E. F. Burian: Sweep the Stage!

"E. F. Burian (11th June 1904-9th August 1959) was what you might call a 'total' artist. Composer, writer, actor, singer, theatre and film director, theoretician, politician, bon vivant, prisoner, communist in uniform. He was one of the first in Czech culture to pursue the idea of certain kind of gesamtkunstwerk, an approach that was later to be taken up in Laterna magica (Black Theatre), or Czech experimental film, for example. Burian's music is almost entirely forgotten in this country today, although it deserves to be valued in the context of the international avant garde between the wars. His purely musical output was vast (perhaps 200 opuses--several operas, a series of orchestral works, many chamber pieces, dozens of stage and film compositions).

Today it seems incredible that one man could have done so much, directing his theatre (which according to witnesses he hardly ever left), while yet managing to produce an enormous amount of work in pretty well every branch of art. Particularly after 1948 his output as a composer was remarkable, including a great quantity of new works, and the revision of a series of earlier works that he now cast in final form. Many of his works (for example his string quartets) he wrote in a strange solitude, despite the conventional view of Burian as a bullying politician--director.

Burian's pre-war music is characterised on the one hand by a kind of neo-primitivism and neo-folklorism foreshadowing the movement in Czech music in the 1950s, but on the other by admiration for jazz, the two strands often pit together in a weird hybrid that would most probably upset today's purist serious composers."

It is with these words that the conductor of the Agon Orchestra, Petr Kofron, introduced a concert that this year effectively re-ignited interest in the music of E. F. Butrian, who was born exactly a hundred years ago. In this number we bring you three articles--among them an essay by Kofron--, which will, we hope, give you at least a basic idea of how extraordinary E. F. Burian was.

"Once as a small girl I was going for a walk with my father when he said, 'Look, that's the singer Emil Burian coming in the opposite direction.' I had only been to the National Theatre once to see a fairytale and I had huge respect for anyone that acted or sang in the theatre. I stared admiringly at Emil Burian, but I couldn't help noticing the girl on one side of him and the boy on the other. The little boy in short trousers and cap made an indelible impression on my memory. To this day I can still summon up a vivid picture of him walking beside his father with his hands in his pockets. I couldn't have had any idea, of course, that this boy was one day going to play such an important part in my work."

This was how the later "Decko" ("D") Theatre actress Lola Skrbkova remembered her first encounter with her future director. It was not only Lola who could have had no inkling of what the young son of the great baritone would become. His famous father could have had no inkling either, although he must have known that his son might well have musical and theatrical talents. He would definitely not have predicted, for example, that Emil the younger, brought up to honour the great tradition of Czech music represented by the legacy of Smetana, would one day fall madly in love with jazz syncopation. On that summer day described by Lola Skrbkova, Emil may not have been very interested in being gawped at by worshippers of his father's art, but at 21, while still a pupil at the conservatory, he was already embarking on a major musical career himself as the National Theatre presented his opera Pred slunce vychodem [Before Sunrise]. He had even written the opera, based on Maeterlinck's play Aladdin and Palomid, two years before. "E. F." was everywhere something was happening in music, poetry and theatre. His name made his life easy and difficult at the same time. He knew the glamour and the pitfalls of fame from his home and family. He must have been aware of the envious voices that could not forgive his uncle Karel (even more celebrated than his brother Emil, younger by six years) his successes abroad, and must have understood the tragedy of this great tenor, often compared to Caruso, who lived out his life in serious illness and deprived of the stage. But anyone who is born with the theatre in their blood is condemned in advance.

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"On St. Camile's Day my wife hopes you will come, and meet Emil, who is my son."

Thus Emil Burian welcomed his son, and left his friends in no doubt of his paternal pride. It was not only thanks to his uncle and father that Emil's home was full of music. His mother was a singing teacher and young Emil naturally grew up surrounded by all kinds of resonant voices, speaking or singing. Did he wonder even back then how all these voices would sound together, rhythmically arranged according to his direction? The year 1920 saw the founding of the arts group "Devetsil" [meaning "Butturbur", a plant, but also literally, "Nine Forces"] that brought together writers, painters, architects, musicians and theatre people, but also critics and arts journalists. Burian became involved through his friendship with the poet Vitezslav Nezval. Here he met Jiri Frejka, and with him and Jindrich Honzl came to form the "trio of the most audacious" as it was later called. Burian joined "Devetsil" as a musician, but it was here than his taste for theatre came to the fore. It was here that the Osvobozene divadlo [Liberated Theatre] was born, in which Burian started to develop his versatility; he played on the piano, composed and sang, but also acted and nursed a longing to be a director--the one who puts together and sets in motion that clockwork mechanism of interlocking wheels that is theatre. Here as a musician he worked alongside Jaroslav Jezek who, for example "full of humour marvellously parodied famous musicians on the piano, and E. F. Burian recited, played at jazz accompanied by gramophone and sung his proverbs, and did all this with great gravity," as the daily Lidove noviny reported on the 2nd of March 1927. A remarkable formulation; Jezek "parodied on the piano" and Burian "played at jazz" ... The performance was something between cabaret, revue and poetic belts, with many elements of ordinary practical jokery, delight in combinations of words, sounds, objects and individual ideas. Gradually, however, a more serious note crept into what were still performances for "letting one's hair down".

The European avant garde identified with left-wing thinking, partly as a reaction to the tradition-loaded bourgeois culture in which the younger generation had grown up. Just as the new bourgeoisie had once defined itself against the aristocracy, so the contemporary generation of artists took up the call for social revolution, which it saw as the condition for the birth of a new kind of art. It was only logical that this political conviction came hand in hand with enchantment with the modern Russian theatre, Alexander Tairov and Vsevolod Meyerhold, and also with the left-orientated theatre of the West--Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator. The Burian--Frejka--Honzl trio finally parted company and went off to different theatres. Burian went via the "Dada" and "Modern Studio" companies to Brno, Olomouc and back to Brno. The "Dada" and "Modern Studio" (where Burian was still working with Frejka), were ephemeral ventures, but it was in these companies that Burian developed his highly individual approach to theatre. It was in Brno that in 1929 Burian's voice-band was formed. Burian was not the only one to be searching for a new relationship to the stage word at this period, but he was the only one to develop ensemble recitation into orchestral score and to found a distinctive theatrical poetics on the genre. In 1929 he presented a Czech classic romantic poem, "May" by Karel Hynek Macha. It was one of the best voice-band presentations, one that he was to return to twice with his own Decko company and which its member Nina Jirsikova was to stage at the Terezin concentration camp.

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One year before "May", in 1928, Burian presented his ensemble at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Siena. Here the Voice-band created a sensation and of course had its critics, as is usual and desirable with every new development. Burian was conscious that the audience would be international, and so the programme was put together from Italian, French, English, German and Czech texts. One of the Italian reviewers gave a charming account not just of the performance but also of Burian himself: "A kind of spirit, a medium, presented himself as cappelmaestro; not the sort we would have expected. No directorial full beard, no glasses, no prim frock coat. Just two searching magnetic eyes shining with intelligent sympathy and--malice. It is hard to imagine the private life of this universal man. After so many attempt to break up old forms, after so many sonatas and quartets 'at any price', it is a magnificent experience to meet someone who ultimately doesn't care about any of it, learns directly from the birds and sings--can one put it like this?--the most beautiful free song of the last fifty years."

Burian defined his "patent" invention like this: "The libretto of voice-band is the poem. The text is not reproduced in the same way as in the old kind of recitation ensemble, but is transposed into the ensemble key in such a way as to allow the beauty of the ensemble union to stand out as much as possible. The word and its latent musicality constitute the building block in rhythmic harmony. [...] The word is rhythmised freely." The melody of voice-band also flowed from the latent musicality of the word, with harmonies created by division according to the natural registers of female and male voices. Nonetheless the ensemble remained a set of individuals, with each performer interpreting the text as she or he wished.

Burian's ensemble changed venues, appearing at the Umelecka beseda [Arts Association], in the Na Slupi Theatre and in the Mozarteum: its performances included for example the Old Czech Mastickar [The Mountebank], Havlicek's Krest svateho Vladimira [The Baptism of St. Vladimir], The Song of Songs (with text arranged by Max Brod), and a Hans Sachs farce, but also Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Collaboration with Frejka, however, ultimately led to claustrophobia and "cabin fever". Burian resigned and left for Brno, while Frejka went to the National Theatre.

In the drama Studio in Brno, Burian was reunited with Jindrich Honzl, and staged Macchiavelli, Maeterlinck, O'Neill, and Salda, for example, but the company did not have the funds to survive. After a year of frustration in Olomouc, Burian tried again in Brno. Here he directed Nezval's Milenci z kiosku [Lovers from a Kiosk] in 1932, effectively engaging in polemic with Frejka, who had just directed the same play at the National Theatre in Prague. The final verses of the play caused both directors problems with the censor: "I know a land near the pole, I know a land of strange beauty, and to this land we shall go together and forever. It is not America, land of deluding mirages, where the black slave sobs in a sea of plantations. [...] That land is strangely beautiful and full of sweetness, Oh, there you would be happy. It is the land of freedom." Shortly afterwards the rebel Burian, persona non grata in Brno, returned to Prague.

"Sweep the Stage!"

"Old Richard Wagner, or to go even further back Monteverdi, or as far as we can, the Ancient Greeks, dreamed of the theatre that is only today starting to be a reality. They dreamed of creating a form that would be neither music nor speech, neither sculpture not dance, that would be neither poem not picture, but everything together. They dreamed of that synthetic form that was discovered for us when the first electric ray fell on a boulevard, and which offers itself to us with each new technical invention. Today for the first time we can realise that theatre in which the frontiers of misunderstanding between the arts would fall. "In 1936 Burian published the slender booklet entitled "Sweep the Stage!", dedicated to the memory of his father. It is a summary of his views on theatre, his hopes for the future and what he had managed to achieve with his own company over the last two years. The "D 34" company was launched on the 16th of September 1933 with a performance in the concert hall of the Mozarteum in Jungmannova Street. The changing number of the company, always indicating the year in the second half of the current season, meant a journey ahead, and symbolised unending searching. The first production was symbolic as well: Erich Kastner's Life in Our Days. The other plays in the first season also showed clearly the social groups Burian was gunning for, and this inevitably meant that his audiences were composed mainly of young workers and students. In his manifesto "Sweep the Stage!" he underlined several passages that formed the axis of his programme: "The modern theatre director serves, but is not a servant", "Theatre must be taken into the hands of those who create it", "The time has come when it will be necessary to shoot for beautiful art. He who shoots first will be the winner". "For us the nation is the working people, and the culture of the working people is the national culture for us".

Director Musician

In the autumn of 1936 Vsevolod Meyerhold visited Prague and saw Burian's production of the Barber of Seville at the Decko: "E. F. Burian is a director very close to me in approach. He composes his productions like a musician, and I regard that as the only correct method in dramatic art," he said. Music always played an irreplaceable role in Burian's theatre. His direction was really a musical score, and he used to call the scripts the librettos. Burian's "polydynamics", as he called the mutual interlinkage of all the dramatic elements, was based on the principles of musical form; he kept to a sense of proportion in the deployment of all elements, and respected the laws of gradation and contrast as in musical composition. It was not a case of music accompanying the dramatic performance, but of ensuring that all the dramatic methods employed "resonated together". For Burian every theatre production was the composition of an opera (the complete opposite of the general tendency today, which is for opera to be directed like spoken drama). In Burian's concept, the musical element was already contained in the essence of drama. "If music is already latently contained in drama, this does not mean that the normal ear has to hear it just as music, i.e. as a series of notes and harmonies produced in time and space using instruments and the human voice. Music is above all the hidden law of the stage. [...] We say 'this space has rhythm', for example, or sometimes we say, 'the dialogue has tempo'. Or else people say, 'this or that actress has a melodious voice'. The trained ear recognises the pause the goes on too long. The individual deployment of the actors in dialogue has its musical law." Commenting on his presentation of Macha (a poet) he said, "Czech music has one of its best composers in Macha." His treatment of lighting, movement and other elements (Burian was one of the first in this country to use film as part of the stage design) was also based on a musical feeling for rhythm and its changes.

Himself a musician, Burian knew how to choose excellent musicians as colleagues. Those who worked in Decko included Karel Ancerl, Karel Reiner and Rafael Schachter. The three were later interned in Terezin, where all of them helped to maintain faith in life through music. The conductor Rafael Schachter, who directed Smetanaes The Bartered Bride and Verdi's Requiem in Terezin, did not survive. Nor did Hans Krasa, whose music for Adolf Hoffmeister's Mladi ve hre [Youth at Play], presented at the Decko on the 19th of February 1935, was the first case of Burian using stage music that he had not composed himself (apart from the use of Kurt Weill's songs in The Threepenny Opera, in which Burian himself played Mackeath).

Burian's avant garde company was soon confronted with fascism and Nazism. During a tour of Switzerland in 1935 the company was faced with protests from fascist-influenced sections of the public provoked particularly by Burian's Vojna [War], a production based on folk poetry from Erben's collection with a clearly pacifist message. Other sections of the public were more understanding: "We don't understand the words but a forsaken mother is always understandable, not only in Czech," someone wrote in Berne. There were attacks on Burian at home, too. In May 1937 the company held a spring festival linked to an international theatre conference and an exhibition of the fruits of Czech (Czechoslovak) culture from Bedrich Smetana to the current young generation. Rightists branded Burian as a Jew-Bolshevik, and Czech nationalists were outraged by the fact that the exhibition included several works by artists from the German minority. The company continued to play, however, and the number of premieres in a season never fell below five, not even in the first year of the occupation.

In the company Burian was not only head, author, repertory director, and director (including involvement in stage design), but also the main composer of the music. Productions involving his own music included Nezval's Lovers from the Kiosk, Macha's Kat [Hangman], Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne, Viktor Dyk's Krysar [The Ratcatcher], Nezval's Manon Lescaut, and with Karel Reiner's music Klicpera's comedy Kazdy neco pro vlast [Everyone must do something for his Country], Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Buchner's comedy Leon and Lena. Decko's last season provided opportunities for young composers: Vaclav Dobias (An Old History by Julius Zeyer), Jiri Sternwald, and Vaclav Kaslik. Zbynek Precechtel wrote the music for Nina Jirsikova's ballet Pohadka o tanci [Fairytale about Dance].

Shortly before the war, Burian as composer took a new path that he was to be prevented from continuing. After a long interval he turned once again to opera. Marysa, based on the story by the Mrstik brothers was completed in 1938 and premiered on the 16th of April 1943 in Brno. Its subject and treatment have led to frequent comparison with Janacek's Jenufa. It is an exceptional work, but one that in the context of Burian's creative legacy tends to be wrongly regarded as a kind of "excursion" into a field uncharacteristic for him. Who knows the direction that Burian would have taken had it not been for the war?

The Fairytale about Dance was the penultimate premiere at Decko. In it a wood nymph teaches people to dance and is sent to her death for it by a wicked queen, but the people who have learnt to dance keep on dancing. The allegory was explicit and unambiguous. On the 12th of March 1941 the theatre was closed and Burian, who from the start of the occupation had been a constant target of attacks by the Czech fascist movement, "Vlajka", was arrested, and with him Nina Jirsikova and Zbynek Precechtel, although the latter was finally judged the least guilty and released. Burian was sent to a series of concentration camps and was one of the few to survive from the ship the Cap Arcona, loaded with prisoners by the Nazis who wanted to remove the traces of their crimes in the camps. The absurdity of all wars was apparent when on the 3rd of May 1945 the boat was sunk by the victorious allies. Thousands of its involuntary passengers were drowned or shot as soon as they reached the shore (official sources speak of eight thousand victims, Burian spoke of twenty thousand).

The Theatre that was Left

Burian returned to Prague in June of 1945. "In the concentration camp I dreamed of the Theatre of Work. I believed with complete certainty that when I returned to my liberated country, the workers of all nations would create the conditions for the creation of a Theatre of Work as the consequence of revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie, and that I would be able to serve my homeland and people within it", Burian wrote in 1953. His initial enthusiasm cooled somewhat when he discovered that the technically equipped buildings had already been taken apart. "And so all that was left for me was a hall that no one wanted, a rat hole under the U Rozvarilu Restaurant". Burian finally resigned himself to the situation and started activities in D 46. For a short time he also led the theatre in Brno and the Karlin operetta theatre. The first production of the new "D"--Decko was Sen jednoho vezne [The Dream of a Prisoner], Burian's adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. "A three-dimensional and interesting example of how people succumb to chaos. E. F. Burian, this distinguished director and unpleasant repatriatee, has come back from the concentration camp with some kind of psychological injury", wrote Ferdinand Peroutka. People didn't want to be reminded of the war or the camps, and didn't want to see Romeo with a prisoner's number. Burian had no better success with operetta, and his adaptation of Friml's Kral tulaku [King of Tramps] was branded a mistake of the same kind. The turbulent times resisted reminders of the inter-war period even in the name of the theatre company. In the period 1951-1954 it operated under the title Army Arts Theatre. These words written by Burian in 1947 could have been addressed to himself. "It's not that we want to deny talent and destroy what is known as creative freedom. The point is whether people can be found among us who will use their creative free convictions to find a relationship with today's reality, with the man of today and his life, and whether they will have the courage to get rid of the superstition that prevents them getting into the heart of the man of today." One of the most audacious of the inter-war generation turned to propagating the ideas of socialist realism, the marks of which were "concreteness and clarity, unambiguous message and aggressiveness of content", rejection of the formalism that "copies the superficial signs of reality" and, experiments at any price". In 1957 he mused on how to fire the young artists of the day and remedy errors, "caused by the unhealthy development of policy towards youth since 1945". He did not wish to criticise the regime; on the contrary his essay was entitled Lenin has Taught Us and used the consequences of the October Revolution as arguments. It is hard to recognise the former theatrical experimentalist in the words, "The National Theatre was once built from the will of the people and it is by the will of the people that it stands today. This means that the management of the National Theatre has a duty to respect the will of the people who built it and who allow it to live. [...] The Bartered Bride cannot be other than as Bedrich Smetana wrote it. What some artist or director dreams up to add to it is of no consequence at all. [...] Our workers, our working people don't ask whether Mr. XY is so highly artistically educated that he can discover Smetana on stage in a different way to some discoverer ten days ago, but whether he has a right to Smetana's Bartered Bride. It is the architect or director who vanishes from the stage as quickly as possible in respect for a great classic work that is the genius!"

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Barriers between Us

An overview of the repertoire of the postwar Decko is testimony enough to the way artistic ideals were adapted (yielded, pandered) to the times, how they helped to create (supported) them, how they resisted them, dodged them, succumbed to them and sometimes found their original power again, but only temporarily. In the first season Burian revived his old productions--Vera Lukasova based on a story by Bozena Benesova, Klicpera's Kazdy neco pro vlast, Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, Macha's May. Reactions were very mixed, as in the case of Romeo and Juliet, so in the case of Klicpera, Burian was even accused of propagating bourgeois ideology despite being a communist. Convinced of his theatrical ideal, in the next season he presented his adaptations of Coster's Eulenspiegel, Cech's Excursions of Mr. Broucek to the 15th Century, Maeterlinck, Tristan Tzara, Dostoyevsky, but also a "platform" for his own ideas in the form of productions of Jeden ze vsech, zpoved autora [One of All, the Author's Confession] and Hraze mezi nami [Barriers betwen Us].

Even before the war, adaptations and dramatisations of folk texts had formed a significant part of his repertoire. Vojna [War] had been followed by another five pieces based on folk inspiration and after the war he returned to these sources. He presented the Old Czech comedy Esther with his own music and then the dramatic belt Laska, vzdor a smrt [Love, Resistance and Death]. A Folk Suite consisted of his revived pre-war production of the Hry o svate Dorote a Salicku [Play about St. Dorothy and Salicka] and he then rehearsed the medley Vanocni hry ceskeho lidu [Christmas Plays of the Czech People]. In March 1949, however, he premiered Parta brusice Karhana [The Team of the Grinder Karhan] by Vasek Kana (which "showed how to represent today's struggle for better methods of work and socialist competition"), in February 1950 Alexej Pludek's Pripad Modra voda [The Case of Blue Water] (roles like the small farmer Simek, the worker from the patron factory Vanek and the Chairwoman of the Agricultutal Co-operative give a fair idea of the direction of the company's repertoire), and in November of the same year Burian's adaptation of Sireny [The Sirens] by Marie Majerova. These productions were followed by Spring Waters by Sergei Michalkov, Surovov's Dawn over Moscow, Pogodin's Man with a Rifle, and Gorky's Vassa Zheleznova. Meanwhile the theatre company had been renamed the Army Arts Theatre and the pacifist Burian had acquired an officer's uniform. On the occasion of Burian's fiftieth birthday there were calls for a new Czech drama, "that would resonate hugely through the time and its chaos, but also light it up and help to find a way out of it", the kind of drama that would give Burian the chance to "take the entire measure of the creative maturity of his whole personality and test its entire development". From the autumn of 1955 the company was again allowed the title D 34, but its position did not become easier. The revived Vojna became the subject of debate in the press. For some it was a "creative polemic against the impoverished, simplified and monastic interpretation of socialist realism", while for others it was "formal wilfulness, nothing but stylisation, no truth of life", "excessive avantgardism". The spectator was said to get "a feeling of cramp, a strange ecstasy, in which ideas are conjured up and connected in the way usual for the avant-garde movements of the thirties, a way that is basically alien to us today. This impression is underlined by the music. The preponderance of the rhythmic element, the often dogged repetition of a few harmonic connections, a few rhythmic figures and a melodic line that is for the most part suppressed or deformed have a crushing and stifling effect on most of the audience, even those who are used to listening to modern and experimental music." When Vojna was published in book form, the publishers Orbis were accused of devoting too much care to the publication, while taking a miserly approach to works that were "of vital importance for the life of the theatre."

Burian still, however, had enough strength to try something new. In the 1955/56 season a small opera ensemble was established in Decko. In 1956 it presented Burian's Opera z pouti [Fairground Opera], "a great romp in three acts". It was directed by Libuse Cechova with stage design by Zdenek Seydl, and the cast included Libuse Havelkova and Vladimir Mensik. While the production was extremely popular, the critics asked, "Is there anything more here than 'great romp'? We think there isn't. In particular, the play no longer seems to contain the idea [...] of celebrating a good boy who wants to live by the labour of his own hands and become a peerless master of his craft, and the fact that he emerges victorious over a devious court good-for-nothing. While the original idea of the folk play is proclaimed here in the author's preface in the programme, it is hard to find in the production itself. [...] Doesn't this work of Burian's offer us rather too little? [...] A great romp and the glitter of a fairground spectacle has this time seduced E. F. Burian away from most valuable aspects of the folk tradition."

Not even his new production of Eugene Onegin in 1957 pleased the critics. Unlike his pre-war version, this new treatment was entirely based on music. Here Burian once again trusted in himself and his faith in the musical laws of theatre. The result, however, was criticised as a simplification of the story, and the creation of "too clear and predictable a line [...], Onegin is simplified into a repulsive villain, smooth and courageous, but an unfeeling, selfish and conceited tyrant." Burian was also criticised for forced rhymes and vulgarisms in his version of the text, and it was argued that while the adaptation brought more than one new and healthy element, the treatment of the material was in some cases excessively subjective. The final premiere at Decko came in 1959 with Burian's own play Rozcesti [Crossroads], a highly symbolic title since Burian himself stood at a crossroads. Prematurely exhausted and defeated, however, the journey he took in the autumn of the same year was to the land "from whose bourne no traveller returns."

The theatre that was to play under his name until 1990 identified with his legacy in more than name alone. Many actors whom he had trained played in it, and the company from time to time returned to some of the titles in his repertoire, further generations of directors and composers rising to the challenge each in his own way. Music remained an inseparable element in the Divadlo E. F. Buriana productions. Burian's Vera Lukasova was staged with his music directed by Jaroslav Dudek, with choreography by Pavel Smok and with Burian's daughter Katerina in the title role (1974). His adaptation of Dostoyevsky's White Nights was presented with music by J. O. Karel (1971), and Burian's repertory legacy was kept alive with the production of Buchner's Leon and Lena (directed by Petr Scherhaufer, 1969), Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera (directed by Garyk Cisar, 1969), Nezval's Manon Lescaut (directed by Karel Novak with music by Jiri Srnka in 1961, and directed by Josef Palla with music by Ladislav Simon in 1969), Pushkin's Eugene Onegin with music by Jan Novak (1968 resp. 1970), and even a reconstruction of the Terezin production of Macha's May in Nina Jirsikova's version, directed by Petr Novotny and with music by Milan Svoboda (1975).

Throughout his life the composer Emil Frantisek Burian remained unjustly overshadowed by Burian the director and dramatic author. His legacy as composer is considerable and very diverse. Apart from stage music for the needs of his theatre he composed a number of chamber and orchestral pieces, individual songs and song cycles. His early opera Bubu of Montparnasse had to wait to be premiered until 1999, seventy years after it was written, at the State Opera in Prague. It was the best production of the season, a major surprise with its multiplicity of styles and dramatic unity. The opera Marysa was recorded for television, directed by Eva Marie Bergerova in 1984, and the Opera z pouti [Fairground Opera] was presented a few years ago by the Disk Theatre, while outside the Czech Republic Burian's inter-war music has been rediscovered by the Dutch group Ebony Band. In comparison with his huge output, however, these are for the moment mere drops in the ocean.

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With permission of magazine Harmonie.