Last night I attended the world premiere of Ahmet Adnan Saygun‘s opera Gilgameş (1964–83), given by the Istanbul State Opera and Ballet—a company which still has no theatre of its own. The poster promised a Dünya Prömiyeri—a world premiere—of a production nobody had been waiting for, and which has nevertheless arrived. More’s the pity.
For forty years this creation lay somewhere in the archive dust. It might profitably have gone on lying there. But no: exhumed, restored, gilded, lit from every angle—and what? Tosh it was, and tosh it remains.
We are inclined to smile at the fact that Shostakovich was once diagnosed in Pravda with “muddle instead of music.” Well—it does happen. I heard precisely such a muddle last night. Live.
How we got here
The story runs thus. There was Saygun, a luminary of Turkish polyphony (so the programme assures us), who was seized by envy of Nevit Kodallı, whose own Gilgamesh had appeared in 1964. So Saygun set to work as well. He wrote for twenty years. Halfway through, a decade in, somebody even tried staging the drafts. It did not take. He spent another ten years revising. And then for forty years nobody could bring themselves to touch it. Why? Had you been in the hall last night, you would understand.
Before the curtain, speeches. The theatre’s management held forth at length and with feeling, not omitting to quote the classics of Republican thought. The line that brought the house down was the announcement that this production is important for the understanding of our(!) history. Quite so. The Sumero-Akkadian epic as the key to the origins of the Turkish Republic. Curtain.
And then the thing itself
Expensive costumes. Expensive screens. An opera that turned out to be half bad ballet, half howling over an orchestral mush. Nobody hits anything, but everybody is trying. And one rather wants to applaud the effort, only… it somehow refuses to come from within. Normally, of course, I couldn’t possibly comment.
The single redeeming feature: on the way out of the hall I noticed a poster. In June and July there will be concerts in the ancient theatre at Ephesus. I shall certainly be going. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
Watch this space.
