International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts
Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle
The Documentary Value of Theatrical Collections for Staging Classical and/or Historical Plays by Yugoslav Authors
Nadezda Mosusova
The Theatre and Theatre Collections / Le théâtre et les collections de documents
International
Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing
Arts
16th International Congress, London, 9-13 September 1985
Proceedings of the Congress
Société Internationale
des Bibliothèques et des Musées des arts du spectacle
16ème Congres Internationale, Londres, 9-13 september
1985
Procès-Verbal
London 1986, pp. 80-84
It may seem a superfluous question, but let us consider what is meant by a theatrical collection or theatrical collections, i.e. by collections which are in the possession of a particular theatre or theatres in general. Are we to say, in this case, theatrical collections or collections of theatrical material?
Collections of theatrical material, of course, can be found in institutions outside the theatre or theatrical museums themselves if, by theatrical collections, we mean collections of costumes preserved from old performances, together with props, collections of sketches for stage sets and costumes and, more recently, also photographs of stage scenery and individual scenes. If we add to this documentary material - such as reviews and articles about the performances published in the press, tapes and videorecordings - which have a bearing on the subtitle of the congress and which would also include old texts, staging manuals and posters, the question arises about where we are to draw the line between collection and documentary material. Both can be easily found and are found outside theatres and theatrical museums, in universities, libraries, archives of academies of sciences, in institutes of musicology and theatrology, as well as in state and municipal archives, as is the case in Yugoslavia and, of course, in other parts of the world.
Classical and historical dramas (which, in certain circumstances, can be the same) by Yugoslav authors of the past constituted a great part of the repertoire of Yugoslav theatres from their very beginning. The beginnings of theatrical art do not date very far back in the cultural history of Yugoslavia. In the Yugoslav area the theatre began to develop only from the 1840s, if we discount the existence of the Medieval-Renaissance theatre, thanks to the influence and domination of the Venetian Republic on the seaboard of present-day Yugoslavia (Dubrovnik-Ragusa, Hvar).
Historical dramas and, more recently, social bourgeois dramas, some of which are sometimes counted among the classics of Yugoslav literature, were performed from their premieres with music or, rather, with songs and music, as was also frequently the case in other countries. Consequently, these musical scores would belong also to the collections of theatrical material. This can be seen from an appeal addressed to the public by the theatrical committee immediately after the foundation of the National Theatre in Belgrade in 1868. The appeal states that the "theatre outfit" is very poor, there is no library, no music, no stage props. Therefore the friends of the theatre are invited to contribute the following (quoted in the shortened form): 1) books concerning the theatre, printed and manuscript, in all languages, 2) musical plays, 3) male and female costumes of all kinds, for adults and for children, different fabrics for tailoring, 4) furniture, 5) weapons, 6) ornaments and jewellery.
The citizens responded to the appeal in great numbers, giving costumes and various objects, while the officers and high functionaries gave sabres, helmets, uniforms and signs of military rank. The latter were particularly important because the plays on historical subjects were often performed with "tableaux vivants". From all that has been said, it can be seen that it is sometimes difficult to establish a dividing line between collections and documentary material - though we could certainly say that the collections are relevant to the future and the documentary material to the past - because everything together helps the present-day theatre to develop a particular approach to the work of the director (who is often also the scenographer) and of his collaborators in producing, in the present case, plays from Yugoslav classical dramatic literature.
On any other occasion, one would expect a musicologist to speak of collections of music which, at a given moment, could be used in the revival of plays which were popular at one time, if they have not stayed in the repertoire up to the present day, together with their music.
Unfortunately, however, comparatively little of the music which was performed with these plays has survived, and it is not preserved in one place only, say, in the theatre. There are collections of such incidental music also in the archives of musical academies, academies of sciences, musicological and other institutes throughout the country. To tell the truth, their artistic value, at least as regards music from the last century, is slight and, consequently, does not attract the attention of producers unless some composer undertakes to modernise the score. Otherwise everything depends on their documentary, historical importance, both for the theatrologist and the musicologist.
Moreover, many of these historical plays would nowadays be pure anachronisms, mere historical documents and museum exhibits, if it were not for the fact that a part of this repertoire has been used by modern composers between the two World Wars, after the Second World War and at the present day as an inspiration for operatic librettos, stimulating them to create musical-scenic works which stand at the peak of Yugoslav musical culture.
These old scores, of course, (from the historical point of view not so old - the music of the Yugoslav peoples is as recent as the Yugoslav theatre, if not more so) have inspired subsequent generations of operatic composers to include some of these musical motifs in their music. A study about influence of the old scores on the new ones would have a purely musicological-analytical character and to a certain extent also a theatrical-dramaturgical approach and would not be at all suitable for the subject we are interested in here.
What interests us in the present case, from the point of view of the theatre and of collections, is the production of such operas at the present time and the influence exerted upon these productions by theatrical collections, i.e. costumes and props, the oldest objects collected from the time when these operas were simply plays. This does not mean that these operatic works remained dependent, as regards their existence on the stage, on their theatrical prototypes. Many of them started a new life on the stage, the independent life of the musical drama which the composer introduced and the director developed in them.
Notwithstanding the independence of the operatic composition (if it is not independent, then it is not an opera but rather a kind of musical theatre in the narrower sense), such an approach to the problem of connecting the collections with the living theatre, dramatic or musical (in the wider sense), i.e. connecting contemporary operatic productions with the old performances, poses us with two problems: the problem of staging a modern opera, and the problem of the influence of the theatre on the opera, i.e. of theatrical directing and staging upon that of the opera and vice versa. We shall begin with the second problem. The influence of the theatre on the opera is in itself a many-sided problem (no less than the first one), of present interest particularly for the situation in Yugoslavia and in other Slav countries.
Between the two World Wars, in addition to the splendid progress achieved in both leading Yugoslav opera houses in Zagreb and in Belgrade (one with a long tradition, the other with a short one - the activity of the Russian emigres in both these centres helped Belgrade to keep pace with Zagreb), drama could be seen to invade, threaten and ultimately prevail over the opera. (This prevalence may have had a purely practical foundation, since in the national theatres of Belgrade and Zagreb the opera together with the ballet shares the house with drama even at present.) In fact, in spite of a brilliant period of development in the performing of operas in the period between the two wars, the drama was able to compete in the struggle for predominance, for at the same time throughout Yugoslavia it too experienced a golden age. Some priminent dramatic directors became famous at this time on the operatic stage as well (e.g. Branko Gavelle, 1885-1962).
After the Second World War, when once again the participation of stage and film directors in operatic productions became usual in many opera houses in the world (with the introduction of the Schaubühnestil into the opera), the opera or the musical theatre began, in the course of the last few decades, to give a lead to contemporary Yugoslav drama, making it sometimes return to the hypothetical state of the earliest form of total theatre, and contributing, at least indirectly, to the revival of the Yugoslav classical drama. We can state with pride that on the Yugoslav operatic stages today there are more and more professionally qualified directors who engage exclusively in the directing of operas, and some of them, through the opera, come to the drama, whereas formerly the opposite was the case.
The first problem which I mentioned, the visual side of an operatic performance, depends, in conformity with modern operatic directing which, at the same time, observes tradition, more and more on the "reading" of music and the creation, not only of stage moves, but also of the entire mise-en-scène with costumes and stage props on the basis of the score. As an example we shall take the opera Fatherland, one of the most significant compositions of the Yugoslav opera, the work of the Serbian composer Petar Konjovic (1883-1970), finished in 1960, performed for the first time in 1983 on the stage of the National Theatre in Belgrade. The dramatic prototype is the drama of the Yugoslav classical author Ivo Vojnovic (1857-1929), The Death of the Mother of the Jugovic, a play which was performed for the first time in the National Theatres of Belgrade and Zagreb in 1906 and 1907 respectively. Every serious opera director of such a complex musical-scenic work as Fatherland would rightly be interested in the conditions under which this drama was performed and in any documentation whatsoever connected with these events, particularly in the collections of costumes, stage props and sketches for stage sets. We may mention in addition that the author Vojnovic, whose work was profoundly influenced by music, made an operatic libretto of this play which was never set to music.
But not only the copies of the texts and of the old incidental music, which are, as we have said, not to be regretted from the aesthetic point of view, have been lost. The documents and collections of costumes and objects of art have also vanished. Many things disappeared in the course of two World Wars, when theatres and archives were destroyed and libraries burnt down in Serbia. Today, as we grieve over the loss of old theatrical wardrobes, we can only ask ourselves whatever became of the dresses, national and theatrical costumes, which were given as a gift to the actress Milka Grgurova by the Serbian queen Natalija Obrenovic? What happened to the sabres and other objects of artistic value which were donated to the theatres by the Serbian princes Mihailo Obrenovic and Aleksandar Karadjondjevic? Many museums and private collectors would be happy to possess some of these objects (I have not touched in the present paper on the question of private collections of theatrical material, if by these are meant the personal wardrobes of actors and actresses, opera singers and ballet dancers).
Nothing has been preserved of Vojnovic's drama, and any items of this kind would have been welcome to the experienced young director Dejan Miladinovic (b. 1948), who directed and staged Konjovid's Fatherland, starting in the first place with the scenography and costumography.
He had to create an appropriate framework for the opera-oratorio, "a sacred festival drama", the subtitle which Petar Konjovic gave to his Fatherland as a reminiscence of Wagner's Parsifal. The composer used his music to emphasise and raise to a still higher degree the emotional intensity of the symbolist mystery play The Death of the Mother of the Jogivic. Its author, Ivo Vojnovic, the illustrious bard of his native town Dubrovnik and of the decline of its aristocracy in the course of the past centuries was, in this case, what inspired Konjovic as well, the poet of the historico-legendary past of the Serbs. Starting from the Serbian national poetry, which has as its subject the downfall of the Serbian empire caused by the Turkish invasion at the end of the 14th century, which was also the theme of most of the historical plays on the Balkan soil in the last century, Vojnovic constructed his play on the basis of the central poem of the epic cycle of Kosovo, The Death of the Mother of the Jugovic and gave it the same title. In it he presents the tragedy of the Serbian people in the figure of the Anonymous Mother, who has lost her heroic husband, Yug-Bogdan, and her nine sons, the Jugovidi, in the decisive battle against the Turks on the Kosovo field in 1389.
Vojnovic's drama was performed with scrupulous preparations in Belgrade as well as in Zagreb, and of course with incidental music. Although at this time one does not find numerous works dealing with staging, which was in the process of development, and with scenography, which also had still to be developed, we know that the first performance was a remarkable theatrical and national event. The first performance of Konjovic's opera, dealing with the same subject, was equally a great musical and even theatrical event for Belgrade and for Yugoslavia.
The director and scenographer Miladinovic decided, for the theatrical space of Fatherland, on a semi-permanent decor of symbolical character. A great conventionalised raven, made of jute, replaced the back-cloth. The stage-lighting was used to give this bird of ill omen and symbol of death different shades of grey and red.
In order to give the costumographer ideas for the costumes, Miladinovic turned to historical books and paintings in Serbian monasteries, which served for the reconstruction, at least in part, of the material culture of medieval Serbia. In his production notes the director offered several possibilities: "The costumes can be authentic from the historical point of view rich court costumes (from the frescoes), free imagination, costume stylised in the manner of antiquity (with the use of historically recognisable elements). The colours either bright or pastel or intentionally bleached (by time and history - like frescoes)".
In the end, he decided in favour of conventionalised historical costume, of fine cloth for women and rougher for the people in the third and final act, as also for the warriors who appear in all three acts as a motionless "tableau vivant". The director used here, in a very convincing way, the "tableaux" from old historical plays, something which is not at all customary in opera. By placing the warriors in attitudes of combat on the edge of the revolving stage during the curtain music in all three acts, he conjured up before the audience the Battle of Kosovo in its various phases.
Given the exceptional
success of this performance, we are convinced that the
revival of Vojnovic's drama The Death of the Mother of
the Jogovic (which has not been on the stage for over
sixty years, unlike his far more popular drama Dubrovnik
Trilogy), could not be carried through at all without
analysing Konjovic-Miladinovic's remarkable realisation
of the Kosovo tragedy on the operatic stage.
URL: http://www.theatrelibrary.org/sibmas/congresses/sibmas85/london85_14.html
Last updated: 27.11.2002
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