Czech composer Srnka reaches career milestone with Munich premiere

The Bavarian State Opera in Munich, one of the world’s leading opera houses, will this weekend stage the world premiere of a new piece by the Czech composer Miroslav Srnka. Called South Pole, the opera tells the story of two teams racing each other to reach the most southerly point on Earth. Starring Rollando Villazón in the role of Robert Scott, it represents a major milestone for the composer.

Miroslav Srnka, photo: YouTube

The opera is about the famous race between Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team and Robert Falcon Scott’s British expedition and its premiere on Sunday is being referred to as one of the biggest events of the season at the Bavarian State Opera.

The 40-year-old Czech composer Miroslav Srnka joins the ranks of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner, whose pieces premiered at the Bavarian State Opera in the past.

This is how Miroslav Srnka described his piece in a promotional video for the opera:

“We call it a double opera, or two operas in one, because we technically have those two teams, who communicate by sending telegrams and leaving some objects, but they technically never really meet, although they are going to the same point, and they are always asking themselves about where is the other team. So we have two operas going simultaneously.”

The author of the libretto to the South Pole is Australian writer Tom Holloway. The two authors began cooperating back in 2007, when Srnka attended a prestigious workshop, the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme.

Photo: The official website of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich

The pair wrote a short opera called Make No Noise, which was performed at the Munich Opera festival in 2011. The piece caught the attention of Nikolas Bachler, the head of the Bavarian State Opera, who immediately commissioned Srnka to write a large piece for his opera house.

It took the Czech composer some time to persuade the venue’s management that the story of the two arctic explorers was powerful enough, but in the end it was given preference over librettos by such authors as Elfriede Jelinek or Orhan Pamuk. Miroslav Srnka again:

“The story itself is a drama, but what fascinates me is actually what happens behind the story and how to set it to music and stage. All this environment is so surreal, it is a place where reality meets something that we didn’t even know could exist. And that is exactly what theatre is about. Opera in general needs some kind of abstraction and some kind of translation of the reality into a world that we can see on the stage.”

The over 2000-seat venue has been sold out for weeks but a limited number of tickets is still available for later performances in February and July.