The Comedians, Suite for Small Orchestra with Reciter, after Fragments from Miroslav Krleža’s Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh

The Suite for Small Orchestra with Reciter Comedians by Ivo Lhotka Kalinski was inspired by the Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh written by one of the greatest of Croatian writers, Miroslav Krleža (Zagreb, July 7, 1893- Zagreb, December 29, 1981) and one of the masterpieces of Croatian 20th century literature. This cycle of 34 ballads was first published in Ljubljana in 1936. In the first movement, Petrica Kerempuh, the eponymous hero is musically illustrated with a cheery and simple, likeable and slightly mischievous theme given to the piccolo, the main characteristics being the periodical structure, interval jumps and vernacular overtones. Lhotka Kalinski paints his musical vision of this ballade with strident orchestral colour and melodies of a pronouncedly vernacular, rather rough and deliberately awkward contours, which we might compare with the figurations and motifs painted with some untaught hand and the intense colours of Naïve artists. The second movement, Old woman weeps below the gallows is an ingenious musical genre scene beneath the scaffold, in which a mother laments her son. Because in Krleža’s ballad we are faced with an extreme form of sarcasm, banter about the picture of the mother’s pain, which is mocked by the commentator without a jot of empathy, in his music Lhotka Kalinski achieves just this mood, since he caricatures the mother’s tears and in the tones suggests a sneer. In spite of the profound tragedy of the scene, it rather drives us to laughter, instead of being terrified by death, we cannot hold back the laughter that the comedy of the situation enforces. The third movement, with typical gallows humour, the ballad Dangling focuses on the playing of a pipe beneath the gallows. Because of the simplicity of the facture, the movement has an elementary strength: at the place of execution where death rules and blood reeks, and those present should feel a chill running down their spines, a trite melody on the flute is heard, which in this way transforms the existential situation into a grotesque and absurd image of the world, which we experience all the more tragically. In sketching out the profoundly tragic with trite means, the composer ingeniously keeps up with the thinking of the writer and in his music faithfully mirrors the very uncommon atmosphere and moods of the poetic vision. It is precisely this spirit of Petrica Kerempuh that we discern again in the last movement in the mood and the music that is used in the first movement, at the beginning of the composition, in a music full of gaiety and élan, but which contains the occasional sour accent. Ivo Lhotka Kalinski composed Comedians, Suite for Small Orchestra with Reciter in 1952 for a competition announced by Radio Belgrade, winning a prize. After it had been broadcast several times, it was first performed in public on December 1, 1953, in Zagreb, by the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Silvijo Bombardelli, conductor and composer.