9^th Contemporary Opera Festival NOA

24/10/2025 Friday, 18.30

25/10/2025 Saturday, 18.30

The Old Theatre of Vilnius (J. Basanavičiaus St. 13, Vilnius)

Jūratė

An imaginary opera by M. K. Čiurlionis

Premiere

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) had a profound understanding of the weight and significance of the opera genre for the entire cultural field. In January 1906, he wrote to his brother Povilas (even before the first national opera, Birutė by Mikas Petrauskas): “Are you familiar with the Lithuanian movement? I am determined to devote all my past and future works to Lithuania. We are learning the Lithuanian language, and I am preparing to write a Lithuanian opera”. Thus, the composer singled out opera as a particularly significant form of expression of national musical cultural identity.

The idea to write a Lithuanian opera became a specific goal for M. K. Čiurlionis after meeting a young writer, Sofija Kymantaitė, who later became his wife. By the summer of 1908, the theme of the opera was already known as well. The opera was to be based on the legend The Queen of the Baltic Sea, created around 1830 by Liudvikas Adomas Jucevičius, a Lithuanian writer, ethnographer, folklorist, historian, and translator. The surviving sketches of M. K. Čiurlionis’ set designs and correspondence about the libretto Sofija was working on clearly demonstrate that they relied on this version of the legend about the love of Jūratė and Kastytis.

We know from correspondence that Sofija had finished the libretto and sent it to St. Petersburg, where Konstantinas was staying at the time. We also know that the composer spent a considerable amount of time at the piano with the libretto, searching for the sound of Jūratė. After reading the libretto, Konstantinas wrote to Sofija about the musical language and staging ideas for the future opera: “My fascination with Jūratė is growing every day, and today I heard a little bit of the music in it. <...> Zose, Zose, advise me. Should I avoid folk melodies in it, or not? Should I take technical challenges into account, or not? When you think that our people are so poor and have nothing, I feel sorry that this work will pass them by, and yet you and I want to give them something. You understand me, Zosele, that I don’t want to offend myself, I just want to set myself a more difficult task. I want it to be possible to perform it even in Warsaw, and when the time comes, in Vilnius, but a lot of water will flow under the bridge before that happens”.

It is obvious from the letters that the composer already had a clear and thorough vision of the opera’s beginning and its first scene – the order of the characters’ appearances, the arrangement of the opera parts, the sequence of the choir’s entries, and similar details – but none of this was written and recorded in musical notation. In 1906–1909, when the composer was considering the possibilities of creating an opera, Čiurlionis’ works from that period, which have survived mainly in the form of sketches, reveal the composer's diverse and subtle artistic world, dominated by marine imagery and fragments of folk songs, testifying to his very bold compositional strategies for that time. These sketches and fragments reveal how deeply Čiurlionis was immersed in his planned Lithuanian opera Jūratė.

Based on these sketches and fragments, the ideas and set drawings laid out in Čiurlionis’ letters, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate musical material, the large creative team created an imaginary opera Jūratė by M. K. Čiurlionis – a dream that Konstantinas himself never managed to fulfil.

The opera tells the legend of Jūratė, the queen of the sea, whose amber palace lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Jūratė falls in love with a man from the land – Kastytis, a brave and simple fisherman who disobeys the will of the gods and fishes in sacred waters forbidden to humans.

The gods, especially the mighty Perkūnas (Thunder), are enraged by the forbidden love between the divine queen and a mortal man. He strikes Jūratė's amber palace with lightning, destroying it and separating the lovers. Kastytis drowns in the stormy sea, while Jūratė is condemned to mourn her lost love forever and shed amber tears on the shores of the Baltic Sea. In fact, Čiurlionis wanted his opera to be open to interpretation and perhaps to testify to eternal love, so, as he had intended, the finale of imaginary opera Jūratė features the Eternal Duet.

M. K. Čiurlionis’ imaginary opera Jūratė was created for the stage of the Old Theatre of Vilnius and its compact orchestra pit. This venue was not chosen for the premiere by chance. After all, it was the Old Theatre of Vilnius, built at the beginning of the 20th century and opened in 1913, that could have become the stage on which the fruits of Sofija and Kastukas’ joint creative endeavour would have been performed.

Historical consultant: Rokas Zubovas

Libretto author: Julius Keleras

Composers: Mantautas Krukauskas, Arvydas Malcys, Mykolas Natalevičius

Director: Gintarė Radvilavičiūtė

Set and costume designer: Renata Valčik

Choreographer: Sigita Mikalauskaitė

Lighting designer: Eugenijus Sabaliauskas

Soloists:

Jūratė – Lauryna Bendžiūnaitė (soprano)

Kastytis – Romanas Kudriašovas (baritone)

Perkūnas – Raimundas Juzuitis (bass)

Actors:

Konstantinas – Telman Ragimov

Sofija – Sigita Mikalauskaitė

Also appearing – Viktorija Aliukonė-Mirošnikova, Nikolaj Antonov, Jauhenas Bakala, Larisa Popova

Vilnius City Municipality St. Christopher Chamber Orchestra (artistic director and conductor Modestas Barkauskas) – Simas Tankevičius, Miglė Dikšaitienė, Nadia Ochrimenko-Galė, Jonė Barbora Kiznė, Monika Sapiegaitė (first violins), Aidas Jurgaitis, Rugilė Šilalytė, Irena Milošaitė, Aušrinė Ruškėnaitė, Rusnė Kiškytė (second violins), Mintautas Kriščiūnas, Birutė Dučmanaitė-Bitaitienė, Birutė Ilčiukaitė (violas), Domas Jakštas, Vaidas Tamošiūnas (cellos)

Vytenis Gurstis (flute), Ugnius Dičiūnas (oboe), Karolis Kolakauskas (clarinet), Vytautas Giedraitis (bass clarinet), Jonas Žemonis (bassoon), Stefano Berluti (first horn), Albinas Stonys (second horn), Andrius Stankevičius (trumpet), Jonas Kunčius (trombone), Danielius Patrikas Kišūnas (tuba), Lukas Budzinauskas, Jose Vincente Fusco Rojas (percussion), Liucilė Uršulė Vilimaitė (harp)

Vilnius City Municipality Choir Jauna Muzika (artistic director and conductor Vaclovas Augustinas) – Lina Valionienė, Viktorija Šedbaraitė, Augustė Andrijauskaitė, Vaiva Joana Jakštaitė, Gabrielė Valionytė, Onutė Aleksiūnaitė, Milda Poškaitė, Justė Andrikonytė, Ūla Marija Barbora Zemeckytė, Irma Kubertavičienė, Beata Rapalavičiūtė, Justinas Šaltenis, Deividas Janušas, Domantas Balsas, Romas Makarevičius, Dainius Balsys, Tomas Kreimeris, Mantas Gontis, Justinas Valaitis, Linas Zdanys

Conductor: Karolis Variakojis

The opera libretto was translated into English by Julius Keleras

Producer: Operomanija

Co-producer: Old Theatre of Vilnius

Partners: Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Klaipėda Puppet Theatre, New Theatre, Lithuanian Composers’ Union

Historical consultant Rokas Zubovas:

The joint creative work on the opera became a factor that united the friendship and love of Mikalojus Konstantinas and Sofija Čiurlionis into a single spiritual space. After six months of friendship in Vilnius, the now-engaged couple went to Palanga for the summer, where they stayed separately but shared what they had created each day. Without a doubt, they talked a lot about the future opera. The plan and structure of the opera, as well as the main accents had to be finalized in Palanga, because in Autumn, while residing in St. Petersburg, Konstantinas received the libretto written by Sofija and already began searching for the sound of their future opera and sketching the future stage sets.

Fate granted only one more year for Mikalojus Konstantinas and Sofija to be and create together. Their dedication to the budding Lithuania and the lack of real opportunities to stage and perform a true opera pushed Jūratė into the background, probably “for now”. Unfortunately, that “for now” had stretched into eternity. We can understand how important this creative partnership was to Sofija and how deep the wound in her heart was after this great loss in her life from the fact that after Konstantinas’ death, she had burned the libretto and never mentioned the opera again.

The fact that more than a hundred years after Mikalojus Konstantinas and Sofija’s summer in Palanga, after letters flying back and forth between Vilnius and St. Petersburg, a creative team has come together, dedicated to following those few “fragments of Jūratė’s palace” to try to find inspiration and tell the secret of the Lithuanian sea legend, proves to me once again how important it is for each of us to feel that culture is like a river flowing through us, carrying knowledge and meaning from the past to the future.

The opera that will be born today will not be “reconstructive”, but it will certainly be “imaginary”, reflecting the fact that we live in completely different times and that each member of the creative team will contribute a piece of their beating heart today: the river of culture has been flowing for almost 120 years since those times.

Libretto author Julius Keleras:

The imaginary opera Jūratė is not just a musical fantasy about love and the sea, the shadows of unfinished score and an old Lithuanian legend. It is like a rebirth of M. K. Čiurlionis’ vision, whose musical contours are realised by contemporary composers, while an unfulfilled dream and contemporary stage art, the past and the present, are bridged by artificial intelligence – a medium between the memory of unwritten music and the hearing of the contemporary world. It is a live and convincing dialogue, where creativity intertwines with technological intuition, becoming both a revived and imagined soundscape.

I wrote the second part in Nida, watching the foaming waves of the Baltic Sea. And now, staying by the sea, it is impossible not to think of Jūratė, who sparked the vibrant, real, and incomparable flame of love. One might only compare it to the stormy sea, which is love too.

Meanwhile, the initial impulse came from L. A. Jucevičius’ legend, the somewhat crazy and intoxicating idea of the work itself, and the excellent creative team.

Composer Mykolas Natalevičius:

The task of generating material forced me to stray somewhat from the usual nature of a composer’s work. The musical material for the opera was created by submitting queries to the AI model, consisting of fragments of works by M. K. Čiurlionis.

At first it was quite difficult to achieve satisfactory results, so after trying various options, I focused on a combination of fragments of late piano music and harmonisations of folk songs. This change allowed to achieve more musical results.

While talking about the advantages of artificial intelligence today, one might get the false impression that AI speeds up work, however, I would say that in case of music the opposite is true. A composer tends to create certain rituals, a plan that ensures a smooth workflow, but while working with AI, there were many inconveniences when it came to making queries, as several or even dozens of attempts were required until an effective result was achieved that could be pursued further in the forming of the entire piece. Since the result often covered only short episodes or even individual times, the constant initiation of queries forced me to change my usual way of working and develop completely different habits.

This unusual work process later raised another question—the ethics of working with AI. How much can I allow myself to alter the result I get? Should I alter and modify the result, or should I try another query? This made the work extremely interesting and, at the same time, very odd.

Another aspect that is often overlooked in today’s discussions is that AI is viewed as a conscious entity and is subject to unreasonable and technologically impossible expectations. There is no doubt that AI technologies are advancing rapidly, but in the field of music, AI tools seem to be most interesting when used as a kind of assistant, an additional creative tool. In music, musical flow is very important, and it is impossible to capture it in sound wave, spectrum, or notes. It is felt when listening to a piece from beginning to end and it unfolds when a person senses the connections between sounds, and these connections are important not only between two adjacent notes in a melody, but also between different voices, between notes at the beginning and end of a piece. And what about timbre and arrangement? It is very difficult to unravel this web and notice the connections not only in a 10-15 second segment, but throughout the entire piece, and today’s algorithms cannot comprehend it.

Perhaps this raises another question: what is music? Music comes into existence when it is listened to, understood, and intuitively felt. Music is usually created by those who have musical intelligence, or, in other words, a high sensitivity to sounds. Those who are able to associate sounds and sound structures with sensory impact. How can music be reproduced using AI, which filters information abstractly, whose logic is based on recognizing connections, but those connections in music are subtle? Recognising such connections can help AI evolve and become a more independent tool in the future. However, this requires a deeper understanding of how sound structures and music work – not just individual fragments or structural elements, but complex, changing, non-standard combinations.

Composer Mantautas Krukauskas:

The imaginary opera is a perfect example of creative collaboration, combining respect for M. K. Čiurlionis’ ideas, the sensitivity of contemporary music creators, and responsibly applied artificial intelligence tools. The musical language is consciously based on late works by Čiurlionis. Both in spirit and inner logic, it echoes what is reflected in the letters of this composer and painter: the dream of an opera that would combine Lithuanian cultural archetypes, a universal language of feelings, and the ambition to search for national identity characteristic of European composers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Our goal as creators is not to imitate Čiurlionis, but to try to imagine what his opera might have been like, based on the details, aesthetics, and historical context of his musical and artistic works.

By paying attention to the authenticity of Čiurlionis’ work, we are implementing a piece that is contemporary, and reflects the possibilities and concepts of the 21st century. This goal is made possible by the chosen co-creation model, the interdisciplinary team, and the ethical application of AI tools, which are not just a gimmick or a fashion statement, but rather a method that, by drawing on the principles of Čiurlionis’ works and curbing entropy, provides previously non-existent ways of gaining new inspiration based on the stylistics of the past century, while at the same time encouraging us to rethink the usual dynamics of a composer’s work. This process helped us form a shared imagination with M. K. Čiurlionis, which, operating in non-linear time, enabled us to transform the intentions of the famous Lithuanian creator into a live stage performance.

For me, this opera is a unique cultural act, an attempt to answer the question of what it means today to continue another creator’s idea with means that he could not have had – not so much to deconstruct or reconstruct, but rather to imagine or reflect. In this respect, it is not merely an imitation of style, but a polyphony of collaboration detached from our usual space-time, a counterpoint between people, ideas, and the means of their implementation. This is how this “imaginary opera” becomes a real, living ritual, seeking not so much to complete as to continue what seems to have never begun, but has been waiting for centuries to be heard, seen, and felt.

Composer Arvydas Malcys:

When I began to delve into the idea of staging the opera, I tried to imagine the musical fashions, stylistics, trendy touches and sounds of that period. It was important to feel the flow, colour, pulse, and mood of the music connecting the past and the present. For Čiurlionis, opera became an unfulfilled desire, a dream.

The musical language of the opera relies on Čiurlionis’ late piano works. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was important for all the nations of Central and Eastern Europe to create and express their national identity in art, and for the awakening Lithuanian nation, the national opera was a symbol of honour, dignity, and solidity.

The period (the first decade of the 20th century) when Čiurlionis revealed his idea for an opera in letters to Sofija was marked by a search for a new musical style, expression, and dense instrumentation – it was the era of Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, and Alexander Scriabin.

The opera’s orchestration is characterized by late Romanticism and Expressionism styles, oriented towards the dense and expressive orchestral sound that was fashionable at the time. Čiurlionis was fascinated by Richard Strauss’ symphonic poems, and even copied one of them, Death and Transfiguration, into his notebook at the library of the Peters publishing house in Leipzig. I tried to convey all of this in the opera score.

The orchestra consists of 30 performers. This is, of course, a small orchestra, which might be called a sinfonietta. The composition of the orchestra reflects the choice of venue for the premiere – the Old Theatre of Vilnius, whose orchestra pit could not possibly accommodate more musicians. On the other hand, it would have been difficult to assemble a large symphony orchestra in Vilnius at the beginning of the 20th century. Overall, Čiurlionis’ imaginary opera Jūratė was an interesting work and an unforgettable experience.

Music director and conductor Karolis Variakojis:

Strange, fragmented organicity. It creates small cracks in the music, as if preventing it from becoming whole, to gain momentum and develop. I often don’t understand how one episode or another should unfold at that crack. One of the most interesting things is to intervene in those gaps, to find a form for them in the performance itself.

Director Gintarė Radvilavičiūtė:

This creative process is like looking in a mirror at a picture floating in the world of ideas of those times, which has remained floating ever since. I want to use letters, memories, and fragments to imagine what Kastukas and Sofija’s Jūratė might have looked like.

Čiurlionis was a creative artist gifted with unique imagination and fantasy, and one feels timid when approaching his personality and work... He truly lived in another world. A world ruled by love and friendship, and something else important that we cannot live without today. This creative process makes me want to touch upon this story. Two people had nothing, but they lived in a world of ideas. And how can we not lose our ideas now that we have everything? Is love still a value? Is love eternal? Here, parallels are drawn between the lives of Jūratė and Kastytis and the two people just starting out in life – Sofija and Kastukas.

From Čiurlionis’ letters to Sofija: “... even though we will die, as our bodies wither away, we will meet in other lands, and it will always be you and me, because we are Eternity and Infinity. Do you remember? It was a long time ago, and we have probably changed our appearance many times, but memory fades and we need special moments to remember”. <...> “Yes, I am overwhelmed by your letter today and by Jūrate for the rest of my life – and I feel so much energy and self-confidence that I will overcome the task that I even dare to write to you about it”.

Choreographer Sigita Mikalauskaitė:

To wade through the sea beyond time, to gaze through the mist created by M. K. Čiurlionis. To dance the silence from the fragments of impulses that have flowed together.

Set designer Renata Valčik:

To touch upon the genius’s work and create the set design for the unfinished opera Jūratė is a huge challenge, so I seek to draw on the spiritual and aesthetic legacy of Čiurlionis’ work. My goal is to create a modern stage spectacle inspired by Čiurlionis' worldview; to create a space where myth, music, dreams, and nature meet. The visual world will be based on the principles of Čiurlionis’ painting: symbolism, the poetics of light and space, floating space, and a dreamlike mood. The sets will not be illustrations, but rather a constantly changing emotional landscape—a living stage vision that responds to music, voice, and movement.

While working with director Gintarė Radvilavičiūtė, we use poetic theatrical language and metaphorical storytelling, where objects, materials, and textures become equal participants in the narrative – a visual metaphor that conveys the inner states of the characters, the forces of nature, and the passage of time. The objects on stage will not be mere things, but they will act as carriers of memory, myth, and emotion.

In this project we collaborate with contemporary Lithuanian artists representing different fields – from music to lighting design – thus continuing Čiurlionis’ interdisciplinary, synaesthetic approach to art. This is not just an opera, but a collective creative experiment that aims to symbolically complete the artistic vision that Čiurlionis began but did not implement.

The opera was created using the artificial intelligence tool Composer’s Assistant 2, developed by Dr. Martin Malandro (USA).

Duration: 100 minutes (2 acts with an intermission)

In Lithuanian with English surtitles

The event will be filmed and photographed. The material will be distributed publicly.