LOVE IS WITHOUT END!
Poetry and music night on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the greatest Czech romantic poet K. H. Macha.
November 22, 2010 , 7pm, Free
Love is without end!
Poetry and music night on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the greatest Czech romantic poet K. H. Macha.
Karel Hynek Macha belongs among poets whose work has been a source of inspiration for generations of artists. Macha is a symbol of Czech poetry and at he has been given world recognition by being compared to English Romantic poets such as Byron. In the Czech Republic the year 2010 has been announced as the Year of Karel Hynek Macha.
Program at the Czech Center New York
The Czech Center New York will recall Macha’s poetry, its immortality and the poet’s legacy on the evening of November 22nd at the Bohemian National Hall. The poet’s most remarkable work, the lyrical and epic poem May, will be presented partly in Czech and partly in English by Czech and American artists. Zuzana Stivinova, Jana Plodkova, Martina Formanova, Martin Palous, Petr Sis and Dusan Tynek will recite their favorite fragments in Czech. English will be rendered by Julian Stetkevych, Bryan Tyree Henry and Laura Esposito. The evening has been prepared in collaboration with the young promising director and playwright Snehal Desai.
The musical part has been arranged by Jiri Kaderabek and is entitled The Tone of a Broken Harp, The Sound of a Snapped String, a multimedia composition for video, tape, voice, piano and string quartet. “The piece was inspired by the dark and almost decadent layer of Macha’s May. Poetic images of love and spring nature mix with the description of ruin, despair and death,” the author says. “The concept and the exact form of the video came to me when I took an unexpected nap one afternoon,” Jiri Kaderabek adds. He will perform together with the American string quartet Fourbythree.
We use the recent English translation of May by the American translator and poet Marcela Sulak which was published by the Twisted Spoon Press in Prague in 2005.
Jiri Kaderabek received prizes in the Zenith Composers Competition (2009), International Cimbalom Festival Composition (2008), Czech Radio Composition Competition (2006), Generace Composition Competition (2003, 2004, 2006, 2007), he also won the Dean of the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague Award (2006), became a finalist of the Musica Nova International Composition Competition (2008) and was nominated for the Gideon Klein Award (2006).
His works have been commissioned and performed throughout Europe and USA. He collaborated with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hradec Králové Symphony Orchestra, North Czech Philharmony Teplice, Bohuslav Martinů Philharmony Zlín, Slovak Philharmonic Choir, National Theater in Prague and ensembles such as Fourbythree, Fama Quartet, Rainbow Quartet, Ensemble Martinů, Ensemble Calliopée, Ensemble MoEns and the Intrasonus Ensemble.
In his current work various compositional approaches are confronted, often principles or fragments of historical music as well as pop, rock and jazz are incorporated. He also works with recorded nonmusical sounds, integrated in the musical structure, and often uses various theatrical elements. He himself considers his pieces „as polygons with internal side mirrors that make it possible to look at each side again and again but always from a different perspective.“ Recently he even integrates himself in performances of his works, whether as a singer or pianist.
Originally founded in September 2008 among 12 friends and colleagues at Columbia University, fourbythree is an ensemble of rising musicians dedicated to bridging the gap between traditional repertoire, contemporary music, and works by emerging composers. With the intent of introducing audiences to both new and familiar sounds, we hope to trace the common thread between musical works in a way that is as illuminating and engrossing for our listeners as it is for us.
Many of fourbythree's musicians are rising artists in their own right – our members have appeared alongside respected performers and conductors, as soloists and chamber musicians in music festivals and halls across the world. Collectively, fourbythree is a cooperative in which we experiment within the dynamics of an independent, mostly unconducted chamber ensemble. Our musicians contribute to all aspects of the group, from repertoire and rehearsal planning to business operations.
In our third season (2010-2011), fourbythree will collaborate in several programs with Contemporaneous and the Brattle Street Chamber Players, as well as in outreach performances at the Turtle Bay Music School. The ensemble will also present a series of diverse and exciting repertoire spanning from the medieval to contemporary periods, including world premieres by Ryan Beppel and Alex Klein, in a wide range of instrumentations. The season will culminate in April 2011 with performances in the greater Boston area.
Karel Hynek Macha
Karel Hynek Macha was born on November 16, 1810 in an old part of Prague where his father was the foreman at one of the city's mills. At school he learned Latin and German, the two languages approved by the Hapsburg authorities, and later studied law at Prague University. His great model was Byron, with whom he shared a romantic idealism, wandering the Bohemian countryside to visit castle ruins, always making sketches and notes describing the natural beauty surrounding him. He also walked the length of Moravia and Slovakia as well as making a journey to Venice on foot.
Much influenced by the Czech intellectuals who were trying to revive the language at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Macha wrote May and many of his poems in Czech (though his early writing was in German, the compulsory language of his education). In this way he identified himself with the Byronic hero who gives his life to a case.
Macha died of pneumonia on November 5, 1836 just shy of his 26th birthday. He was to have been married in Prague to the mother of his son three days later. Buried in a pauper's grave in Litomerice, his remains were exhumed in March 1939, as Nazi German was occupying the country, and given a formal state burial at Prague's Slavin Cemetery on Vysehrad among the great Czech dead. In addition to May, Macha in his short life wrote a number of poems, short prose sketches, and a journal where he explicitly describes his sexual encounters with his wife to-be, Lori.
MAY by Karel Hynek Macha
translated from the Czech by Marcela Sulak
illustrations by Jindrich Styrsky
Compared to Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Poe, called Lautreamont's "elder brother" by the Czech Surrealists, Karel Hynek Macha (1810-1836) was the greatest Czech Romantic poet, and arguably the most influential of any poet in the language. May, his epic masterpiece, was published in April 1836, just seven months before his death. Considered the "pearl" of Czech poetry, it is a tale of seduction, revenge, and patricide. A paean as well to his homeland, virtually every Czech student learns to recite the first stanzas of the poem from memory and new editions are still regularly published. The reason for the poem's popularity and longevity is the beauty of its music and its innovative use of language. Scorned at first by the national revivalists of the 19th century for being "un-Czech," he was held up as a "national" poet by later generations, a fate from which the interwar Czech avant-garde, who considered him a precursor, tried to rescue him.
Unlike the other seminal 19th-century European poets, Macha's work has been largely ignored in English translation. The present volume, the only available in English, provides the original Czech text in parallel.
