London, Coliseum: Martinů's ‘Julietta’

If I had to sum up Martinů's opera Julietta in one word, it would be ‘strange’. Strange and wonderful, strange bordering on the weird, the otherworldly, the dream-like. This last redefinition is apt, since the opera is based on Georges Neveux's play Juliette, ou La clé des songes – the Key to Dreams, a benign nightmare where a Parisian bookseller, Michel, searches for, finds, loses and finally searches again for a girl encountered briefly three years earlier. The action opens with his return and discovery that she lives in a town where no one has much depth of memory beyond the previous ten minutes! And when random shafts of recollection from further back do occur – as in the scene in the Forest with the Wine Waiter and the Old Couple – they only add to the surrealism of the situation and Michel's deepening confusion, with that pointed imprecision so natural in dreams yet so out of place in reality.