Librettist: António Chagas Rosa
Libretto based on the homonymous tale by Mário de Sá-Carneiro
Opera in seven scenes
Date: 2022
Language: Portuguese
Duration: 82 minutes
Small-scale
The Man of Dreams: soprano
Narrator: baritone
Two waiters: actors
In a timeless café a man is waiting impatiently for something. A disarming chameleonic person appears and claims of having crossed life’s monotony by being capable of transcend the boundaries of dreams. Living everything he dreamt, he explains the reasons of his endless happiness: he travelled in dreams to places with new indescribable colors, to cities where one could breathe music, to countries where there were more than two sexes and where soul was visible and body not…Eventually he succeeded transcending his fastidious life boredom, through a continuous oneiric trance: “Well, I’ve managed to change my existence and I do it everyday! I have access not only to everything that exists, but also to what doesn’t exist.”
Is this man a projection, delusion, dream or nightmare? How much is real or imaginary in it? Crazy or sane?
Cl | Bar Sax | Tbn | Tb | Perc | Pf (Synth) | Acc | Vln | Vc | Cb
Publisher: Ópera do Castelo Edições
The opera O Homem dos Sonhos, with music and libretto by composer António Chagas Rosa, stems from the adaptation of the homonymous short story by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, written in 1913 in Paris, the city where the poet lived in the last years of his life and where he would prematurely commit suicide in 1916, at just 25 years old.
Commissioned by Ópera do Castelo, it had a long genesis period since 2015, until its premiere venue was finally confirmed at the São Luiz Municipal Theatre in February 2022.
As a literary text, it contains some typical aesthetic elements of symbolism and futurism, always with great dramatic intensity, in a way preparing what modernism would be and which exerted a powerful influence on Fernando Pessoa.
Two figures gradually unravel the mystery that is life. One of them confesses the foundations of his infinite happiness: he is the Dream Man. The other allows himself to be disturbed by this “wonderful stranger,” who overturns reality. Nothing happens. And yet, everything seems to have already happened or to be about to happen: an infinitely modernist conversation.
An opera in 7 scenes, always interspersed with instrumental interludes, it was written for a soprano with powerful dramatic expression, the poet’s “alter-ego” who embodies the dream man himself; a baritone – the narrator (poet) – and an instrumental ensemble of 10 musicians.
With a theme that is always visionary and timeless, it reflects on the human condition. On the thin line between madness and sanity, between dream and reality, encapsulating eternal human dissatisfaction and its continuous obsession with transcending its limits. Limits of time, space, body, and gender. On the other hand, the premonitory and structuring fascination of the dream itself, since it is, after all, what shapes and guides human beings in their existential march, as a global society and as individuals.
Date: 2022
Venue: São Luiz Municipal Theatre
Commission: Ópera do Castelo
Stage director: Miguel Loureiro
Music director: Jan Wierzba
Cast: Catarina Molder, Christian Lujan, Vasco Santos, Pedro Santo and Ensemble MPMP
