‘King Roger’: An Operatic Mid-Life Crisis of Ideas

“You can look at ‘King Roger’ on several levels--all interesting,” says Murry Sidlin, who on Sunday will conduct the first U.S. staging of Karol Szymanowski’s rarely performed, 64-year-old opera for Long Beach Opera in Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center.

“On the superficial level, it’s a story of a mid-life crisis for Roger II, the Norman king who ruled Sicily in the 12th Century.” A “male-menopausal” crisis, Sidlin specifies, not unlike the one experienced by Ulysses in Monteverdi’s “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria,” scheduled by the same Long Beach Opera in May.

“On a deeper level, it’s a philosophical discussion dealing with the life of the spirit vs. the life of the body. The Apollonian vs. the Dionysian--a conflict with which Szymanowski was obsessed throughout his entire creative life.”

The Polish composer began work on the three-act opera after completing a long novel, “Efebos,” on the subject of love and eroticism. Both works, the literary and the operatic, were greatly influenced by Szymanowski’s extensive travels, especially trips to Sicily, Greece and Southern Italy, just before World War I.

“The setting for ‘King Roger’ is 12th-Century Sicily, when a real Norman king, Roger II, ruled,” Sidlin said in an interview earlier this week between rehearsals for the new production and following his latest concert with the Long Beach Symphony, of which he is outgoing music director.

As staged by David Alden, with sets and costumes designed by Philipp Jung, “specific historical references have been removed” from “King Roger” for this production, Sidlin pointed out. “With stark scenery, it is easier to focus on the subtext.” In the third act, for instance, what Szymanowski envisioned as the ruins of a Greek amphitheater now emerges as, in Sidlin’s words, “a large, white room, resembling an airport, with places for departures and arrivals, and with ramps.”

This “updating,” the conductor thinks, accomplishes “an interweaving of all the historical elements the work brings together--the Oriental, the Muslim, the Christian. All these cultures meld in this opera.”

What makes the story of King Roger relevant to our time is that “12th-Century Sicily was a society in decay--much like our own. And then into this society comes a Messianic character--a shepherd--from the East.”

Who is this shepherd whose simple hedonism threatens the archaic social patterns of Roger’s world, and whose philosophy proves alluring to Roger’s own Queen, Roxanne? Each of the three acts of the opera, according to musicologist Jim Samson, “is built around a confrontation between Roger and Dionysus (represented by the shepherd-prophet).”

The work was written between 1918 and 1924 in Szymanowski’s fertile middle period when, having passed through the early influence of Richard Strauss, the Polish composer became a post-Impressionist inspired by Ravel. “Daphnis et Chloe” made a tremendous impact on the younger composer when he first heard it, during a tour of the United States he undertook with his countrymen Artur Rubinstein and Paul Kochanski in 1921.

“You can hear Strauss, and Ravel, and Scriabin in this lush music,” Sidlin says, praising the skills Szymanowski used in producing this score. There are even “innuendoes of Stravinsky--but always in a mix that is identifiable as Szymanowski.”

The orchestra of 80-plus players--”I think we can just fit into the Terrace Theater pit,” the conductor hopes--will be assisted by 80 members of the William Hall Chorale, on stage in Act I, offstage in Act III.

According to Samson in his book, “The Music of Szymanowski” (New York, 1981), “the richly dissonant harmonies and sumptuous orchestral colors of the second act form a striking contrast to the Church music from the first and from the more austere sound world at the opening of the third and final act.”

In the opening act, the composer sets up the struggle between the more severe (Apollonian) church rituals and the newer faith (Dionysian) espoused by the shepherd.

“The deliberately archaic idiom used in these opening choral sections strongly suggests the anachronism . . . of the institutionalized church. The . . . effect . . . is presented at the outset then as one force acting on the personality of Roger and, by implication, on modern man.”

Sidlin notes that “many Eastern influences emerge in Szymanowski’s music--its mysticism causes it to flow and float, a river of sound, passing through key centers, seldom arriving.”

Two performances of the opera are scheduled in Terrace Theater, Sunday at 4 p.m. and Wednesday at 8 p.m.