Hans Werner Henze, Der junge Lord (1965)

If you're going to watch this very strange, perhaps not wholly satisfying opera, you might want to do it without having read a summary beforehand. So if you read on, you have only yourself to blame!

So we're in this German town, and everyone's excited because a rich Englishman, Sir Edgar, is moving in (while this is happening, there's also a romance between two townspeople, Luise and Wilhelm, but that's not really relevant until the end). But the townspeople get annoyed because Sir Edgar is standoffish and won't go to their soirées or otherwise participate in the town's life. He only goes to a circus that's passing through, and invites some of the circus performers (including an ape, or at least a guy in an ape suit) to dine at his house. Some amount of time passes, and weird noises are heard coming from Sir Edgar's house. But his secretary explains that these noises come from Lord Barrat (the title character), who is still learning German and being punished for his mistakes. But soon, he'll be better at it, and then all the people are invited to a party in the house! Whoo! This mollifies them. At the party, Lord Barrat is acting very weird, but the townspeople find this charming and begin to imitate him. Luise is attracted to him, to Wilhelm's dismay. A while later, at another party, there's an understanding that she and Barrat are going to be engaged. Everyone's dancing, which dancing becomes progressively wilder and wilder, until finally Lord Barrat's human disguise falls off and he is revealed to be an ape. The same ape from the circus? Maybe. That is wholly unclear.

So yeah, something about conformity, small-mindedness, a bit of emperor's-new-clothes, like that? Or maybe just, English people are weird? But to be honest, it feels to me like a joke with no punchline. I continue to like Henze's music, and his versatility is impressive here, vacillating between romantic and stately dance music to wilder and wilder stuff as the situation warrants.

And yet...well, I wouldn't rank it among my favorite of Henze's operas. It's not long, only a few hours, but it somehow seemed to drag a bit, for me, and as noted above, I don't know that the scenario pays off in any way. The relationship between Luise and Wilhelm is really a big ol' nothing, which on the one hand is clearly essential, but on the other, eh...and how about Lord Edgar's black servant Begonia (okay, given the time period of the opera, clearly slave, but let's just whitewash that for the moment), who keeps pronouncing--in English--what "Jamaica girls" do, and what Napoleon did (I know that sounds like gibberish, but watch it and you'll see). Is this in some way racist? And even if not, what's the purpose of it? The plotting seems...a bit iffy to me.

We have this DVD, I think of the debut, which is fine. Loren Driscoll particularly is a hoot as Lord Barrat, twitching around in a very animalistic way (he's wearing an ape suit under his clothes; the transformation works well in its low-tech way).

So yeah, even if I didn't love it, it was still okay; I will never pass up the opportunity to see a Henze opera.

Oh yeah, I also want to note that this is my fiftieth German-language opera.  German is still fourth, behind Italian, English, and French in that order, but it's moving on up.