Marga

In one act by GEORG PITTRICH.



Text by ARNO SPIESS.





The first performance of this highly interesting little opera took

place in Dresden in February 1894 and awakened the interest of every

music lover in the hitherto quite unknown composer. Scenery and Music

are of the colouring now common to modern composers, for whom

unfortunately Mascagni is still the God, at whose shrine the worship.



The scene is laid in a Bulgarian village at the foot of the

Schipka-Pass. Marga the heroine, a Roumanian peasant-girl has had a

sister Petrissa, who, suffering cruel wrong at the hands of Vasil

Kiselow, has cursed her seducer and sought death in the waves.

Marga, who had vowed to avenge her sister, is wandering through the

world in vain search of Vasil. When the curtain opens she has just

reached the village, where Vasil occupies the most auspicious position

of Judge. Thoroughly exhausted she sinks down at the foot of a cross

and falls asleep.



Vasil's son Manal, finding her thus, detects a wonderful likeness

between the sleeping beauty and a picture, which he had found some time

ago in the miraculous Sabor Cave, and which for him is the ideal of

love and beauty.--This picture, a likeness of Petrissa had been hung

there by Vasil in order to exorcise the curse of the unhappy virgin,

but Manal has no knowledge of his father's misdeed.



When Marga awakes, the young people of course fall in love with each

other, and Marga discovers too late, that Manal is the son of her

sister's destroyer. Hesitating between love and her vow of vengeance

she wildly reproaches Vasil who falls at her feet in deep contrition

beseeching her forgiveness, which she grants at last.--Full of

penitence he relinquishes his property to the young people, and

exhorting Manal to be a just and clement Judge, he betakes himself to

the mountains, resolved to join in the war against the Turks.