THE DIARY OF THE ONE WHO DISAPPEARED

About the show

It is 1917 when Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) meets Kamila Stösslová, who is almost forty years younger than him, in a health resort. She is married and has two children. This does not prevent Janáček from falling deeply in love with her. The relationship remains platonic, but he will remain obsessed with her until his death, with more than 700 ardent letters to prove it. Kamila inspires him to write some of his most important operas, such as Katya Kabanová and The Makropulos Affair. A year earlier, Janáček read an anonymous series of poems in a newspaper about Janik, a village boy who falls madly in love with a gypsy girl and leaves everything behind to follow her. The composer sees his feelings for Kamila reflected in the poems. Based on the poems, he writes a series of songs that can be best described as an intimate self-portrait. Will Janik’s desire for passion free him from his suffocating surroundings? Or is he wasting his entire existence on an illusion? The form of the work is unique: a series of 22 songs for tenor and piano, with an addition of three songs in the middle for a small choir of women and a mezzosoprano representing the gypsy girl Zefka. Ivo van Hove directs top singers Ed Lyon, Peter Gijsbertsen and Marie Hamard, and TA actors Hugo Koolschijn and Gijs Scholten van Aschat. Fascinated by voices, Belgian composer Annelies Van Parys writes an answer to this touching love story.