Aleksandar Denic, set designer, the author of a large number of theatre and film set designes both in this country and abroad. He worked with a number of famous domestic and foreign directors such as Arnold Barkus, Michael Basset, Srdjan Dragojevic, Uli Edel, Srdjan Karanovic, Emir Kusturica, Tanja Mandic Rigonat, Dragan Marinkovic, Goran Markovic, Darjan Mihajlovic, Dejan Mijac, Mikele Merola, Stefan Sablic, Branislav Micunovic, Jug Radivojevic, Miloš Radovic, Michael Rouds, Slavenko Saletovic, Alisa Stojanovic, John Skovel, Gorcin Stojanovic, Radmila Vojvodic and others. He directed stage cantata Atlas by Anja Djordjevic in Yugoslav Drama Theatre. Among numerous acknowledgements and awards, he won Great Award of Serbia, nomination for Ammy Award, Golden Knight, Crystal Prism, Golden Mimosa and Golden Turkey, are outstanding.

return to drama The bereaved family

Branislav Nusic passed away in his home on the day of Epiphany, 19th January 1938. Although it was well known that the greatest Serbian comediographer had already been ill for a long time, the news of death surprised everyone. Nušic’s funeral was one of the most noteworthy public events in the cultural life of the capital between the two world wars. Nusic’s body was laid on a catafalque in the foyer of the National Theatre on 21st January, and the funeral was on 22nd January. Here are some of the statements that famous Nušic’s contemporaries made on the day of the funeral.

„Nusic has unforged in his comedy a precious metal for small coins, small and numerous, intended for many. Recognized and unrecognized by critics, and admitted to the Academy only at the age of seventy, Nusic was finally acknowledged not only as the most active name, but also as a necessity of the time. One of the satisfactions for Nušic should be the feeling of voidness after his death; voidness and care at the theatre, to which he injected camphor year after year.“                                                         

Milan Grol 

„The reason for our citizens, for so many small people, to assemble around the coffin of Branislav Nusic, around the dead body of the writer of comedies, jokes, a creator of caricatures, a cheerful writer, an entertainer, to form a long and voluntary guard around his funeral, from the centre of the city to the distant cemetery – was not an ordinary curiosity of common people for solemn processions, or a wish to take part in a public act, or an attraction of a famous name, or even something that we could call ’thankfulness to laughter’... The true reason that summoned those long rows of Nusic’s fellow-citizens to the streets along which his dead body was carried was a different interpretation, a different meaning that Nusic’s laughter must have and had acquired at the same time when his life ended.“ 

Milan Predic 

„Nusic was my parent. The parent of my repertoire. He has created me the way I am now, by the roles he has written for me. He was a great man, so great that for a long, long time from now on there will be no one to match him... Nusic has meant a huge deal for us, actors. We have loved him as a father and have cherished him as a child. He has worried about us as a father, has taken care to give us the best roles, and we, in return, have cherished and protected him. Nusic has left us today. But as long as theatre and actors exist, Nusic will be famous and among us he will always be alive.“ 

Zanka Stokic

return to drama The bereaved family

The Bereaved Family (1934) is an extremely interesting comedy on a „bereaved“ group of people who expect an inheritance and have already started dividing the fortune that they have not got. In this work of comedy-writing terms the writer gave a gallery of characters of small minds who competed in lies and cynicism – headed by the masterly realized character of Agaton, who was the most dynamic personality among them, which meant with the most plastic features of hypocrisy and the lack of scruples, which a small but cunning mind could possibly have. Just in this Nusic’s comedy the dramatic and theatrical „imminent present time“ had its full effect, construed from simpler to more complex forms of sensual-concrete presentation. Namely, a group of people scatters as a group, persons individualize, enabling the character of Agaton to dominate ever more in a comical way, so that from a typical character of a certain social stratum and the said group he grows into a character who transforms and adjusts so cunningly that he loses the measures of his cunning mind and even himself is shocked with the exaggeration of his last combination! Our playwright masterly realized the dramaturgy of this comical play.

Verbal comics dominate in the first act. The second act has primarily been realized by situation comics, which reveal a gallery of characters and single out Agaton, who struggles to become „a leader“ of the bereaved family. The end of the second act is the pinnacle of that comics, since, paradoxically, individual interests lead the characters to a group, „family“ quarrel, in which words, as elements of hypocrisy and signs of interests, are reduced to the level of mere shouts. Finally, the third act begins with a revelation that the deceased has deceived them all: it would seem the group is united, but every individual has already taken and is taking off his face a mask, the mask of „the bereaved family“. Relatively calmly, with resignation, with bitter and vindictive, even sarcastic, words addressed to the deceased, every one of them reveals his/her real, morally corrupt face. Only Agaton tries to find new ways for his Proteus being, desiring to obtain inheritance, money and estate. Verbal and situation comics are now subordinated to the comics of character of Agaton’s person, of the group and the society. Traditional moral balance achieved by introduction of positive versus negative characters – a poor girl, the deceased’s illegitimate daughter, and a young lawyer, as a contrast to the group and Agaton – has not significantly disturbed this comical play. Fortunately, these positive persons are not meant to be in the comedy to lecture, or to show some ideal beings, but also to suffer them, to some extent, the sensuality of comical play. Traces of cruel life and shadows of tragic are lost in a vertiginous burlesque play, in humorous and lucidly ironic, even satirical relations and connotations, in cascades of thunderous laughter behind which is a vigorous well of critical, comic ethos.

return to drama The bereaved family

Branislav Nusic was born on 8th October in 1864 in Belgrade as Alkibijad Nusa, to a Cincar merchant’s family, of the father corce and mother Ljubica. The family soon moved to Smederevo, where Nusic finished his elementary school and the first two years of the boarding school, but he graduated in Belgrade in 1882. When he was eighteen, he officially changed his name into Branislav Nušic and under that name he graduated from the Belgrade Law School in in 1884.

At the age of nineteen, in 1883, Nusic wrote his first comedy, Parliamentarian, which was commended and supported by the most eminent writers, but nevertheless remained in his desk drawer for thirteen years, and was not staged, because Aleksandar Obrenovic, the ruling prince, did not like it and claimed that it was „a mockery of the defenders of parliamentarism“. But Nusic continues to write and participates in turbulent historical events at the end of 19th century. In 1885 he completed his regular military service and, as a member of a regular military unit, took part in the Serbian-Bulgarian War. Revolted by the fact that none of the state officials was at the funeral of Mihailo Katanic, a hero from the Serbian-Bulgarian War, he wrote a satirical poem, Two Slaves (Dva raba), for the opposition newspaper of the time, Daily Newspaper, and for that he was sentenced to two years of prison. In the prison he wrote the comedy Protection. How did he get a permission to writec Nusic knew that the prison superintendent read his mail and therefore started to “write” letters to his cousin, a state minister. Thanks to his quick wit, he acquired a privileged treatment for himself and – a right to write.

When he left the prison – as if being one of his heroes – Nušic was awarded nothing less than a position of a consul, a service that he would perform for some ten years and during which he would stay in Bitola (where he married), Serez, Thessalonica, Skopje and Pristina. In 1900, Nusic was appointed a secretary to the Ministry of Education, and soon thereafter he became a head dramaturg of the National Theatre in Belgrade. In 1904, he was appointed the manager of the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad, but left this position a year later and moved to Belgrade, where he became active in journalism. He started to write under the pseudonym „Ben Akiba“.

He returned to Macedonia in 1912. First he lived in Bitola, then in Skopje, where he founded a theatre in 1913. During the First World War, Nusic retreated with the Serbian army all the way through Albania, and then recovered in Italy, Switzerland and France. In this world war, Nusic suffered the greatest family tragedy. His only son, Ban, was first heavily wounded, and when his wounds healed, he returned to the trench and got killed. Nusic never really got over his loss, and showed his feelings in his prose work The Nine-hundred-fifteenth – a tragedy of a nation. However, Nusic would not have been Nusic, if there were no anecdotes related to his sufferings in the First World War. When he saw that he had to retreat with the Serbian army, Nusic made a selection and threw away a number of his unfinished manuscripts and notes, and took with himself all the works that were finished, or sketched in details,. All the way to Pristina, where the retreat was by railway, he carried with himself the manuscripts of almost fifteen kilograms weight. But, since the retreat from Pristina to Prizren required walking, he was forced to make a new selection. The Suspect was among the rejected manuscripts. The drama was left with an Albanian who gave Nušic his word of honour („besa“) to safeguard the text. Although the Bulgarians attacked Pristina during the war and burned everything, even all Nusic’s possessions, the Albanian kept his „besa“ and the text of The Suspect was saved.

After the First World War, Nusic was appointed the first head of the Art Department of the Ministry of Education. He remained at this position till 1923. Thereafter he became the manager of the National Theatre in Sarajevo, to return to Belgrade in 1927. In the last decade of his life, Branislav Nusic became an opponent again, and, as a member of the National Front, he spoke publicly against fascism. He was elected a full member of the Serbian Royal Academy on 10th February 1933. He died in Belgrade on 19th January 1938.

The Ensemble for New Music Construction Site was founded by a pianist Neda Hofman in the end of 2011. The idea for its establishment has arisen from a desire to gather together a troupe of musicians who share the same enthusiasm and affinity for the contemporary music, as well as from the necessity for the contemporary music to be performed in our country in continuation by the chamber ensemble on constant basis. The Construction Site consists of twenty members, all of them reputable performers with a great experience in contemporary repertoire interpretation. They perform in various structures (from duo to big chamber orchestra structure) and play solo pieces, as well.

The Ensemble for New Music Construction Site deals with performing and recording compositions of domestic and foreign authors. The repertoire of the Construction Site consists of the pieces of art created during 20th and 21st century, which represent the contemporary music development, but are insufficiently present in the concert life of Belgrade and Serbia. In addition, a minimum of 50 percent of the Ensemble’s performances is related to domestic music. The Construction Site orders compositions of selected domestic and foreign authors and thus premieres their pieces of art.
Nada Hofman is the Arts manager and the President of the Construction Site and Goran Marinkovic is the Vice President. The Managing Board of the Ensemble consists of Nada Hofman, Ana Radovanovic, Vladimir Dinic, Srdjan Sretenovic and Goran Marinkovic.  

Pierrot Lunaire/ Lenz
Four Pierrots:
Schoenberg, Giraud, Buchner and Lenz

Listening to Schoenberg’s and Giraud’s poems, I could not help asking myself who Pierrot is and why he is a lunaire. What do I know about that unadjusted young being who identifies himself with Christ and who feels as being crucified by mankind? Who is the woman he is in love with, a dark muse resembling Lilith and what makes her so special? Why is Pierrot so panicky afraid of the gallows and the silver hangman’s sword? Where is the one he loves and he is jealous of so much that he dreams about slashing the alive rival’s skull, taking vengeance with unseen cruelty on great sufferings his heart has been bearing. And where is his homeland he comes back to, completely broken in the last poem, is it in this world at all?

The young man, shaped by the poet and the composer as well, has been intriguing, scaring and upsetting me more and more. He is a victim and a hangman. He is the one who suffers and who is persecuted, but also the one who is insane, unadjusted and upsetting, the one out of society. I have tried to reconstruct the man who inspired Schoenberg and Giraud as well and in whom they both recognized themselves. Of course, the poet Giraud put a mask of on the main character’s face, the mask of one of the typed characters of Del arte comedy, a dreamer Pierrot, an unhappy lover Pierrot, an abandoned Pierrot, a poet Pierrot… Who is beneath that mask which has been obsessively put by the artists since the beginning of 19th century? Who hides I Schoenberg’s piece of art? Is it a jealous and abandoned Arnold Schoenberg, whose wife left him and ran away with their close friend? Is it understood Schoenberg, a mocked and persecuted artist, whose concerts are dropped in by the police as to calm the audience in their mockery and comments which interrupt the program. Or it is a Jew Schoenberg, confined to a corner, who leaves Austria in 1934 and goes to the USA, demonstratively changing his surname? 

Searching for the parallel for a stage answer to these questions, Georg Buchner and his novella Lenz were constantly in my minds. Just like Arnold Schoenberg (like each Pierrot), Buchner is also an obsessive fighter for the new live art and the new better world, he is an unadjusted and upsetting creator, he is a persecuted prophet with the complex and turbulent emotional life. In his novella, which is here organically attached to Pierrot Lunaire, Georg Buchner follows the climax of insanity of the young poet Jacob Lenz (the fourth Pierrot). The writer uses some documentary material from the diary of the Pastor Oberlin, who received the deranged poet into his house, collages it with his own reconstructions of Lenz’s progressive insanity and pangs of conscience, creating the series of chamber music scenes full of restlessness, silence and anticipation, intimate and voyeuristic moments, screams and whispers, but first of all with the poet’s obsessive creating.

Lenz goes through the same losses and breakdowns that Buchner, Giraud and Schoenberg are going to experience. Those are sufferings, “black crosses” all Pierrots are crucified on, all artists who are, by nature of their Christ like and prophetic craft/ passion/ destiny, doomed to suffering. Instead of one abstract Pierrot, connecting the Schoenberg and Buchner’s pieces of art, connecting expression and narration, we create the complete picture of a cursed artist, taking the rare opportunity to observe in parallel his life and experiences, as well as his art that arises from his life and experience. Four Pierrots- Schoenberg, Giraud, Buchner and Lenz- like crystals reflect and refract the light on each other, allowing the viewer/ listener to see all innumerable shades that one crystal wouldn’t manage to refract. 

                                                              Aleksandar Nikolic

return to drama Pierrot lunaire/ Lenz

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG: PIERROT LUNAIRE

The Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg, one of the greatest music artists of 20th Century, has composed his cult piece of art, Pierrot Lunaire, by the poems of a Belgian poet Albert Giraud, translated into German. The piece was created in 1912, as a melodrama performed by a speaker reciter accompanied by a specific chamber ensemble, atypical for that time. Even the sole part of the reciter (spreshgesang- speaking singing) is the problem for performing and can be sorted out in two ways, which means that interpreters either recite or sing! The hardest thing to achieve is the unity of recitative- parlando. 

The piece arises from the heritage of the Late German Romanticism, marked with Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Melodic lines are chromatized and the harmony is atonal, so it speaks about the frontal part from the pre-dodecaphonic period of authors, indicating the evolution of the music language from the Late Romanticism, full with chromatics, over atonality to a new dodecaphonic system, conceptualized in the 20-es of the last century.

Abstract, atonal, shrilly, mystical, dark, surreal- these are the epithets the piece has received from the expert critics and musicology. 

A young team, led by director Aleksandar Nikolic, has taken for their basis the Schoenberg’s music from the piece of work Pierrot Lunaire and upgraded it with unusual prose insertions of the German writer Georg Buchner about the poet Lenz and his phantasmagorical and nightmare visions, between reality and fantasy.

Thus we have obtained the piece of work that belongs to postmodern theatre, which is called a musical-drama grotesque.

Schoenberg's music is, among reciters, written for the ensemble of chamber musicians, soloists. It is performed with the flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, which does not belong to any classical or even orchestral ensemble. 

We appealed to one of the most ambitious young troupe in our city, the Ensemble for New Music Construction Site, the great soloists on their instruments, to perform the demanding score. 

Dr. Branka Radovic

return to the drama Pierrot lunaire/ Lenz

Frida Kahlo  (1907-1954) has been a world icon for decades already: as a woman, as a painter, as a revolutionary and as a steadfast personality, who immured unhappy pages of her life into a myth of herself. Frida was healthy only by the age of six, and after traffic accident and numerous operations, she was often bedridden. Her life was filled with adoration of her husband Diego Rivera and succumbing to her own art in which she built in her dreams, her inspirations, but also her nightmares and all disappointment. Despite being an invalid, Frida Kahlo had a relentless and unshakable spirit, permanently occupied by a revolutionary zest and devotion for her people. She made friends with the greatest personalities of her times, with artists, but also with revolutionaries, among whom was the most famous expatriate emigrant Leon Trotsky. She died on 13th July 1954, from lung embolism according to official information, though some doubts remained that she committed a suicide. Right after her death, Frida Kahlo became a legend, first in her homeland, but also very soon in the whole America and Europe, even in our country, where she became a symbol of a woman and a painter. After publishing of her diaries (In Serbian, Clio Publishing House, Belgrade) and appearance of the film Frida with Salma Hayek, the glory of this Mexican painter becomes really incomparable. Therefore, the whole world is preparing to celebrate in 2007 a centenary of her birthday.

return to the drama Frida Kahlo

return to opera The magic flute

Since this year we have also launched the children’s program that befits every big opera house in the world. 

We wanted our youngest audience, school and preschool children, to be offered the program that would open them the opera and opera house’s door and enable them the first steps to meet, accompanied by teachers or parents, to watch and listen to for the first time one great and real music performance. That is why we have shortened Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, which originally lasts very long, to about an hour duration, leaving thus the most important tunes and parts, while omitting many other parts.

In that way Mozart’s Magic Flute is adapted for children and children’s age, so it takes the central part of our new program. We have done this performance solely with young authors and singers and most of them are on the stage for the first time.

As Mozart’s music is liked and listened to by everybody, both younger and older ones, our performance singles out nobody, but involves viewers of all generations who are keen on opera. Therefore, everybody is welcome. 

To be able to get to remote parts of our country and to perform The Magic Flute even there where there are no opera houses and halls, no conditions for the whole orchestra to be set, we have decided to present the setting just with the piano, although the original score is, as any other opera, planned and conceived to be with the entire orchestra.

It is known from various scientific studies that in a specific way the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can affect children’s psyche, improve their intelligence development, reduce aggression and hyperactivity, bring a peaceful sleep and develop an abstract thinking dimension with children! Not to mention about the fact how much the music of this genius author makes children be acquainted with the highest quality part of human spirit since the very existence, educate them and it might generally help the development of music and art move towards better, more human directions in future, if being created by the artists who have been growing up with Mozart! Listening to Mozart’s music, since the time it occurred, is simply planetary important and undoubtedly listening to his music is becoming more and more important in the newest age which abounds with the expansion of values, diametrically opposed to the refinement of Mozart’s work.  Today’s children are lucky to have Mozart and his genius work as the counterweight to plenty of content offered to children with dominating aggression and (or) the kitsch and trash. But, Mozart should be consumed and it is up to adults to offer him to children, as the soul vitamin. Adults should as well be responsible for children’s future, directing them towards real values.

The abridged version of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute”, created as a fairytale adapted to children, could certainly offer them a modern and funny way of listening to Mozart and watching the theatre play. It is well known that using music to the greatest possible measure is a justifiable endeavor in children’s plays creation, since it approaches the heart even when a child does not understand the textual part of the play and the story content. Nevertheless, “The Magic Flute” is undoubtedly the music masterpiece the heart must be pursued and the children, who have never before been to the Opera, will gently accept that art through the music genius of Mozart. The Opera audience consists of a very small percentage of nowadays mankind… 

return to opera The magic flute

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti, (1797 – 1848) is one of the early romantics, a composer who built bel canto style with his 70 operas and whose authot’s productivity, even at that time when creativity was fast and prolific, presented a real rarity. Today, so to speak, every opera house in the world has at least one operetta by this great maestro. Born in Bergamo, Donizetti studied with the famous pedagogue Pedro Matei in Bologna and after the first successful operas, he worked for the theatres in Naples, Milan and Rome, when Gioacchino Rossini, his great predecessor and paragon, took him to Paris.

Opera Anna Bolena is an outstanding work that belongs to his primary creative period, while La Favorita (A Great Love) and Daughter of the Regiment are performed in Paris. A great success is realized nowadays by a rarely performed work Linda from Samonia, while three of his achievements overcame time and spatial barriers. They are Lucia of Lammermoor, a lyrical drama, composed after the novel by, at least at that time, very popular Walter Scott, and which is one of the operas with the most demanding lead role for a coloratura soprano in the whole opera literature, as well as two comic operas, The Elixir of Love and Don Pasquale. The two great arias from The Elixir of Love, a romance Una furtiva lacrima (One Furtive Tear) and cavatina Quant’ e bella quant’ e cara are a part of repertoire of the greatest tenors of the world.