Evžen Zámečník
Ferdy the Ant
Performed in the original Czech, with Czech and English surtitles. The performance lasts about 1 hours 30 minutes, including one interval. The production is designed for children from 5 years.
How does an opera work? Ferdy the Ant knows best!
Ferdy the Ant – work of all kinds! He is easily recognizable with his red scarf with black dots around his neck, and he’s friends with Gwendolyn the ladybird and Bug Butterfingers. He’s always in a good mood and he knows how to deal with everything – in other words, he’s an ideal hero for a children´s opera. The cult character of Ferdy comes from a series of illustrated story books concerned with the world of insects by Ondřej Sekora. These inspired Brno composer and conductor Evžen Zámečník (1939-2018) to create, as he said himself, this “pretend opera” for both young and old which had its very successful world premiere in 1971 at the Brno Opera. The two-part opera starts by familiarizing children with how an opera functions and then it’s time to start acting. Everyone joins Ferdy for morning exercises on a meadow, where a drunk bumblebee plays for them. After that, Ferdy helps Cricket fix his TV set so that he can watch the hockey, Bug Butterfingers organizes a performance by a swimming pool and at the end Ferdy flies home in an airship made from a spider’s web.
Premiere: August 22th 2020, Janáček Theater
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