Refugees plead for food

The shepherd Manolios - who assumes a Christ-like role - takes pity on the newcomers and urges his fellow villagers to share what they have with the refugees.

But the village elders take alarm at this and brand Manolios a dangerous revolutionary.

Martinu completed the original version of The Greek Passion in 1957 and submitted it to the Royal Opera House, where his old friend, the great Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik, was then music director.

Unfortunately, at this point the bureaucrats became involved. A "panel of experts" invited to examine Martinu's score questioned its suitability for a London audience and plans to stage The Greek Passion were dropped.

The opera critic Rodney Milnes thinks that the committee's objections to the work could have been political as well as artistic. There may have been "unspoken reservations about a strong vein of liberation theology in this study by a left-leaning writer [Kazantzakis]", he says.

Martinu obviously took the artistic criticism to heart as he subjected the work to a drastic rewrite, simplifying the plot and highlighting the more lyrical aspects of the music.

Until recently, only the revised version of the opera was thought to have survived.

Allegory of Christ's passion

However, a few years ago Martinu expert Ales Brezina succeeded in reconstructing the original version. This was first shown at the 1999 Bregenz Festival in Austria in a co-production with Covent Garden - thus giving London the opportunity to make belated amends for its rejection of the opera in 1957.

The intervening years have done nothing to diminish the topicality of the work - problems faced by asylum seekers are as much of an issue now as they were during Martinu's lifetime.

Martinu's profoundly moving opera may have finally "come home", but it certainly does not make for a comfortable experience.

In the words of music critic Andrew Clark, "This tragedy of a community divided by incoming refugees was never going to win admirers in establishment circles, but it should be required viewing for every politician caught up in the UK asylum debate today."

Photos by kind permission of the Bregenz Festival.