Opera Barga production stopped by German Court

Regular readers will have noticed on the front page that one of the barganews blogs has an eyecatching bright new colour. The eyewatering yellow/green colour that now shouts out of the page is there so that people will notice the Operabarga blog.

Click on the blog to read the complete story and all the latest news on what is turning into a terrible event for the Operabarga production.

The court in Dusseldorf ruled for a suspension of all shows and coproduction activity on behalf of altstadtherbst kulturfestival dusseldorf with regard to the staging of Motezuma in Dusseldorf in September. The ruling has made it impossible for the Opera Barga management to go ahead with its production of the work, seeing as the court decision effectively involves the singers of German nationality in the cast to refrain from taking part in a production of the Berlin Motezuma score even abroad.

Consequently the Opera Barga Festival will perform a revised version of the opera that will not include any of the music protected by the presumed right that the Singakademie claims over the work. The show however will be presented virtually in its entirety, with the libretto spoken by the singers and the arias replaced by others from other arias of a similiar rhythm and colour.

Nicholas Hunt from Opera Barga has stated that:

"Opera Barga in fact wishes to publicly thank everyone, and in particular Federico Sardelli, Uwe Schmitz-Gielsdorf and the entire cast for the effort and enthusiasm with which they have faced this difficult and completely unprecedented situation.

This being said, the rights issue over the Opera is far from over. Singakademie claim to have sole rights to the opera on the basis of an article of law that is meant to protect scholarship and reseach investments aimed to unearth long lost works. If this is actually the idea behind the law, then Singakademie have done nothing and invested very little in order to procure themselves this right, and the right might be just as well attributed to Steffen Voss, the first to recognise the fragment for what it was, or even Federico Sardelli who has worked on revising the score for performance, a fact that cannot be denied seeing as it was his version of the score that was performed in the world premiere in Rotterdam in June with the Count's very costly blessing.

Our hope is that the production that we and our German partners have been working on for the past year may in the future see the light, perhaps in Dusseldorf in September. And that the world becomes aware that if this right is acknowledged, musical and even literary scholarship, as well as performance may suffer tremendously, as everyone attempts to lay claim to rights of presumably unpublished works that are no longer under copyright."