Gismondo is a Pacifist: An Interview With Max Emanuel Cenčić
The famed countertenor talks with Filip Lech about musical archaeology, the benevolent King Sigismund and the newly established Bayreuth Baroque Festival.
The German premiere of the opera Gismondo, Re di Polonia will take place on 11th September 2020, during the first edition of the Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival. Max Emanuel Cenčić will play the title role and will be accompanied by the {oh!} Historical Orchestra under the direction of Martyna Pastuszka.
Filip Lech (FL): You grew up in a musical family – since early childhood, you’ve spent a lot of time in opera theatres.
Max Emanuel Cencic (MEC): I didn’t want to go to the kindergarten, so when I was three years old, I always went to the theatre with my parents. I was watching almost every rehearsal, almost every show in the theatre. It was a very interesting time.
FL: Could you try to describe the audiosphere from those times?
MEC: It’s more like a visual impression which I had. It was the most fascinating in the morning, when people where rehearsing and there were no costumes or anything. Then in the evening, all of a sudden, the stage would transform – there was the light, costumes… everything was so different.
I particularly enjoyed Samson and Samson et Dalila by Camille Saint-Saëns, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya Dama. I got to see a lot of repertoire in my early years.
FL: What is the first aria you remember?
MEC: ‘Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen’: ‘Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart’. This is the Queen of the Night aria from Die Zauberflöte – it fascinated me when I was a very young child.
FL: Italian must have also been present in your life since childhood. What is your relationship with that language?
MEC: Italian is the language of the opera and the most important language which has been used to create masterpieces. So I think it comes with it – it’s complementary. I have Italian friends, but I don’t travel so much to Italy physically. I travel to Italy more in my mind – through the music and my work, I’m almost always present in Italy. My spirit is there.
Sadly, I’m not very big literature connoisseur – my time is very limited between my musical life, my directorships and my other ventures. The day has only 24 hours; I can’t do everything.
FL: What is the meaning of baroque in Croatian music?
MEC: Well, Croatia was not a very musically developed country in the Baroque period. I don’t identify myself with the national culture, as this is something that was invented in the 19th century – it’s not something that really existed before. Culture is a fluid phenomenon; people acquire it by learning and traveling. It shouldn’t be instrumentalised by any entities. It changed a lot in the 19th century, but I’m not very interested in it.
FL: Sometimes you perform Croatian Baroque music – for example Ivan Lukačić and Filip Franjanin.
MEC: Yes, it’s quite interesting, but they were not the major composers in the history of music. To be more precise: they are not very important in the history of music. Recording an album with works by Gabriello Puliti and Ivan Lukačić was an exciting project. I am a musical archaeologist – I like going out into uncharted waters.
FL: What are the biggest pearls of the Slavic baroque for you?
MEC: I’m not a specialist in Slavic baroque. One of the few composers from Slavic countries who achieved a lot was Dmitry Bortniansky, who presented his operas in Italy.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the world of music was dominated by the Italians, the French and a few Germans. For me, the music created by Slavic composers started to flourish in the 19th century, when a lot of really great music was created.
FL: Until recently, ‘Gismondo’ was an almost unknown opera.
MEC: Vinci is one of my favourite composers. He’s one of the composers that has unjustly been completely forgotten. He was killed – it was strange story. Apparently, he had a liaison with the wife of somebody very powerful, who then killed him. He died relatively young, but he was a very inventive composer.
An interesting thing on the subject of of Gismondo is that Filippo Balatri, who first sang the role of Gismondo, was one of the castrati that was given from the Grand Duke of Tuscany to Peter the Great of Russia. Balatri was the first castrati who spent 15 years in Russia. Peter the Great has no interest in music whatsoever, and after this period, Balatri asked to be sent home, because he didn’t want to stay in Russia any longer. When he returned home, he was a sensation; everyone wanted to know about his travels.
So the opera Gismondo Re di Polonia was produced for this castrato who came from the East. It was very fashionable to talk more and to be interested in Eastern countries like Poland and Lithuania. In this opera, they used the historical background of the fight between Lithuania and Poland – but it’s not a historically accurate story. It’s an invented one, like in every baroque opera. No baroque opera is historically correct; they only use some elements, but then they invent a love story, conflict, a drama to entertain people.
FL: What is your relationship with that character?
MEC: Gismondo is an interesting character because he is a pacifist. He is the king of peace, and he doesn’t want to be brutal; he goes to endless wars but wants to offer a fair deal to the Lithuanians. He’s a very gracious character – he’s not some kind of bloody thug.
Besides that, it’s an exceptionally beautiful and satisfying part, one suitable for my timbre.
FL: What is the idea behind the Bayreuth Baroque Festival?
MEC: There’s an amazing musical history behind Bayreuth, even before Richard Wagner chose this place, because of this history. Already in the 17th century, there was an opera theatre there, which commissioned works from Georg Philipp Telemann and Reinhard Keiser. In 1748, Wilhelmina of Bayreuth built the Markgräfliches Opernhaus. The Bibiena family was responsible for the construction. It was actually a copy of the Viennese Burgtheater located at Michaelerplatz. The Viennese theatre no longer exists – it has burned down. The Bayreuth monument is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
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Max Emanuel Cencic, photo: Łukasz Rajchert / artist's promotional materials
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With the Bayreuth Baroque Festival, we will be bringing this place to life again, once a year. We’ll also present forgotten works of opera seria that can’t be heard anywhere else. But we will also have great concerts with artists like Joyce DiDonato, Jordi Savall, Romina Basco and Accademia Bizantina.
FL: Do you have some dreams and plans related to the festival?
MEC: My dream is definitely that this festival will be much bigger that is now – we’re only playing two weeks, and I hope we can expand to one month. It’s a little dream that I have now, for the moment.
FL: And with the repertoire?
MEC: It will remain always the same. So we’ll remain up until the 1750s, and the repertoire will be strictly opera seria, and strictly what people have not seen so far. We’re really doing musical archaeology – which means that every production is a complete, new production, which is taking place for the first time in more than 200 years. Our main goal is Italian opera seria, because this opera house is an apotheosis of that style – it deserves to have a place.
FL: What are your archaeological working tools?
MEC: Modern musical notation is not the same as it was 300 years ago. Manuscripts that were written 300 years ago are sometimes barely legible; you have to reconstruct some of them. There are certain composers who have a very good quality, but there are no modern editions of their works – so you have to go into the archives, different libraries, and look into this music, check if it’s good. Because there is a lot of very bad music. You have to basically extricate everything, for about a year. It’s an enormous amount of work – it takes hundreds of hours to transcribe and evaluate this music and then decide who is going to sing it, where are we going do it, who will finance it and so on. It’s an enormous process.
FL: What does working on a festival look like in the time of a pandemic?
MEC: It’s not easy. Every week, we have new losses. When we started to organise, we were sold out in six weeks. And two weeks before the start of the festival, we were told that we had to give everyone the tickets back – and that only 200 will be allowed into the theatre. So you can imagine how difficult it is. Apart from the time that we spent returning thousands of tickets, the frustration of our audience is enormous. They booked tickets, hotels, travel… and now they have nothing. It’s not easy. But we tested everyone – we are all negative for the virus, and our work continues. In such uncertain times, there are drastic measures.
FL: How do you deal with the current world situation as a singer?
MEC: I stayed home for few months – I walked my dogs. I cooked. I was quite happy doing that, because sometimes, slowing down your life is not all bad.
Interview originally conducted in English by Filip Lech, Sep 2020
The premiere of the opera Gismondo, Re di Polonia during the Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in cooperation with Orlen Deutschland GmbH.
The opera is a co-production of Parnassus Arts Productions and the {oh!} Historical Orchestra with the support of the City of Gliwice, All’improvviso International Festival of Early Music, FUGA Cultural Society, the Municipal Theater in Gliwice and GAPR.
