Ryszard Peryt (1947-2019) - A fond recollection of an immense opera directorial talent
Ryszard Peryt (1947-2019) |
The Director of the Polish Royal Opera, Ryszard Peryt (1985 - 2005), has died. For twenty years he was the Director of the Warsaw Chamber Opera. His magnum opus was the production of all the stage works of Mozart. In 1991 twenty-five of these works were created to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the composer's death, at the time a unique European project. Annual Mozart festivals and cycles followed. Not only operas by Mozart but also Baroque operas by Peri, Caccini and Landi through an unforgettable Monteverdi cycle, a Handel festival and rarely performed work by John Blow, Henry Purcell and numerous others. His international directorial reputation was outstanding.
Here was a truly Renaissance man in many outstanding disciplines - director, actor, doctor and professor of theatre arts, lecturer at the Theatre Academy of Warsaw. He had been presented with many prestigious Polish cultural awards including the Polonia Restituta in 2008 and Zlota Gloria Artis in 2011 and in 2018 a musical award by the Polish Ministry of Culture.
Here was a truly Renaissance man in many outstanding disciplines - director, actor, doctor and professor of theatre arts, lecturer at the Theatre Academy of Warsaw. He had been presented with many prestigious Polish cultural awards including the Polonia Restituta in 2008 and Zlota Gloria Artis in 2011 and in 2018 a musical award by the Polish Ministry of Culture.
As I did not know him personally terribly well, I feel the finest tribute I can pay him is to recall my experience of his directorial achievements in Mozart during those unforgettable festivals in the 1990s in the golden age of Warszawska Opera Kameralna. His recent achievements at the Polish Royal Opera were also considerable but those earlier days had the deepest influence on me.
Below is an extract from the chapter devoted to Warszawska Opera Kameralna from my book A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland (London 2008)
Below is an extract from the chapter devoted to Warszawska Opera Kameralna from my book A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland (London 2008)
Ryszard Peryt as I remember him |
The
music of Chopin had been the overriding reason for my coming to Poland and it
was with surprise and delight that in the space of six weeks I was unexpectedly
presented with all twenty five works that Mozart wrote for the stage. Mozart was adored by Chopin above all others save Johann Sebastian Bach, so the connection with my beloved Polish composer was intensified. The cycle
was performed by one of the most remarkable opera companies in Europe , the Warszawska
Opera Kameralna (Warsaw Chamber Opera). Warsaw is the only capital city in
the world where such an historically accurate Mozart cycle together with much
of his instrumental music is performed on original instruments every year.
The
city has had a distinguished operatic heritage since the early baroque period
when it was the only capital other than Rome
to have had an opera theatre that hosted famous Italian soloists. Many works
were especially written for the Warsaw
stage during the Jagiełłon and Vasa dynasties of the seventeenth century. The
volatile Tarquinio Merula wrote a theatrical duet called Satiro e
Corisca for King Zygmunt III Vasa performed in Warsaw in the summer of 1626 some ten years
before public operatic activities began in Venice . The Warsaw Chamber Opera continues
this baroque tradition with a magnificent annual Monteverdi festival where all
the composer’s operas and staged works are performed.
The authorities finally allocated the company the use of the former Calvinist
or Dissident Church , a fine neo-classical building by
the Saxon architect Szymon Bogomił Zug. The small building was in disrepair and
after a tortuous eleven years of redesign and procrastination opened in 1986 on
the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the opera company. The
auditorium seats 160 and the resulting intimacy is perfect for operas
originally conceived for the court or theatres far smaller than today. The
company under the talented theatre and opera director Ryszard Peryt coupled
with the vivid scenic imagination of Andrzej Sadowski produced the
unprecedented first Mozart festival of twenty-five stage works in 1991, the
bicentenary year of the composer’s death. The opera company has made numerous
recordings and as a musicologist he founded the Sutkowski Edition which publishes early Polish music, scholarly
tomes on the history of Polish music and more esoteric subjects such The History of Polish Organ Cases as Works
of Art.
‘I call my opera house the ambassador’s club!’ Sutkowski told me
enthusiastically. He has a loyal following in the Warsaw diplomatic corps and is considered an
institution in Warsaw .
The young singers
could be heard warming their voices with fragments of scales, popular tunes or
the arias to come. A moment’s inattention might inadvertently allow a window to
drift slightly open to reveal a costumed singer adjusting his wig or a soprano
applying makeup or adjusting her breasts in a corset before a lighted mirror. A
violin or flute from the orchestra might be practising a particularly difficult
leap. The atmosphere was intimate, perfectly
eighteenth century, an almost Commedia
del Arte prelude of youthful exuberance in anticipation of the opera to
come.
My first experience of this theatre was with Lucio Silla, an opera seria
composed in 1772 when Mozart was 16 for the carnival season at the Teatro Regio
Ducale in Milan .
The libretto for this unlikely triumph of virtue was by Giovanni di Gamerra, a
writer fond of tombs and lugubrious plots, allegedly drawn towards necrophilia
in private life. All Mozart’s musical strengths are here assembled waiting for
a decent librettist and the darker shadows of personal maturity to take flight.
The orchestra at the Warsaw Chamber Opera is concealed beneath a
proscenium stage. To one side a small apron extends slightly into the
auditorium where a harpsichord and cello continuo play under dim lighting. In
this intimate theatre the singers seem enormous in stature, the slightest play
of emotion visible, the vibration of the voice clearly felt. The intimacy
allows a penetration of the mind of the character in a uniquely disconcerting
manner. In Lucio Silla, the role of
Cecilio, a Senator who has been proscribed by Silla the Dictator of Rome, was
composed by Mozart for a castrato. Here it was performed as intended by the
remarkable Polish sopranist Dariusz Paradowski with a voice as close to a castrato such as Farinelli as is
possible today.[1]
This rare voice has an almost shocking affect when first encountered but
Paradowski is a consummate actor with the male stage presence of a Nureyev and
duly received the flowers and ovations of a star. The youthful operas of Mozart
all possess castrato roles such as
the lyrical intermezzo Apollo and
Hyacinth based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses
which he composed with a Latin libretto at the astonishing age of eleven. In
the Warsaw
cycle visual links are established between each opera in regard to scenery,
costume and direction. Voices can be variable but the ultimate coming together
of the production is magical under the highly imaginative staging of Ryszard
Peryt. Through these rarely performed
works and brilliant productions of the most famous operas (Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Die Zauberflöte are all packed with wonderfully naive eighteenth
century ‘stage business’) I was uniquely able to follow the astonishing
evolution of Mozart’s operatic inventions as his dramatic genius unfolded.
‘Brother Mozart’ had also been involved
with Masonic ritual from an early age when he set a Masonic poem to music
dedicated to the doctor who had cured him of smallpox. This was long before his
petition to the Fraternity which he joined in 1784 and before the composition
of Die Zauberflöte. Music is utilised
in many Masonic rituals which led him to compose for the brotherhood throughout
his life, particularly the beautiful music for the initiation of his father
Leopold. In 1773 Mozart was asked to supply the incidental music to the play Thamos, König in Ägypten (Thamos, King
of Egypt) by Tobias Philipp Baron von Gebler. He was later to compose two small
Masonic Cantatas. One entitled Die
Maurefreude (K471) was composed
in 1784 for Ignaz von Born, at that time Master of True Concord. The other, Laut Verkünde Unsre Freude (K623), was the last work he wrote for his
lodge named New Crowned Hope. He conducted it on 18 November 1791 while still engaged on the
composition of the Requiem. Two days
later the composer took to his bed
from which he never rose again.
At Łazienki Park
in the Theatre on the Island the Warsaw
Chamber Opera created a visionary staged version by Ryszard Peryt of this
incidental music fused with the music of the two cantatas. Late in the evening
fluttering funeral candles were lit along the sinuous paths leading to the
theatre from the entrance to the park. The orchestral pit lies before a strip
of water which isolates the Theatre on the Island
(inspired by the ruins of the Temple
of Jove at Baalbek in Syria ) from the
Amphitheatre (modelled on ruins at Herculaneum ).
Trees were silhouetted against a fading summer sky and the leaves rustled in
the light breeze moving over the shattered columns and pediments, the lake a
dull mirror reflecting statues of the dying Gaul and Cleopatra. Together with
the cry of peacocks ambling along the balustrades of the palace, one was lifted
onto a plane of rare classical beauty.
The overture began, music at once spiritually passionate yet graceful.
Gradually the chorus, a semi-circle of black-robed hooded figures wearing
silver medallions, emerged through the mist. Soloists in black robes entered
with huge silver sculptures of mythical beasts reminiscent of Egypt or Assyria resting on their shoulders – a winged bull, a
winged lion, an eagle and a winged human head. Behind them a sculpture had been
assembled from cannons, the skeletons of horses, scythes, drums and the
tattered banners of war, perhaps an oblique reference to Polish history.
A dense moral argument unfolded with the chorus carrying splendidly
grotesque banners of the Seven Deadly Sins. A cauldron of flame was lit in the
centre of the stage and the winged lion crouched behind it intoning in a
mysterious tongue. A mime lit a trough of fire that flashed across the entire
width of the theatre coupled with an explosion of cannon which caused the
sculpture of war to revolve. The darkness, the ancient ruins, the wind in the
trees, the wood pigeons in panic seeking their night nests and the harsh cry of
peacocks lifted this setting of the Mozart Masonic Liturgy onto a theatrical
and spiritual level which was quite extraordinary. No production could have
been more appropriate to the spirit of the original play which dealt with the
Masonic conflict between light and darkness.
I drank champagne with the artistic director Stefan Sutkowski under the
stars and wandered out of the dark park following the trail of light of the now
guttering funery candles. Great music creates a desire for itself, a desire for
repetition like a profound sexual relationship. Such Warsaw nights at the Mozart festival
sustained me through many of the reversals of fortune associated with that
ill-fated project.
[1] A sopranist
is a counterternor who is able to sing in the soprano vocal range. Much baroque
opera originally written for castrati
is now performed by this very rare male
soprano voice. The even rarer
‘indocrinological castrato’ is different again from a sopranist in that he is a
singer who has an hormonal disorder that prevents the larynx developing in
puberty and the voice from breaking. Such a singer might have the range to
perform the ‘Queen of the Night’ aria from The
Magic Flute.
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