Prince of zeta by Petar Konjovi : Opera in five/four acts on the 125th anniversary of the composer's birth

Petar Konjovi ( urug, May 5, 1883 - Belgrade, October 1, 1970) stands out among Serbian composers as an author of instrumental and vocal compositions. Studies at the Prague Conservatory (1904-1906) acquainted Konjovi with Czech music, Wagner's opus, and the Russian national-romantic school, which contributed to the evolution of his talent for both music and stage, enabling him to express his ideas more explicitly in operatic works. It was in the Prague that the second opera - Prince of Zeta - was conceived, with new musical vividness and dramatic appeal (first version composed 1906-1926, the second and final 1929-1939), followed by Ko tana (1928), Peasants (1951) and Fatherland (1960). Konjovi 's mature operas are characterized by his masterful handling of form, both in close-ups and in detail, as well as his deeply individual assimilation of musical folklore into his work. The Prince of Zeta is not to be understood as a folk opera, but some main themes are directly derived from folk music, precisely from the Montenegrin folk songs quoted in the Mokranjac's Ninth Garland and treated in Konjovi 's post-romantic, almost expressionistic way, interwoven with some Italianate leitmotifs, so as to present the opera's two worlds, Montenegrin and Venetian. In the process of forming Konjovi 's operatic style, with vocal parts based mainly on the principle of declamation, the opera Prince of Zeta (first performed in Belgrade, 1929, conducted by Lovro von Mata i ) proved to be a work of great impact. Hardly anyone grasped then the wide sweep of inspiration which allowed the composer to set and to solve several important problems connected with music drama, essential also in his subsequent stage works. First of all, Konjovi had to handle in his own way the verbal drama the prototype of his opera, Maxim Crnojevi by the Serbian poet Laza Kosti (1841-1910). Permission came from the playwright in the first decade of the 1900, Prince of Zeta being partly set musically, but from then on with new interventions in the poet's text. Being a highly skilled writer, poet musicologist and essayist (he wrote four books and a great number of articles on music and the theatre, and translated opera librettos of Wagner and Moussorgsky), Konjovi felt free to introduce some daring alterations to the literary works he used for his music dramas. So it was with the play Maxim Crnojevi , premiered in Novi Sad in 1870 (printed in the same place in 1846 and 1866). On the other hand, the young poet Kosti (he was in his early twenties when he wrote Maxim Crnojevi ) had the prototype for h