The category is: composers murdered by scumsucking nazis. Actually, Zemlinsky was "only" murdered by proxy; he made it to New York but died soon after of, you know, nazi-related stress. Whereas Ullmann was straight-up murdered at Auschwitz. There's no way to sugar-coat it. This production is a double-feature of a one-act opera by each of them, to show us, I suppose what we lost.
It's tempting to just call nazis shitheads and be done with it, and I'm certainly not going to stop that, but I think it might be more rhetorically effective to just point out what enormous dumbasses they were and are. They've more or less accepted that they're evil, or at least that people will call them that, but nobody wants to be thought of as a slackjawed dimwit. And yet: German culture, including music, was really vibrant at the start of the twentieth century. German was eclipsing Italian as the primary language of opera. And then, in the name of "purifying" their culture, these moronic cavemen destroyed all that. Great job, fellows! You are truly, deeply stupid people.
Well, enough said on that topic for now. How about the operas themselves? Der zerbrochne Krug is a comedy based on play by Heinrich von Kleist. The story is that a woman is going to court to try to find out who broke her water jug, but then it turns out that the judge himself broke it! I'm sorry; I find it just a little implausible that somebody charged with upholding the law would, on the contrary, break said law. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take a long drink of water while I check twitter.
Supposedly, the jug represents her virginity, but I found that somewhat obscure. If this seems like a pretty thin plot, well, the whole opera's less than forty minutes long. This is understandable, given that Ullmann was interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp when he wrote it. I mean, not that the story demands anything longer. But whatever the case, the whole thing can't help feeling a bit slight. I think the best part is the overture, here elegantly staged with silhouettes behind the image of a jug enacting the crime. That's fun, but the music doesn't really capture me aside from that.
Der Zwerg is an entirely different story. It's based on "The Birthday of the Infanta," a story by Oscar Wilde, and, per Wikipedia:
Yes...it's "semi-autobiographical." Good god, wikipedia: it's true that neither Zemlinsky's nor Wilde's lives ended happily, but what the hell do you imagine they were LIKE? Crikey. The story is that some sultan has sent a dwarf as a present for the infanta on her eighteenth birthday. He doesn't know that he's deformed because he's never seen his reflection; he thinks he's a dashing knight. She plays with him a little, gives him a rose, and leaves. He ends up seeing his reflection, being casually rejected by the infanta, and dying of a broken heart, the one compassionate lady-in-waiting notwithstanding.
Zemlinsky's music is just great: really delicate romantic stuff that becomes dramatic when need be. Based on the evidence of just these two operas, I'd say he was the better composer. And MY GOODNESS, the emotional cruelty of the plot: it is not surprising that this comes from the writer of The Picture of Dorian Gray. And Mary Dunleavy really brings it across as the infanta:
"Oh well, time to go dancing!" It's strong stuff, for sure. The title character is played by Rodrick Dixon, an African American singer, and he's very good, but this also causes me to feel complicated emotions. Because, yes, it's easy to imagine the characters in the play feel significant casual racism to go with the rest of their callousness. His ethnicity marks him as different as much as his hump does (or more, really; the hump isn't particularly visible much of the time). So that's fine in theory, but you sort of think, I mean, I'm sure no one involved in the production was intentionally thinking "hey, look at this freak, on top of everything else, he's black!" But...I don't know. The thought that that may have been a calculation in his casting remained in the back of my mind. Maybe I'm overthinking this, obviously we have reasons to be thinking hard about race issues lately, but it did make me a little uncomfortable. OH WELL. Good opera regardless, and another thing I especially liked about it was that it comes dead last on my alphabetical list. It may in fact actually be the furthest-back opera title in the world. Unless there's a Zygotes: The Opera out there. And now I'm picturing an opera based on "Diary of an Unborn Child." What fun.
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