The Legend of Erin

The composer and conductor Otakar Ostrčil (1879–1935) is a major figure in the history of the National Theatre Opera. He successfully linked up to the era of Karel Kovařovic, who in 1919 engaged him as a dramaturg and after whose death he assumed the post of the opera company’s director. In addition to nurturing the traditional repertoire, Ostrčil paid great attention to contemporary Czech and international music. During his tenure at Prague’s National Theatre, he entrusted premieres of his own operas to Brno, a case in point being The Legend of Erin, set to a play by Julius Zeyer (1841–1901), first performed on 16 June 1921 at the Na hradbách (today’s Mahen) Theatre. 

The National Theatre first presented the opera on 14 March 1923. The Legend of Erin was most recently performed, in a shortened concert version, at the Estates Theatre, within the 1982 Prague Spring festival. The new production, to premiere in 2025, will mark the 90th anniversary of Otakar Ostrčil’s death. After decades of its absence from Czech stages, music lovers will be afforded the opportunity to see and hear a truly remarkable opera. 

The author of the libretto, the writer and playwright Julius Zeyer, drew inspiration from Celtic myths, as recounted in works by the French historians and philologists Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville and Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, as well as the Scottish poet James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian. The mythical bard Ossian and his father Fingal (King Finn), as well as King Cormac, feature in Zeyer’s play and Ostrčil’s opera, depicting a gripping story of forbidden love, betrayal and revenge, set in Ancient Ireland. The Legend of Erin has been undertaken by the conductor Robert Jindra, Music Director of the National Theatre Opera, and the stage director Jiří Heřman, artists well known to the Prague audience.