The Sea, Music Vision in Two Acts (Three Tableaux), Piano reduction

One of the last students of the famous master Antonín Dvořák, Fran Lhotka (1883–1962), graduated in composition and horn from the Prague Conservatory in 1905. By 1909, he moved to Zagreb as a musician (horn player and accompanist for the opera esmeble of the Croatian National Theatre), where he remained for the rest of his life, leaving behind a brilliant legacy of his compositions. His ballet The Devil in the Village made a significant media coverage in European musical circles, premiering triumphantly in 1935 at the Zürich State Theatre, and later being performed with exceptional success in a number of European cities. His ballets Bow (Lûk) and Ballad of a Medieval Love (Balada o jednoj srednjovjekovnoj ljubavi) also achieved notable success outside of Croatia. Today, Fran Lhotka's ballets and orchestral works are considered some of the most popular music-theatrical and symphonic achievements of the new national direction in Croatian music. Their publication in the Croatian Music Information Centre series of sheet music editions is an outstanding contribution to the study and performance of this important segment of Croatian culture and music history. Fran Lhotka composed the musical vision The Sea in 1920, and the work was premiered on October 29 of the same year at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. According to the autograph of the score, the libretto was based on the tale of Milutin Cihlar Nehajev and the verses of Vladimir Nazor. The printed libretto of the opera (published in 1920) also credits Nazor as the author. The libretto is based on the legend of the arrival of the Croats on the Adriatic Sea. A key theme in examining Lhotka's music in the musical vision The Sea is the composer’s effort to find a musical idiom that reflects the archaic and historical character of the libretto’s plot, while still maintaining a modern expression. Like all composers who adhered to the neo-national music style at the time, Lhotka took on the difficult task of blending national, folk, or local elements with contemporary (cosmopolitan) elements of musical language, which were present at the end of the first decade of the 20th century. To reflect the atmosphere and storyline of the libretto, set in a historical, partially mythical, and legendary context of migration of the peoples, the composer used relatively simple melodies based on modal scales, almost always following a diatonic interval structure. He attempted to interweave these with an appropriate harmonic language that would not conflict with the character of the archaic, "primitive," and simple melodic lines of the soloists and chorus. The deliberate simplification of melodic lines (in the orchestra and in the solo parts) as well as the musical texture based on the repeated use of the same motifs gives The Sea a ceremonial and exalted character, but also an elemental effect. It is a kind of attempt to mirror, through music, the basic Empedoclean elements, that is, the primordial principles that are an important part of the narrative foundation of the musical vision: Earth (personified by the harsh mountain landscapes of the Croatian coastline), Fire (altar, thunder, and lightning!), Wind (storm), and Water (the sea!). The importance of the musical vision The Sea by Fran Lhotka for Croatian music lies primarily in its high craftsmanship and compositional-technical level, which in the first decades of the 20th century, when only a few Croatian operas were composed, was not taken for granted. The ambivalence of the form, between opera, cantata, and oratorio (which the composer was well aware of), could today be interpreted as an original and inventive compositional solution. The conclusion is that the work would be better received in future performances in a concert setting rather than a staged one. It can be said that The Sea is intriguing from the perspective of its libretto as a historical-legendary interpretation of the narrative about the arrival of the Croats in their present homeland, which cannot be denied literary and artistic value. At the same time, it is a testimony to a period in Croatian music history that, regrettably, was not abundant in (first-class) stage musical works.