Prague - The well-known story of the judicial murder of Milada Horáková and the show trial with her is now made into an opera.
The trial, inspired by Stalin's show trials of his 1930s purges, was based completely on trumped-up charges. Pro-democratic Horáková, member of the National Socialist Party resigned from parliament after communists took over in 1948. She was then accused of treason and sentenced to death in 1950.
The opera is titled Tomorrow will.. (Zítra se bude..) and is to be premiered tonight in Kolowrat, the National Theatre chamber theatre.
Same life story
The opera libretto has two authors - Aleš Březina, head of the Bohuslav Martinů Institute in Prague, and National Theatre director Jiří Nekvasil. They tailored the libretto for a singer Soňa Červená who herself was persecuted by communists.
Her husband left Czechoslovakia to live in the West and because of that Červená was subjected to cruel interrogation. Her mother was arrested and died in Prague´s Pankrác prison shortly after the arrest.
Červená, now 82, then decided to leave Czechoslovakia via east Berlin. She became a famous mezzo soprano, sang around the whole world and cooperated, for example, with Robert Wilson.
"The story of Milada Horáková has a unique message - it is fascinatingly brutal," says Březina.
More about trial than Milada
But the opera is not only about Milada Horáková as a pro-democratic politician but mainly about the show trial against her. Soňa Červená will guide the viewers through the opera in a series of roles - at one moment she is Milada Horáková and at another she is a state prosecutor or commentator.
The authors have been compiling and analyzing archive recordings and television footage, transcriptions and newspapers clips published at that time.
The archive recordings were rediscovered only in 2005. And it were precisely these recordings that inspired Aleš Březina to compose the opera.
Horáková´s humble nature is juxtaposed to hysteria and dullness of the communist prosecutors and the whole trumped-up court proceeding. According to Březina the whole trial was built up as a show by the communists who used all means of media in an attempt to intimidate "the working class" citizens.
Song by Kohout
The prosecutors´ parts are to be sung by children-pioneers. The opera also contains a song written by Czech novelist and playwright Pavel Kohout who was a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in the 1950s but turned a dissident in the 1970s and became one of the founders of human rights document Charter 77. Kohout eventually emigrated to Austria.
Kohout wrote the song at the time when he was still a communist and the opera's title is based on his song lyrics, which contain the phrase "Tomorrow will".
The authors also used a goodbye letter that Horáková wrote during the last minutes of her life. The letter reached its addressee only in 1990, a year after the Velvet Revolution.
The opera is to be performed on 14, 20 and 24 April, 6 and 13 May.
