Dragutin Gostuški’s Ballet Rummy: From the Award of the Croatian National Theatre to the Premiere at the Music Biennale Zagreb
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: One of the most significant works in the opus of Dragutin Gostuški as a composer is Rummy – A Fantastic Ballet Scene (1955). The ballet’s plot is based on the universal theme of the relationship between a woman and a man, and the music, although of neo-Romantic provenance, reveals some of the composer’s modernistic compositional techniques. After winning an award in a competition announced for new drama, opera, and ballet works on the occasion of the centenary of the Croatian National Theatre (1961), this ballet premiered two years later at the Music Biennale Zagreb (MBZ), an international festival of contemporary music in Yugoslavia (1963). Reflecting the diversity of compositional tendencies in the 20th-century music, the program of the MBZ (1963) included, among other things, as many as fourteen musical and stage works by Yugoslav and foreign composers. Alongside the performance by the Hamburg State Opera, which introduced the Yugoslav audience to some of the classics of contemporary opera (works by Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg), contemporary Yugoslav ballet held a central place in the musical and stage repertoire of the MBZ (1963). On the penultimate day of the festival, the Croatian National Theatre hosted an evening of Yugoslav ballet, during which, along with three ballet works by Zagreb authors – А Man in front of the Mirror (1961) by Milko Kelemen, The Demon of the Golden Street (1962) by Krešimir Fribec and Encounters (1963) by Ivo Kirigin – the ensemble also premiered Rummy (1955) by the Belgrade composer Dragutin Gostuški (directed by Zvonimir Reljić and conducted by Pavle Dešpalj). Since Gostuški’s ballet had previously been awarded at the competition held on the occasion of the centenary of the Croatian National Theatre, this paper first explains certain inconsistencies in the implementation of this competition by analysing Gostuški’s correspondence with the leaders of the Zagreb theatre. A whole set of (un)fortunate circumstances, as it turned out, led to Rummy being premiered two years later at the MBZ. Furthermore, an analysis of the score of this piece took into consideration certain musical characteristics of Rummy in relation to the avant-garde tendencies in music at that time, as well as in relation to the criteria for selecting repertoire at the Music Biennale Zagreb. Finally, through the analysis of festival reviews and critiques published in the press from various Yugoslav centres, this study has found conflicting reactions among music critics to the premiere performance of Dragutin Gostuški’s ballet at this most important international festival of contemporary music in Yugoslavia.
Author: Miloš Marinković
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4408936330