The Lizard

Ballet by Lepo Sumera and Märt-Matis Lill

Amserv presents

Ballet by Lepo Sumera and Märt-Matis Lill
Libretto by Andrei Petrovi after Alexander Volodin’s play of the same name
World premiere on March 18, 2025 in the Estonian National Opera

Choreographer and Stage Director: Marina Kesler
Music Director and Conductor: Kaspar Mänd
Designer: Reili Evart
Lighting Designer: Rasmus Rembel

In 2025 we celebrate the 75th anniversary of Lepo Sumera. Estonian National Opera is honoured to stage Sumera’s ballet “The Lizard”(1987–1993) that never reached its world premiere due to difficult times in history. Composer Märt-Matis Lill has restored and renewed the ballet music based on Sumera’s manuscripts.

Music historian Merike Vaitmaa has said: “The fate of “The Lizard” has been bumpier than of any other works by Sumera. The author of the idea and libretto at the time was the choreographer of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow Andrei Petrov, who based his version on the well-known playwright Alexander Volodin’s play-fable “The Lizard” (“Yashcheritsa”, 1982) that retold the story of Romeo and Juliet in the distant past. In the meanwhile, Mai Murdmaa was interested in staging “The Lizard”, but it never came to be. What does Sumera’s music speak of? Lepo once said, while working on the annotations of his new ballet that writers could characterise their works in dance”. (“Kümme aastat hiljem”, Sirp, April 23, 2010).

According to the choreographer Marina Kesler “the world of “The Lizard” is extremely exciting. The plot takes place in two parallel worlds – there is the shooting of a film, where on the background of war a love-story progresses and the world behind the scenes, where love suddenly becomes a reality. As a stage director I tell a very human story about love where the two realities entwine so completely that the protagonists do not understand what is real and what happens in the movies, and this will bring about a tragic ending. Sumera’s music is very powerful and gives strong choreographic impulses. It is amazing, how contemporary, and actual the libretto is! It lacks the cliché plot of classical operas and ballets, where most of the events are predictable. “The Lizard” is a story of real people, a story told from heart to heart”.

Märt-Matis Lill on the music of the ballet: “Working on Lepo Sumera’s “The Lizard” has been a very exciting insight to Lepo’s creative process and at the same time it shows in detail, how the turbulent second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s influenced our artists. It must have been one of the grandest and most prestigious commissions that Lepo received, and it is clearly visible that in the first parts, Lepo has demonstrated his skills in great pleasure – there are numerous nifty solutions that felt very modern at the time. It can be felt in the score that when the possibility of staging the ballet died with the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Lepo focused on composing other projects, and therefore the final parts of the music are sketchy or simply missing. He used the music at the beginning of the ballet to create symphonic pieces. Translating them back into the dramaturgy of the ballet has been a real challenge.

This process has been very exciting and captivating. My relationship with Lepo and his music has been very long and tight. I began studying composition with him in 1985, being a ten-year-old student at the Music School. That is why I remember Lepo very well from this period, without knowing that he was writing this ballet. His music reflects his colourful, somewhat restless and at the same time fantasy-laden personality. I have tried to restore as much of Lepo’s original musical dramaturgy and add my own musical interpretation where the parts have been missing”.

Recommended age 12+