DIRECTOR'S NOTE

Music theatre, as it was formed in the ‘70s, descendant of Gesamtkunstwerk (arts composition) by Richard Wagner, searched new ways for stage narration, taking advantage of the possibilities each individual art offered and also the complex stage “gestures” which resulted by their synthesis. This premised equivalent use of the different form of arts (music, speech, movement, image, light) at the service of the history. Today there are many and often conflicting views on what is music theatre and which is its difference from  musical or opera. Regarding that point most of the artists agree that in music theatre speech is not necessarily set to music but it functions individually in the whole synthesis.
What does this means; Speech can be elaborated as one more element of the whole score, the sound, the tonality and the rhythm are reclaimed in the same way they result from their use during speech in a specific condition. In this point theatre education intrudes, since necessarily issues come up such us the action of speech, the objective of the narration, the suggested condition, the motives etc.
            The problem which is created – taken as granted that music theatre was born in music ensembles – is that the musician-interpreter does not have the necessarily theatre technique in order to use the speech in such a way that it will still be a part of the complete form without losing its own functionality. Inevitable speech, cut out from the dramatic relationship, became unambiguous  and in many cases is just used as a sound element of complex music constructions. 
 The aforementioned ascertainment gave impetus to the constitution of Theatre Group OPERA, which is consisted mostly by actors and searches fruitful ways of aligning the theatre and music thinking, without lagging behind one or the other. It tries mostly to discover the musicality of the elements of theatre art without sacrificing the acting quality.
            Papadiamantis' novel Merchants of Nations gave us the most fruitful material for our work. Reading loud this text someone may realize the sound richness of the dialect and that at the same time he participated through breath in a experiential experience of initiation at the most secret paths of the writer's world. It is a gift for the director-composer to work with such a material. Every vowel is a note, every consonant is a new rhythm, the change of the speech compositions energizes the emotion in a similar manner that Bach's music does.   The speech in our performance born music, movement, light, video. This is the beginning and the end. The chorus speech is interchanged with the personal speech and unanimity and counterpoint serving the text architecture. The video and the light enhance the space and time of the play and the movement does not just describe the situation but also adds visual sounds at the whole orchestration.
The performance could be characterized as a theatre oratorio in four parts. Each part corresponds to an act of the play and in a place of action: island of Naxos, Venice, island of Patmos and island of Naxos. Also in each place a dominant action is happening with the respective music characteristics: abduction – adagio, revenge – animato, confession – grave, return – presto. The stage composition has one goal to assist the understanding of the speech, by creating through the image the conditions which will enlighten the text.  
The realization of such a thorough and complex score demands a long laborious preparation and a huge discipline by the interpreters -musicians and actors and their spiritual loyalty, which was given to me generously. I thank them for that.
Theo Abazis
Director – composer