Doubly signed first printing of this illustrated retelling of the 1938 Czech opera, performed in the Terezin concentration camp by its original cast of orphaned Jewish children imprisoned there alongside composer Hans Krása.
Fine in near fine jacket.
Price: $200.00
"In dark times such as these BRUNDIBAR, both the opera and its tragic history, shouldn't offer us too much reassurance; we shouldn't draw comfort from the fact that even after the worst has happened, people and armies survive, because, after all, only some people survive [...]" (Kushner)
Both as a picture book and an English-language stage production, Kushner's adaptation of Adolf Hoffmeister's original libretto and Sendak's many-layered stage designs and illustrations offer as much darkness as an audience member or reader is ready to accept: to the very young child, BRUNDIBAR is a fairy tale; to the older child, a fairy tale with a deep shadow; to an adult, a double text heavy with historical dread and sorrow, a testament to the powers and limitations of art in the worst and bloodiest times and places. Sendak, conscious all his life of the deaths that could have been his own, felt profoundly connected to BRUNDIBAR from the first: "I felt the whole thing was me. This is was my story."
Read more: Frank Rizzo, "My Interview With Maurice Sendak;" James Fisher, The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope.
First edition. New York: Michael di Capua Books, (2003). 8.5'' x 10.75''. Original brown cloth boards. Original unclipped ($19.95) color pictorial dust jacket. Illustrated in color. [56] pages. Signed by Sendak and Kushner on title page. Minor edgewear, faint rippling to rear jacket panel.
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