The Crystal Ship

Vogue January 2022

The Crystal Ship ‘Before you slip into unconsciousness, I’d like to have another kiss’, sings Jim Morrison in “The Crystal Ship”. The song inspired a fragment of the set design in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera directed by Karolina Sofulak for the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen. The Doors’ song tells the story of a goodbye, in Sofulak’s production a crystal ship appears on stage, as if carved in ice: this is how the King bids farewell to the love of his life, Amelia. It is here, also, that he finds his death. (…)

The crystal ship is not only a dreamlike metaphor of fragile beauty, it is also a very specific reference to being on the water, sailing. (…) Karolina is a keen sailor herself, and has been exploring the Masuria Lake District for many years. In her opera work she emphasizes the importance of ensemble work, the fact that the director and conductor should be “the first servants of the production” and not terrifying demiurges. The opera house as an institution is often a reflection of the country in which it is located. Danish common sense and egalitarian division of responsibilities are reflected in a well-run institution. (…)

Karolina Sofulak is an opera director and a traveller. She graduated in West European Language and Culture Studies from the University of Warsaw, as well as Opera and Musical Theatre Directing from AST Drama School and Academy of Music in Kraków. She made her debut at Opera North, one of the most progressive opera houses in Great Britain. She has worked for opera companies in Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France and Poland. She speaks four languages fluently. In Britain they take her for a Scandinavian, in Scandinavia for a Brit, in Italy for a German, and in Germany for an Italian. Her Slavic nature is undetectable, but the director allowed it to reverberate fully in her insightful staging of Dvořák’s Vanda at the Opera Rara Festival in Krakow.

As an artist Sofulak is extremely attuned to Zeitgeist – in London’s Manon she referred to the ‘Profumo Affair’ (soon after, Prince Andrew resigned from his official functions due to his rapport with Jeffrey Epstein); Poznan’s Faust raised the issue of women’s right to decide about their bodies, while Krakow’s The Golden Dragon told a moving story about immigration. While working on Un ballo in maschera, the director stays close to the libretto. It is worth noting, however, that before A Masked Ball premiered, Verdi and his librettists were forced by censorship to change the time and location of this opera twice. It was originally conceived as the story of the assassination of Gustav III of Sweden (which actually took place during a masked ball at the Stockholm Opera). The tense political situation in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, including the attempted assassination of Napoleon III, made it risky: the government feared that the subject of the assassination of a European ruler presented on stage would dangerously fuel the public mood. The action was ultimately transferred to a British colony in America. Karolina is working on the third, intermediary version – the action of which takes place in a port city in Pomerania.

Crinoline dresses, wigs with sailboat fascinators, giant admiral hats and the aforementioned crystal ship – Karolina Sofulak’s production has a fairy-tale and spectacle nature to it, which opera directors more and more often tend to eschew. (…) This show, however, has a bitter taste of the approaching end of an era – the theme underlying the staging is the decline and burning out of certain social and political concepts. (…)

One of the director’s inspirations were the rulers who defined their era, such as Louis XIV or Louis II of Bavaria. The King in Sofulak’s show is an art-loving dreamer, but for him art is an escape from reality, rather than a tool for changing the world for the better. He lives in a claustrophobic courtly world, and his death on a crystal ship (which rhymes with Ludwig of Bavaria’s fairy-tale castles) marks the twilight of the system. “This feeling of twilight approaching is something we are experiencing strongly right now”, she says. “To survive, we must evolve, be sensitive to new ways of living, new ways of exercising power. Today’s Europe reminds me of a party with the lights partially turned off, a bit like in Lampedusa’s The Leopard. We can’t continue soundproofing the walls of our fortress”.

Text: Agnieszka Drotkiewicz
Translated by: LS
Portrait photo: Filip Adamus
Show photo: Sebastian Eskildsen/DKT