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  • Setting the Stage, Staging the VoiceOn Directing Weill and Brecht’s Der Jasager
  • Eli Friedlander (bio) and Michal Grover-Friedlander (bio)

The present essay is a reflection on our recent production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Der Jasager (1930; The yes sayer). It raises various questions of interpretation concerning the opera and attempts to articulate how the direction and staging of the opera addressed these questions. Directed by Michal Grover-Friedlander in cooperation with the stage design of Eli Friedlander, this production was originally performed as the culmination of a year-long course at Tel Aviv University in 2010 devoted to Der Jasager. The following year the opera group Ta Opera Zuta was formed. The group is committed to the integration of research and performance in opera and music theater, concentrating on the specific questions raised by the staging of the voice. This integrative vision was realized in Ta Opera Zuta’s 2011 performance of the opera, which can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube at http://youtu.be/l2bIXCoFQUg. Thanks to European American Music Distributors for permission to reprint excerpts from the score of Der Jasager.

Setting the Stage

Synopsis

The opera opens with the declamation of the chorus that what must be learned above all is consent. The teacher arrives to bid farewell to one of his students before setting off to the city beyond [End Page 203] the mountains, where he will seek a cure for a disease afflicting his town. At the student’s house, he asks the boy why he has not been to school recently, and the boy replies that his mother has been ill. The teacher tells of his trip to the mother, who asks if he intends to take the boy with him. They agree that it is not a journey for children, but as he prepares to leave the boy asks to join the expedition. The teacher protests: the journey is too long and arduous. But the boy insists on going, so that he can bring back the cure that will help his mother. His mother and the teacher reluctantly allow the boy to make the journey.

The teacher, the boy, and three older students set out on the journey across the mountains. Soon the boy is exhausted and confesses that he is not well. The teacher tells him that it is forbidden to say such things on the journey, but the three students, aware of the boy’s condition, demand to speak to the teacher. When the teacher is forced to admit that the boy is ill, the students remind him of the great custom ordaining that whoever falls ill during the journey over the mountains must be hurled into the valley. The teacher acknowledges the importance of the old custom but reminds them that the sick person must consent to this treatment. He asks the boy whether he consents to the custom or would choose instead to return to the village. The boy gives his consent and adds that he knew the risk involved in taking the journey. All he asks is that the three students fill his jar with the medicine they are to acquire and deliver it to his mother. The three students then throw the boy over the cliff, keeping their eyes shut so that none of them can be deemed more guilty than the others. The opera ends with the chorus repeating its opening declamation: what must be learned above all is consent.1

Translations and Transformations: Play to Opera to Plays2

The opera is based on a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Japanese Noh play,3 to which Bertolt Brecht did not have direct access when writing the libretto. He worked with a text twice removed from the Japanese source, and in the course of transmission the original work, Taniko (The valley rite), was substantially altered. In [End Page 204] 1921, Arthur Waley published his English translations of some twenty Noh plays from the Japanese (NPJ). Waley, in translating, already secularizes the play: literal sickness is stripped of its symbolic meaning as spiritual impurity, the religious motivation for the boy’s sacrifice is altered, and the journey’s ritual...

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