Word: slovakians
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...SHOP ON MAIN STREET. This poignant Czech drama hurls the question of universal guilt into a tranquil but non-occupied Slovakian village in 1942. The case concerns a Chaplinesque little nobody (Josef Króner) who, because he is an Aryan, is put in charge of the business, and the fate, of a shiningly innocent old Jewish shopkeeper (Ida Kami...
...SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Humor and fantasy heighten the impact of this keen-edged Czech tragedy. In a complacent Slovakian village in 1942, a henpecked nobody (Josef Króner) befriends but ultimately betrays the doomed old Jewess (Ida Kamiñska) whose button shop is given to him by the Nazis...
...Shop on High Street, made last year by Czechoslovakian Co-Directors Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, took festivalgoers in New York back to the year 1942, when the Jews of a little Slovakian town incredulously learned that Hitler's pogrom had begun. Shop starts as a warm and well played village comedy. Tono Brtko (Josef Króner) is a simple and straightforward carpenter in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who hates his brother-in-law, the local Gauleiter, but accepts a supposedly lucrative plum from him-appointment as "Aryan manager" and ideological overseer of a Jewish button shop...
...rarely seen by Western critics until its production this month at East Berlin's State Opera. It will be staged in Belgrade, Budapest, and in the Soviet Union, eventually may find its way West. The opera's plot concerns the trials of a Slovakian peasant girl named Katrena whose lover is found murdered in a forest clearing. At first suspected, Katrena is later cleared and promptly marries an earlier suitor named Ondrej. When she bears a child ahead of schedule, Ondrej flies into a jealous rage, reveals in a drunken soliloquy that he is the murderer, later confesses...
...fleshed the bare bones of his plot with some moving psychological insights. The libretto was admirably supplemented by Suchon's muscular score, which reminded the enthusiastic audience of the music of Czechoslovakia's Leos (Jenufa) Janacek and Hungary's Bela Bartok. Strongly rhythmic, it combined rich Slovakian folk flavor with pungently powerful orchestration. In Katrena's lament over her fate, strikingly sung by Soprano Anny Schlemm, and in Ondrej's affecting admission of guilt, Suchon provided crowd-rousing vocal high points that might well place The Vortex in the standard operatic literature...