Bregenz.(Greek Passion)

After success with Bohuslav Martinu's Greek Passion in 1999, Alfred Wopmann, in his penultimate season as intendant of the Bregenz Festival, opened the 2002 season (July 17) with Martinu's highly vexing Julietta, or the Dream Book, at the Festspielhaus. The conductor, Dietfried Bernet, and Alex Brezina, director of the Martinu archive in Prague, prepared a new German translation for the occasion. If not exactly a hit with its baffled audience, the production enjoyed a succes d'estime, and I found the experience so mesmerizing that I made a return trip (250 kilometers) to catch a second performance. However, little of the German text was audible, and the performance was hampered by the positioning of the sole intermission after Act I (forty-five minutes long), with Acts II and III (ninety minutes altogether) following without any further interruption. Only in the second part of the evening did Martini's poetry begin to soar and his musical inventiveness overwhelm this listener.

The composer wrote his own libretto, after a novel by Surrealist Georges Neveux. Julietta tells of a Parisian bookseller, Michel, haunted by the memory of a beautiful girl he has seen but never met. He visits a coastal town, the inhabitants of which have no memories and live on the verge of reality and illusion. There he meets the girl of his dreams, Julietta, but he is bewildered when she speaks of a shared past that never existed; in a moment of exasperation, he shoots her. After a stop at the Central Bureau of Dreams, Michel starts out to find Julietta again--be it in reality or in his dreams.

Stage director Katja Czellnik interpreted the opera as a Surrealist fantasy, in which the characters start over each time they seem to have ...