Word: schweik
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...officially exist. As successful squatters, living on fish and cunning, the Kwimpers hold off waves of governmental agents, sociologists and gangsters intent on civilizing them. Writers have loved such types, from Shakespeare's Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, who defied Elizabethan order, to Hasek's Good Soldier Schweik, whose peasant idiocy proved smarter than the Austro-Hungarian monarchy...
...this picaresque libretto, Composer Kurka composed an astringent score for brasses, wind instruments and percussion only, omitting the strings. Strongly rhythmic, shot through with jazz influences, it occasionally offered a wry commentary on the action, provided at least two moments of moving lyricism: Schweik's apostrophe on war ("Who will go to the war when it comes?") and the Chorus of Wounded Soldiers ("Wait for the ragged soldiers") in the final scene. But overall, the music was too fragmented to be effective, or to redeem the curiously Panglossed-over view that marred the libretto : the apparent belief that Schweik...
...author of this Candide-like scrap of philosophizing is one Joseph Schweik, private first class in the Czech army during World War I. Cheerful Sad-Sack Schweik first turned up back in the 1920s in Czech Novelist Jaroslav Hasek's antimilitary satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. Last week he popped up on the stage of Manhattan's City Center in the premiere of the late Robert Kurka's operatic version and won a warm welcome from audiences in the New York City Opera's spring season of contemporary American works...
...Librettist Lewis Allan three years ago, finished the vocal score and 350 pages of orchestration before his death of leukemia last December at the age of 35. His good friend Hershy Kay completed the orchestration from Kurka's red-penciled notes. Loose-jointed and episodic, the opera introduces Schweik (Tenor Norman Kelley) as he is being arrested for "high treason," traces his progress through a scurvy prison and a madhouse, follows him into the army as an orderly. At the end he wanders away from the trenches singing a plaintive little song ("I'll take a quiet road...
...Soldier Schweik was the ninth opera and the only premiere of the ten scheduled by the New York City Opera in its five-week all-American season. Still to come: Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (TIME, Oct. 8, 1956). Underwritten by $105,000 from the Ford Foundation, the season spans the last 20 years of U.S. operatic production with a repertory drawn from more than 200 submitted works. Among the composers represented were such veterans as Douglas Moore (The Ballad of Baby Doe), Leonard Bernstein (Trouble in Tahiti), Gian Carlo Menotti (The Medium, The Old Maid and the Thief), plus...