Celan premieres in Bucharest after being crowned with success in Germany

Newsroom 18/11/2010 | 13:45

“Celan”, a co-production with the Bremen Theater and homage to Paul Celan, the pen name of Paul Antschel, a Hebrew poet of Romanian origins, will make its debut at The Bucharest National Opera on November 28.

The opera, composed by Peter Ruzicka, was very well received at previous representations in Dresden, Mainz, Darmstadt, Köln and Bremen. Conductor Vlad Conta is the musical director of the opera, which is constructed as a seven-scene biography of Celan (1920 – 1970), during his stay in his hometown Cernauti, then in Bucharest, Vienna and Paris. The center stage of the spectacle is taken by the Holocaust and its impact on the poet, both from a personal as well as literary perspective.

The opera, although successful in Germany, was not solely positively embraced by critics. Some, as observatorulcultural.ro reports, considered that a subject as the Holocaust could not be represented musically. However, others conceded that if Celan could write poetry after Auschwitz, so can music be written about the Holocaust.