Ivica Kunčević i Brigida Masle Dražinić: Enigma Jarnović

Ivica Kunčević i Brigida Masle Dražinić: Enigma Jarnović

Director: Helena Petković

Stage manager: Virginija Bolfek

Sound design: Damir Šimunović

Sound designer: Marin Lucianović

Lighting designer: Antonio Ljubojević

Quartet Equinox

Đana Kahriman, violin

Iva Vukić, violin

Šimun Končić, viola

Mihaela Čuljak Martinović, cello

Festival Drama Ensemble

Nataša Dangubić, Markiza

Goran Grgić, violinist

Maro Martinović, count

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The musical and theatrical work 𝑬𝒏𝒊𝒈𝒎𝒂 𝑱𝒂𝒓𝒏𝒐𝒗𝒊ć, which explores the life and secrets of the famous violinist Ivan Mane Jarnović, was created based on a text by writer Brigida Masle Dražinić and the great director and theater artist Ivica Kunčević, directed by Helena Petković.

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Andantino, a writer’s rendezvous

About fifteen months before the French army entered Dubrovnik, at the very end of the Republic of Dubrovnik, Saint Petersburg newspapers published the following news in a black frame:

‘Elderly man dies of stroke at a billiard table.’

The man was Ivan Mane Jarnović, 57, most likely born on a ship in Dubrovnik waters. Perhaps just behind Bokar and Lovrijenac Fortresses, near the wonderful setting of Ivica Kunčević’s Sad Jele, one of the best productions in the history of the Festival, or near Lokrum Island, which director Joško Juvančić ingeniously chose for his staging of Ivo Vojnović’s Equinox. This is probably where the life, the unusual fate, the mystery of the virtuoso who delighted the audiences with his musical skills and scandalized Europe with his whims, outbursts, demands and excesses began.

This was more than enough to inspire conversations and knowledge exchange with which we filled time and space and slowly paved the way for the third writer’s rendezvous (‘Anica and Ruđo’, ‘Marojica’).

The musician’s peculiar character and mysterious life awaken the imagination, so the written word became necessary, but not as a reconstruction of Jarnović’s life as an artist. The intention was rather to explore the other side of the virtuoso, to tell the story of the glorious, touching, painful, humiliating and absurd situations in which our hero found himself. To base fiction on historical details from the life of the man who may have been from Dubrovnik, to ask questions about his artistic talent, career, love, passion and hate, escapes, vice, identity, and, finally, death.

Brigida Masle Dražinić