Zoran Erić’s Incidental Music for Nikita Milivojević’s Production of Mihiz’s Banović Strahinja

Abstract

This article deals with Zoran Erić’s incidental music for the theatre play Banović Strahinja directed by Nikita Milivojević and based on the eponymous drama by Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz. The drama is Mihiz’s unique (and considered by many the most successful) interpretation of the myth of the hero Banović Strahinja. Nikita Milivojević’s staging, on the other hand, is a contemporary interpretation of Mihiz’s dramatic text, and it contains the key for understanding contemporary themes. Milivojević stages a play that is focused on the character of the Woman, presenting her and highlighting her presence as a force that affects not only her fate, but also her relationship to other characters, thus affecting their fate as well. Zoran Erić’s music outlines these relationships, provides the spectator/listener of the play with a musical layer of interpretation, and communicates the idea of the play to the audience, thereby engaging in dialogue with both the writer and the director.
In this article I analyze both the dramatic text and the theatre play, whose key points and concepts are presented with the intention to fully grasp the role given to the music. The director’s interventions on the dramatic text conditioned the musical aspect of the theatre play. Both original (Бановић and Koltze) and archival numbers (Brother John, Für Elise, Golden Eye, Taruka, Querer) are analyzed and discussed in order to define their functionality in the play. The focus is on the composer’s original numbers (whose fragments found their way off the theatre stage and onto the concert stage in the piece Six Scenes-Comments) in order to highlight their significance and place in the theatre play, which was important for creating the ambience for their little stories within the big story of the century.