Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 52 No. 1, 2026.
Original scientific paper
The Last Rose of Summer – The Dramaturgy of the Relationship Between Nature and Opera
Sibila Petlevski
Abstract
In the first part of the paper, I focus on the dramaturgical aspects of the relationship
between nature and opera. The immediate reason for this is a concrete international collaboration realized in 2025 as part of the project »Nature and Opera« at the Academy of
Music in Zagreb, directed by the Swiss opera director Mathias Behrends, under the musical
direction and musical instrumentation of Mladen Tarbuk. The dramaturgical approach opened up a wide field of reflection, but the impetus came from the elements for the concrete opera production; the director’s scene-sequence and Tarbuk’s score. Tarbuk brought eleven representative musical excerpts from the works of ten composers - Wagner, Meyerbeer, Dvořák, Britten, Berio, Janáček, Schumann, Mussorgsky, Mahler and Berg - under the common denominator of eco-opera. In the second part of the text, I deal with Zoran Juranić’s opera composed on the libretto inspired by Luko Paljetak’s radio-play The Last Flower of the Summer (1989). This opera by Juranić, for which he received multiple awards, was realized in co-production with the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad and performed at the 27th Zagreb Music Biennale in 2013. In this paper, I explain the significance of the flower motif in Paljetak’s oeuvre, but I also describe the postmodern treatement of this motif in Juranić’s opera.
Keywords
ecology; opera; postmodernity; citationality; polystylistics
Hrčak ID:
347186
URI
Publication date:
6.5.2026.
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