Judita – Opening night, music monodrama and an exhibitionFrom the theatre — 28. September 2024.
The long-awaited premiere of opera Judita by Frano Parać directed by Snježana Banović that will be held on Friday, October 4, 2024, with Ivan Josip Skender as conductor, will be accompanied by equally significant events that from diverse discourses approach the matter of this timely novel about a subversive heroine.
On Sunday, at the CNT Foyer, ensemble Dialogos and Katarina Livljanić performed the music monodrama titled Judita - Biblical novels of Renaissance Croatia after the text of Marko Marulić. From a musical aspect, this project is a reconstruction founded on the usage of Gregorian, Beneventan and Glagolitic sources of medieval Dalmatia and on the exploration of Glagolitic singing in oral tradition. The text of Judita exists without music, but its metric structure resembles a tiny number of archaic Glagolitic songs that were used during preaching in medieval Dalmatia, often in context of extremely emotional and dramatic songs connected with a Passion or rituals of the Holy Week. The text itself refers to texts that were sung in liturgical venues, so the task of the reconstruction was to find, in relevant musical sources (Dalmatian and south Italian) songs that correspond to the original text. In this research, it was necessary to explore the most archaic layers of the Glagolitic songs. This liturgical repertoire sung in the local language (Croatian sacral Slavic), despite actually belonging to a Roman ritual, has been preserved in the manuscripts written by hand in Glagolitic script used in medieval Croatia. The written sources mention the existence of this singing in Dalmatia already in the 11th century in clergy circles that did not speak Latin. Still, the uniqueness of the Glagolitic repertoire that is passed on orally is its viability until today in several places along the Croatian coastline, on Dalmatian islands and in Istria. In this music monodrama Judith and Holoferness with all the personified demons that inhabit their inner mental world are sung by a female voice appearing in more roles in a wide range of vocal nuances, accompanied by gusle, lijerica and the archaic flute. Together, they create a story that occurs within an increasing emotional abundance, transferring this ancient story with its powerful and nostalgic Dalmatian melodies into an intriguing theatre context.
On the occasion of the opening night there will be an exhibition titled Judita — Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow demonstrating the timeless relevance of various incarnations of Judita and the interpretation of her phenomenon in multiple media.
On September 30, 2024, at 1 p.m. in the CNT Foyer the music score of Parać's Judita will be on display together with costume and set designs created for this performance by the prominent costume designer Dženisa Pecotić and the versatile artist and set designer Zlatko Kauzlarić Atač.
