The sick King Jorgen worries about the marriage of his daughter Elena. The fairytale-like, dramatic confusion triggers a shimmering golden fire bird with its wondrous song every full moon night - it makes the king heal and brings the "good" prince as husband of the "good" Princess Elena.
Unlike any other opera, the so-called Beggar's Opera is not just one composition, but a lineage of adapted compositions, beginning with the original hugely successful 1728 political satire written by Englishman John Gay. Composers and writers have penned variations on it ever since. The most famous of these was A Threepenny Opera by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Some things these compositions share in common is their setting among the poor and criminal classes, and the roguish character Macheath. This production is based on an adaptation of Gay's original by Vaclav Havel the freedom-fighter, writer and philosopher who became the first (and only) president of the united post-communist country of Czechoslovakia, and it retains many traces of its theatrical origins. Film reviewers were not too tolerant of what they called "slavish adherence" to the noted Czech writer's stage production, but theater, philosophy and history buffs may feel otherwise.
Czechoslovakia 1918. The newly formed National Assembly has made Stoklasa the administrator of the Kratochvile Castle. Although with no aristocratic background, he is a man of fortune and is trying to buy the castle. To impress his neighbors and the local politicians he invites them to a great hunting party. Uninvited comes a man who claims to be Duke Alexej. Stoklasa believes him to be a hustler. This hustler, however, manages to charm all the women before he leaves.
Helenka, a textile industrial student, invents an ideal man who is the envy of all her friends. The dreamy and delusional Helenka resists her complexes with an imaginary lover, her more realistic friend Zuzka would also prefer the dreamy Patrik, but in the end she will probably be happy with the less ideal Honza, and the self-confident vulgar nymphomaniac Sylva flies from one lover to another like a butterfly, finally as she was the only one waiting for her dream Patrick.