Photo: Stefan Brion
The dreadful history of Hans Krása’s Brundibár will be familiar to many, so I won’t expound on it for long. Krása was a Jewish composer in Czechoslovakia. After a clandestine premiere in an orphanage, his children’s opera, Brundibár, was performed by and orchestrated for the thirteen instruments available in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) Ghetto in 1943. It was exploited by the Nazis with monstrous cynicism: They filmed it for propaganda, and used it to help convince Red Cross inspectors they had visited a model camp. All but a handful of those involved were killed shortly after in Auschwitz, including the composer himself (gassed on arrival) and Ilse Weber, one of whose songs features in the program built around the half-hour opera by the Opéra Comique.
The plot (abridged from a text on Sarasota Opera’s website) is as follows:
A brother and sister, too poor to buy milk for their sick mother, see Brundibár making money by playing his hurdy-gurdy in the street. They try to busk too, but evil Brundibár mocks them and chases them away. A sparrow, a cat and a dog urge them to stand up to him. With the help of the local children, they charm the townspeople with a lullaby. Brundibár tries to steal the cash they earn, but is caught. The children sing a victory song. The bully is defeated. As the Opéra Comique’s handout concludes, “Hope, courage and solidarity: these are the values conveyed by this delightful work, which pits art against brutality. A lesson in life for all time.”
The production is directed by Muriel Mayette Holtz and Jean-Claude Berutti, and performed by the Maîtrise Populaire de l’Opéra Comique, the house’s youth academy. The academy operates a dual entry system, not necessarily based on typical, academic selection criteria, to offer an initiation in the performing arts to children from all walks of life. Not all of them are expected to go on to make a career of it. The Maîtrise is neither an English cathedral or college choir, nor a collection of stage prodigies all set to replace Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger. In performance, the youngsters’ dedication, enthusiasm and sincerity make up for some rough edges in the acting and singing. But in a work like Brundibár, their ordinariness and diversity are an asset.
Photo: Stefan Brion
As Brundibár, per se, lasts barely more than half an hour, they and, I guess, Louis Langrée, director of the Opéra Comique, here conducting the Frivolités Parisiennes, have concocted a ninety-minute spectacle by encasing Krása’s opera in a selection of pieces relevant to their project, musical or not.
The “curtain”, a projected pre-war map of Europe that homes in on the Prague area, rises on an old-fashioned schoolroom, with its benches and desks, hefty, wood-framed blackboards on castors, and posters of flora and fauna. Dressed in their school smocks, the students study, play, scuffle to a perky performance of Janacek’s Mládi (Youth) for wind ensemble. They fashion carnival masks out of cardboard boxes and papier mâché that will come in handy later.
Two of Poulenc’s snow-themed songs, Un soir de neige, and O magnum mysterium, from his Christmas motets, set the scene for an allegory, (acted not sung), written by Jean-Claude Grumberg, a playwright whose father was killed in the camps. Taking turns to speak (not always wholly audibly), the children play out his De Pitchik à Pitchouk. In this surreal tale —magical in a way that recalls Chagall’s paintings—an old lady’s curious Christmas Eve encounters and wandering dreams poetically evoke the tribulations of Europe’s Jews in the twentieth century and, ultimately, the Holocaust.
In the space cleared by pushing aside the classroom’s desks and benches, with scenery provided by the blackboards—now screens showing drawings that recall the sketchy sets used in Terezín—the children perform Krása’s opera. Their cardboard and papier-mâché masks turn the principals into carnival giants, with proper costumes and props, such as a barrel-organ pedaled around by the wicked Brundibár on a quadricycle or an ice-cream stall. The rest of the children wear their blue school smocks and simpler masks. We presume that the unpretentious blend of semi-professionalism and making shift with what’s to hand is much like performances in Terezín. But then…
Near the end, before the final chorus, the opera is interrupted. The children slip off their smocks and shoes and leave them in a frighteningly evocative heap on the stage. Two by two, they file off quietly through a narrow opening at the rear, filled with bright light. We are shown, in silence, black-and-white excerpts from the Nazi propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: a documentary film from the Jewish settlement area). We see the children in the camp performing Brundibár. We see them in the audience, too, with stars stitched to their clothes. We know that just a few days later, these very children we see were carried off to Auschwitz. Few escaped.
Alone now, on the empty stage, one of the older girls from the Maîtrise sings a simple but heart-rending strophic song, Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt by Weber, who volunteered to join her husband in Auschwitz with their son Tommy so as not to break up the family.
Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt,
das Herz so schwer wie Blei.
Bis jäh meine Weg ein Ende hat,
dort knapp an der Bastei.
Dort bleib ich auf der Brücke stehn
und schau ins Tal hinaus:
ich möcht so gerne weiter gehn,
ich möcht so gern nach Haus!
(I wander through Theresienstadt, my heart as heavy as lead, till suddenly the path comes to an end, right by the ramparts. I stand there, on the bridge and look out over the valley: How I wish I could press on, how I long for home!)
Finally, the children tumble back in, dressed now in a variegated assortment of colorful, everyday contemporary clothes, for the final chorus, “Brundibár poražen” (Brundibar is defeated). The tyrant is gone. We couldn’t be bullied. We won the war. The children sang, all friends, united. They formed a chorus; not one of them was afraid of that dictator.
I’ve nothing to add about individual performances; in this case, it would be irrelevant. Les Frivolités Parisiennes, under a visibly attentive Langrée (doing everything necessary to keep the youngsters in order) brought the same lively, incisive vim and vigor to Krása’s eclectically “degenerate” blend of hothouse Viennese erudition, jazz, and children’s and popular songs as they more usually do to the madcap bouffe works of Hervé or Offenbach.
Photo: Stefan Brion
The production, at the end, packed a sickening but salutary punch. It recalled to me, personally, my first visit to Oradour-sur-Glane, a village near Limoges massacred by the Nazis in 1944. There, you descend into a strikingly-designed modern museum filled with spine-chilling reminders of the horrors of the time, to emerge among the ruins of the village, where rusting cars and charred baby carriages have been left untouched as a memorial. At a time (that I would never have believed possible in my optimistic youth) when a new generation of unspeakable bullies is deciding, with monstrous cynicism, who is human and may live, who isn’t and may not, it’s tough but supremely useful for us all to be reminded forcefully of the reality of these awful truths from the not-so-distant past.
