idea of writing an opera there based on The Magic Mountain, and he found support for the suggestion.
?I wanted to compose the piece for 2011, but Graziella Contratto insisted that the premiere take place this year, which is the 25th anniversary of the festival,? Vajda said. ?I don?t like this kind of rushing ? it?s better to have time to make corrections and to get the singers to grow into their roles ? but some interesting things came out of working at such a fast pace: I had to write the piano parts knowing that the performers expected not a single note to change,? he added.
The Magic Mountain is a Bildungsroman and if it is to be presented literally, one would have to write a seven-hour opera, which is impossible nowadays, Vajda said. But the novel is about time, and music is nothing more than time, which is why it can be compressed well, he added.
The libretto for the opera was written by Bettina Geyer, the director of the Darmstadt Theatre.
?I got a lot of help from Bettina. She read the German text for me so I could hear the real pitch, as the opera is in German,? Vajda said. ?She is also directing the piece,? he added.
Because of the pace of the project, the singers in the opera were found on the internet. Falko Hönisch will play Hans Castorp, Sylvia Vadimova is Madame Chauchat, Michael Leibundgut is singing the role or Peeperkorn and Marcell Bakonyi, a member of the Salzburg Landestheater, is singing Settembrini.
In February, the Oregon Symphony will perform Vajda?s Trip to Fremido, based on the novel by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy. The piece will be performed in November in Budapest, at the French Institute, as well as in Pécs. The English language narration will be by Tibor Szervét.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
