THE CHARLATAN (Janáček Brno 2024)

ABOUT

If we had to choose one Brno composer to commemorate during the festival, it would definitely be Pavel Haas. Janáček’s favorite student, whose life ended prematurely in October 1944 in the Auschwitz concentration camp, is connected to Brno not only because he was born in the city and studied here. Haas’ only opera The Charlatan had its world premiere at Brno Mahen Theatre in 1938. It will also return there after almost ninety years in a new production by the Moravian-Silesian Theatre Opera Company, directed by Ondřej Havelka and conducted by Marek Šedivý. Festival audiences will thus have the opportunity to see The Charlatan in the place of its birth just a few weeks after the Ostrava premiere.

Deception and delusion, potions, tricks and deceit all accompany the wandering charlatan Pustrpalk on his travels from town to town through a landscape destroyed by the Thirty Years’ War. Pavel Haas found his inspiration in a novel by the German writer Josef Winckler Doctor Eisenbart, based on the real-life character of the barber surgeon Johann Andreas Eisbarth who, although without a medical education, gained recognition even in Austrian court circles. The name of the protagonist and many other features, however, Haas added from a purely Czech source – the medieval The Ointment Seller. The tragicomic and almost Faustian tale of a wandering barber surgeon who promises the unattainable only to search in vain for happiness in his own life, premiered on the brink of World War II, less than three weeks after the Anschluss of Austria. The war and the death of Pavel Haas were the reasons why The Charlatan did not appear on stage until sixty years later at the opera festival in Wexford, Ireland. It will be shown in the Czech Republic for the first time since its pre-war premiere. 

Patricie Částková

Cast & creatives

Author: Pavel Haas

Conductor: Marek Šedivý

Director: Ondřej Havelka

Ensemble: National Moravian-Silesian Theatre