Tomorrow There Will Be...

Cast: Kühn’s Children Choir www.kuhnata.cz, Canti di Praga www.cantidipraga.cz, Instrumental Ensemble PurPur

TOMORROW THERE WILL BE...
Opera - proces
The prime impulse behind the origination of this work was the wish to create a feature–length music project for Soňa Červená. From the very outset, it was clear to us that we would focus on the fate of a distinct Czech woman. We soon arrived at the conclusion that we would be hard put to find a more significant, and in its sheer monstrosity more fascinating, theme than the one afforded by the communist show–trial of Dr Milada Horáková. At its beginning there was the endeavour of a totalitarian power to eliminate all non–communist heroes of the anti–fascist resistance; at the end gallows from which four people swung and a countless number of other fates devastated in the openly and spectacularly manipulated trial.
When studying innumerable archive materials, inaccessible until recently, it became ever clearer that we would work almost exclusively with authentic period texts. Partly because they are fascinating in their ambivalence (the humility and conciliatoriness of Milada Horáková versus the hysteria and uneducatedness of the public prosecutor and the entire judicial machinery), partly because the whole trial was wittingly built up as a theatrical production making use of all the possibilities of the mass media of the time with the aim of intimidating and violently uniting the “working people”. I asked for cooperation on creating the text the stage director Jiří Nekvasil, who brought to it a number of crucial dramaturgical instigations and helped transfer a host of authentic documents into a self–contained stage form. The pivotal character of our opera is not Milada Horáková but the trial against her, which with its inexorable gravitation towards the murder of the heroine and many of her co–accused bears the features of an ancient tragedy. Milada Horáková, fully aware of the futility of any struggle for bare life and reconciled to death, stands at its centre.
When it comes to the music, we have refrained from the idea of personifying a specific fate by a specific enactor. Individual performers impersonate by turn various historical figures. For example, the letter Milada Horáková wrote to bid farewell – and which the then judiciary concealed from its addressees, not to be handed over to them until 1990! – is not presented by an individual but a polyphonic children’s choir, which allows for highlighting of the impersonally transcendental beauty of her final words: “I am humble and resigned to God’s will. He determined this test for me and I am undertaking it with a single wish – to fulfil God’s laws and retain my pure human name. Don’t cry! Don’t languish! It is better this way than to slowly die. My heart could no longer endure a long lack of freedom.” Aleš Březina

The opera is staged in Czech.

Photo: Hana Smejkalová

Duration of the performance: 1 hour and 15 minutes