A new production of Hans Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár received its premiere on 9 April at the Teatro Royal in Madrid. Its being part of this opera season’s programme has to do with the overall dramaturgy which, as the theatre’s artistic director Joan Matabosch puts it, is focused on works revolving around the topic of the „Central European anti-Semitism in the time of Europa’s resignation from its cultural and civilizational values”. Among the other works within this dramaturgy are Wagner’s Parsifal, Schönberg Moses and Aaron or The Emperor of Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann which will be premiered in June.
Brundibár, an opera from 1939 which however had not been heard by its author till only a couple of years afterwards at the Theresienstadt concentration camp where he rehearsed and 55 times repeated it with the deported Jewish children as performers, was at Teatro Real created by a theatre and opera director Susana Gómez while Jordi Francés, also a successful percussionist, was the conductor. The premiere itself was preceeded by a number of accompanying events organized with the help of the Czech Centre Madrid. Dagmar Lieblová, a chairwoman of the Terezín Initiative which is an association of the camp’s former prisoners, and a Holocaust survivor herself, gave a speech at the “From Parsifal to Moses and Aaron” talk held by the theatre on 1 April as well as three days afterwards at the Centro Sefarad Israel where she talked about her experience as a prisoner and a performer in Brundibár. Moreover an exhibition was launched of the drawings by Theresienstadt’s both child and adult prisoners. Brundibár will be performed 12 times during the month of April.
9 April 2016, Teatro Real, Madrid
Hans Krása: Brundibár
Director: Susana Gómez, conductor: Jordi Francés
Brundibár: Jorge Martin
soloists from the Pequeños Cantores de la JORCAM, Joven Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid (JORCAM)