Every summer the Bregenz Festival defies the laws of nature with a season of open-air opera floating on the waters of the Austrian side of Lake Constance. Since 1946, its organizers have been successfully applying the same recipe (resistant materials and groundbreaking assemblies) through a sophisticated aquatic platformanchored to the bottom of the lake, which houses the musicians’ pit, a complex of dressing rooms and the engine room.
The result, always spectacular, brings together music lovers from all over the world to enjoy the great titles of the repertoire in the evening light (James Bond himself paraded behind the scenes in Quantum of Solace) but also important premieres in the alternative room (already covered) from the Werkstattbühne, with some well-known examples, such as The passenger from Weinberg or the golden dragon of Peter Eötvös.
This year all eyes were on the Spanish-Argentine composer Fabián Panisello, author of the score for Shimoda’s Judith, which was released last night in a new production and with all the tickets sold. «Following the premiere in Vienna of my second opera, Elisabeth Sobotka, the artistic director of the festival, suggested that I compose a new chamber opera”, she told at the break of one of the rehearsals at the Werkstattbühne. “The idea was to create a redemptive counterpoint of the Madama Butterfly pucciniana through patriotic sacrifice of a geisha in the service of the first American consul in Japan back in 1856».
The German libretto john luke is based on a play by the Japanese playwright Yamamoto Yuzo adapted by Bertolt Brecht during his exile in Finland in 1940. “His friend Hella Wuolijoki, who had just bought the rights, encouraged him to cover it, but the work was not published until 1997 because it was considered unfinished,” says Lucas, who has summarized the events of the sakoku (political isolation) and diplomatic negotiations to avoid the bombardment of Shimoda port. «The entire text exudes a kind of feminism before the letter through a national heroine who ends up being disowned for having been part of a dirty and dishonorable Commercial transaction”.
Just like what happens to Violetta Valery in The Traviata, Okichi’s lesson in generosity and nobility unleashes a climate of social rejection around it. “When she believes that she will be happy, her fiancé convinces her to become a geisha again, so she indulges in drink and ends up dying poor, yes, with her dignity and pride intact” , continues the librettist. “Because that conscious will to self-destruction is his particular way of claiming moral reparation».