Explosive Pluralisms

A specifically Germanic tradition of opera was renewed in Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, an ambitious serial construction saddled with an antiwar moral. Zimmermann approached the problem of tradition by recasting opera as an inherently monstrous, pluralistic, and multivalent art form. Rather than steering around Wagner, Berg, and the modernists who had problematized opera, Zimmermann regarded them as a legacy worth confronting. He programmatically addressed modern music’s relationship to history, referring to old forms as Berg had done and incorporating new influences in an updated Gesamtkunstwerk. He positioned opera as a site for the serialist realization of his concept of the “spherical shape of time” (Kugelgestalt der Zeit). His allusions shaped the work’s formal structure and characterization, the rigidity of which in turn suggested an analogy to the inevitability of societal oppression. Archival documents show Zimmermann negotiating a balance between serialist control and Expressionist verve.

The Opera Underneath

Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann recapitulated two cultural traditions simultaneously: first, the drive for opera to return to the imagined purity of ancient tragedy, and second, a German obsession with the Greeks. Setting Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles word for word in a declamatory vocal style with minimal, percussive accompaniment, Oedipus der Tyrann was estranged from opera and ascetic to the extent that some critics heard it as “an opera without music.” Orff eschewed intuition and operaticism, believing that a stripped-down approach would give him access to the universality of experience the classics had often represented for German culture. But the Germans’ Greeks were less apolitical and universal than Orff wanted to believe, and Orff inherited not only the elemental strengths of the “Greeks” but also the baggage of previous German appropriations of antiquity, from idealist philhellenism to the more recent nationalist reception of Greek culture during the Third Reich.

Italy, Atonally

In König Hirsch, Henze imagined operatic tradition primarily as an Italian inheritance consisting of vocal beauty, formal artificiality, and emotional expression. König Hirsch mediated Henze’s experiences living and listening in Italy through the musical modernism in which he had been trained immediately following the war. Tributes to conventional operaticism included stylized incantations, moments of hysterical coloratura, a villainous Credo, and several instances of folk-music pastiche. A close reading of Henze’s characterization of the musician figure Checco, who expresses himself partly through diegetic “Neapolitan” song, shows the collision between Henze’s modernism and his newfound italianità. The opera’s arias later became emblems of the opera’s expressive excesses; the conductor of the premiere, Hermann Scherchen, subjected them to severe cuts, setting off a fight over the artistic status of traditions of vocalism and emotion that ensured Henze’s definitive break with the avant-garde.

Rebuilding and Retrenchment

This chapter places the opera commissioned for the reopening of Munich’s faithfully reconstructed Nationaltheater, Egk’s Die Verlobung in San Domingo, in the context of postwar Munich’s architectural and cultural restoration. The ethos behind the Nationaltheater reconstruction reflected Munich’s understanding of its relationship to National Socialism and to wartime destruction. The festival to celebrate the newly built theater mythologized Munich’s operatic tradition and was largely insensitive to recent history, instead emphasizing a continuity of greatness. This attitude of retrenchment was reflected in Egk’s opera, which was about romance and racial violence during the Haitian Revolution. Despite his interest in modern techniques, Egk was invested in traditional operatic expression and forms. He problematically used jazz idioms and percussion effects to “other” Black characters while coding expressive verismo tropes as white and heroic. Die Verlobung in San Domingo is a product of the patriotic, monumental, and traditional milieu for which it was written.

Introduction

OPERA COMPOSERS in the twentieth century faced the fundamental challenge of making opera modern.1 Though new operas were continually composed and premiered throughout the twentieth century, opera as a practice had become artistically and institutionally conservative, invested in a core repertoire spanning from Mozart to Puccini....

Epilogue

The Epilogue cites the famous 1967 interview with Pierre Boulez in Der Spiegel, notoriously titled “Blow up the Opera Houses,” to understand the fraught status of modern opera from the postwar period up to the present day. A conflict between the principles of modernism and the canonical idea of opera persists even as more recent composers have found increasingly innovative forms for contemporary opera to take. If musicologists want to fully account for opera’s significance as a public and civic art form, opera history must incorporate not only radical advancements in the genre but also its more moderate and conservative manifestations.

The Significance of Nonsense

The Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1 opposed operatic tradition through its use of a non-narrative text that represented archetypal emotions and states of being. The opera’s main point of reference was Weimar Berlin: Blacher drew belatedly on Dada and cabaret and referenced New Objectivity and the German appropriation of jazz. Blacher also relied on many time-honored musical conventions from both opera and popular styles to convey the libretto’s affects and situations, references that for many critics negated the piece’s claims to “abstraction.” The work created an uproar at its premiere as audiences and critics perceived politicized narratives in the work’s purported nonsense. Detractors saw the piece as hastening the genre’s demise, while its defenders affected a modernist rejection of audience complacency. Both sides saw the Abstrakte Oper as a political statement and seized the opportunity to accuse their opponents of having an unsavory relationship to the National Socialist past.

Placement and Displacement

This chapter explores the historical and institutional basis for the West German renewal of opera in the postwar period. The chapter presents narratives of individuals involved in the creation of opera to contextualize opera’s restoration after 1945. Significant personnel continuity in the operatic ecosystem before, during, and after the Third Reich meant that the postwar opera industry was populated by men and women whose recent experiences included National Socialist ideology, military service, Allied bombing, the loss of family members, displacement, hunger, forced labor, imprisonment, and denazification. The chapter also sketches the institutional basis of contemporary opera, discussing seven opera companies and surveying the position of new and recent works within the postwar repertoire. From this survey, we see how the production of new operas enhanced companies’ prestige and was motivated by a perceived duty to promote modern composers, to challenge audiences, and to advance opera as a living art form.