"Refugees out". As I watched the message painted in huge letters on the stage backdrop by men in suspended cradles, I saw in my mind’s eye the crude, illiterate slogan "Get out England" daubed that very day on a hotel in the Midlands used to house migrants.
Martinů knew a thing or two about refugees, having been forced to flee Europe by the Nazi invasions of his native Czechoslovakia and then France, and later the fall of his homeland to Communism, and this, his final opera, a reworking in 1959 of an earlier version, is a cry from the heart for tolerance and mercy. Sadly, he died before its first performance two years later.
The libretto by the composer himself is based on a story by Nikos Kazantzakis about refugees whose homes have been destroyed by Turks. Both the refugees and the villagers in whose territory they seek a new life are Greeks, but the associations are universal, as this production from the 2023 Salzburg Festival reflects.
The huge stage of the Felsenreitschule, as wide as an aircraft hangar, is filled by a white box and peopled by local folk in anonymous powder-grey tunics. Name your country, it seems to say. Into this monoculture wander the refugees in multicoloured dress, hungry, some dying.
The villagers are about to stage a Passion play, but although it is the man chosen to play Judas who first challenges the new arrivals, it is the priest Grigoris, the figure from whom they seek charity, who turns upon them most fiercely. Told of their fate, he accuses these unfortunates: "what sin have you committed to fall into disfavour with God?"
Fearing displacement and impoverishment, the villagers are hostile to the incomers, but first the shepherd Manolios, chosen to play Jesus, and those cast as his disciples and Mary Magdalene are moved by pity to come to their aid, all except Judas, who stabs Manolios in a mob brawl. As their would-be saviour lies dead, the refugees trudge wearily on.
Martinů’s music has a majestic quality, exultant, tragic, elegiac, with touches of Greek and Moravian folk song and a delicious, distinctive soundscape that closely echoes that of his oratorio Gilgamesh written a couple of years before.
The singers are first-class, with Sebastian Kohlhepp as the spiritually transformed Manolios, Sara Jakubiak an exuberant Katerina / Magdalena, Gabor Bretz as the forbidding Grigoris and Charles Workman as the slightly dodgy dealer Yannakos turned benefactor Peter.
The piece, in its original English, declares its polemical intentions on the tin, with a few extra lines of vituperative prejudice thrown into the spoken dialogue by director Simon Stone.
For a more homespun alternative to this hard-edged, abstract production, go to the DVD of the open-air version shot for Czech TV in 1999 that combines soloists of Welsh National Opera with miming Czech actors. That has a greater sense of personal drama, but is 25 minutes shorter and unfortunately omits most of Manolios’s emotional plea for a kinder world that forms the moral climax of the opera.