Vladimir Nabokov found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel “The Great Gatsby” simply terrible. At least that’s what Nabokov’s biographer Arthur Mizener reports. Fitzgerald couldn’t repay his colleague in kind, because when Nabokov published his magnum opus “Lolita” in 1955, he was long dead. In Munich you can now meet these two giants of American literature – in the musical theater. And it couldn’t be more different.
The Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was also a renowned lepidopterist.
(Photo: dpa)
“I am here by mistake – I don’t mean this prison specifically – I mean this whole terrible, striped world,” says Vladimir Nabokov of the protagonist Cincinnatus in his short novel “Invitation to beheading” complain. He wrote the book in Russian in Berlin in 1934, it was first published in Paris in 1938, in English in 1959, the language that the exiled Russian Nabokov mastered to perfection, and it was first published in German in 1970. A man is waiting to be executed in prison. He is the only prisoner. He is treated there with tortured politeness because they do not want to tell him the time of his execution. This work is repeatedly compared to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”; Cincinnatus, like Josef K., is a prisoner of an inscrutable, totalitarian justice machine: Leon Zmelty composed a chamber opera version of the material, the libretto comes from Sören Sareck. World premiere is on Thursday, February 22nd, 7:30 p.m. in the Munich reactor hall (further performances February 24th and 25th). Students from the Bavarian Theater Academy August Everding and the Munich University of Music and Theater are taking on this super exciting project in a joint production, directed by Maria Chagina and musical direction by Torbjørn Heide Arnesen.
Jay Gatsby and his true love, Daisy.
(Photo: Birgit Gufler)
The very rich, mysterious Jay Gatsby is also a prisoner – a prisoner of his obsessive love for Daisy, who has long since married someone else and lives on the other side of the bay. Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “stayedThe Great Gatsby” (1925) not between two book covers. The material is too ingenious, Hollywood also recognized that, there was a silent film adaptation shortly after its release, in 1949 Alan Ladd played the title hero, in 1974 Robert Redford, and in 2013 Baz Luhrmann’s shrill version with Leonardo came out DiCaprio. Gatsby was brought to life on theater and musical stages, the Met in New York commissioned a Gatsby opera in 1999, and of course there are ballet versions too. Munich audiences can now experience Gatsby as a musical dance theater German theater experience. The Spanish choreographer Enrique Gasa Valga is bringing his production, which he created for the Tiroler Landestheater, to Munich. The six-piece live band around singer Greta Marcolongo revives the music of the 1920s and 1930s, but – as role model Baz Luhrmann – not only that. The premiere is February 23rd, 7:30 p.m.
Returns to the Bavarian State Opera as Adina in Donizetti’s “L’ Elisir d’ Amore”: soprano Pretty Yende, who makes a bella figura here at Paris Fashion Week.
(Photo: IMAGO/Zabulon Laurent/ABACA)
Rehearsals for the next premieres (“The Passenger”, March 10th, “Les Misérables”, March 22nd) have long been underway at the Bavarian State Opera and the Gärtnerplatztheater. The audience definitely won’t get bored by then. This is how the wonderful one sings Pretty Yende once again Adina in Donizettis “L’Elisir d’Amore“, (National Theater, February 23rd), and the Mozart opera returns to Gärtnerplatz “Le nozze di Figaro” back (February 18).