Page 153 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim┊Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 8

an attempt at an analysis of the factors influencing a conductor’s interpretation ...
month Matačić was invited to Ljubljana to conduct trial performances of
Madama Butterfly and Carmen. He did such a good job that in August that
year he was offered a permanent position. Critics praised him and recom-
mended him for future collaborations, while also pointing out some defi-
19
ciencies in his conducting technique and routine. His permanent engage-
ment was confirmed on 15 August 1922, at the same time as those of Julij
Betetto, until then a soloist at the Vienna Opera, the promising young ten-
or Mario Šimenc, and the Russian director Vasily Sevastyanov, an émigré
from St Petersburg, with whom Matačić worked closely during his first Lju-
20
bljana period. Following his successful performances of Madama Butter-
fly, Carmen and Tosca, Matačić was entrusted, at the start of the 1922–23
season, with the premiere of Janaček’s Jenůfa, a work that places signifi-
cant demands on the conductor, in what would be the first performance of
this opera anywhere in Slovenia. The critics were unanimous that the pre-
miere was a great success for the company and that the conductor had led
the performance masterfully and with spirit. Spirited direction, intimate
familiarity with the score and the ability to achieve the homogeneity of all
the performers were among the qualities frequently remarked upon in re-
views of operas conducted by Matačić even in later phases of his career. Re-
views of Jenůfa, the first production he led on his own, compared him to
Milan Sachs (1884–1968), a Czech-Croatian opera conductor celebrated pre-
cisely for his interpretations of Janaček’s works. It is not beyond the realms
21
of possibility that Matačić had heard one of Sach’s performances of Jenůfa
– the opera that brought him international fame – while living in Zagreb
in 1920.
It was also during Matačić’s tenure in Ljubljana (1922–24) that the Lju-
bljana audience was introduced to Notre Dame, a contemporary work by
the Viennese composer Franz Schmidt (1874–1939). Composed between
22
1904 and 1906, the work was premiered in Vienna in 1914 and most fre-
quently performed in the early 1920s. Schmidt, a composer and cellist with
Hungarian roots, attended the Vienna Conservatoire (later Academy),
where he studied composition and theory with Robert Fuchs and Anton
Bruckner and played the cello in the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra under
19 Košir, Kuret, Bedjanič, Lovro Matačić v Sloveniji, 47.
20 Ibid., 48.
21 E. A. [Emil Adamič], “Kultura. Opera. Madame Butterfly,” Slovenski narod 56, No.
129 (8 June 1923): 3, http://www.dlib.si/?URN=URN:NBN:SI:DOC-AA1WR7I7.
22 “Repertoar. Notredamski zvonar,” Sigledal, https://repertoar.sigledal.org/pred-
stava/3340.

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